Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Having used PCs since the early days of the Intel 8088-based personal computer, I’m always baffled by the amount of instability in today’s computer systems.

I build my own computer systems and one would expect that the notorious “blue screen of death” (BSOD) would be a remnant of the past, since software and hardware have advanced.

An onslaught of crashes on a new and fairly clean system led me to believe that hardware was the issue.Too many failures during simple tasks like browsing or checking email led to almost catastrophic data loss at some point. I was able to recover data due to my backup process.

As a last resort, I decided to uninstall the Avast! antivirus that seemed to stall at the same time the crashes occurred. Surprisingly, the BSOD screens went away.

I’m now running AVG antivirus which seems to respect the system resources; it even lets me know when the browser is using an increased amount of memory.  No crashes whatsoever during the week that I’ve been testing it.

Googling “Avast BSOD” returns several such reports from others that apparently faced the same issue. In the end, it all comes down to a piece of software that is supposed to protect you from catastrophic data loss.

After this painful experience, I would not recommend Avast antivirus as the choice of antivirus software.

A few days ago I let one of my domains – Greek.in – cross its expiration date.

The domain is with Name.com and I simply “ignored” the reminders on a busy week.

While in the process of renewing it, I noticed that the domain was displaying a standard Sedo ad page, with the minimal, greenish text against a white background. There was no contact information regarding a sale on that page.

Checking the DNS I noticed that it was still that of Voodoo.com where I park some of my domains. I assumed that some type of DNS wizardry was occurring in the background, so I contacted Name.com support.

I was told that per the terms of use, Name.com reserves the right to park and monetize my traffic while I don’t renew my domain.

Since the domain was already listed for sale in my Sedo account, it was obvious that Name.com was forwarding it to a landing account of their own at Sedo.

After contacting my account manager at Sedo I was told that all URL forwarding has been ended for Sedo customers, at the request of Google. To use Sedo parking and monetize traffic, one must use the Sedo DNS.

So what’s going on here? Is Sedo giving “elite” customers such as Name.com a different ad channel to monetize domains and pile them up onto one account? Or is Name.com oblivious of the fact that this method of forwarding reaps no monies from traffic?

Within 4 hours of renewing my domain, it was pointing back to Voodoo.com but the mystery still remains.

These days it’s hard to allocate the term “friend” to people that we only interact with online.

When I was growing up, friends were the kids that we shared games of soccer, hide and seek, or board games with. They were those that we shared a common school, were punished together for making fun of the teacher, or bled our knees from climbing the rocks behind the school building on an autumn afternoon.

Growing up, one made friends through other friends, at parties, at gatherings in smoky cafes, or in college. Some friendships would break and some would remain intact for years to come. Friendships were made in the army, while wishing that boot camp training was over, while guarding remote posts – missing loved ones a thousand miles away.

Eventually, as adults, we forged friendships with co-workers and with them we fought asshole bosses, shared lunch breaks and talked about sports and our personal relationships. We had BBQ’s and summer vacations together, taking silly or embarrassing pictures.

Somehow, some friendships evolved into long distance observations through Facebook, Twitter or via emails. We considered friends to “always be there” and to never ever grow older, or sicker.

We believed friends never die.

Finding out that a good friend, Adam H., passed away eight months ago in a motorcycle accident was a big shock for me and an even bigger awakening. Everyone involved seemingly assumed that everyone else knew about it; yet, no-one told several people about this extremely unfair human loss.

Being left with nothing but designs of websites and other digital traces of what used to be a lively man, reminded me how short and fleeting life is. Our footprints in the sand, our effect on others, our human legacy – they all depend on who we really are on the “inside”. There is no way to etch one’s soul onto silicon, no method to recreate life. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

This is a small, impossibly miniscule dedication to Adam, who tutored clients and shared fun moments with so many of us. It’s a reminder that only the good die young.

Farewell, my friend.

I still remember the early days of the commercial Internet, having graduated from college a good five years earlier. These days, information technology was restricted to local programming and games development, systems analysis and expressive computer art.

Computer monitors were small, expensive, monochrome and heavy.

My early web sites comprised of lots of text against dark or gradient backgrounds, contained bullet lists and headers that could fit across a monochrome 640-pixel wide screen. That was the standard size in late 1993, when the NCSA Mosaic browser was launched.

I learned to optimize my graphics for the benefit of the visitor; these days a 14.4k modem was top of the range.

Since then, a lot of things have changed. Resolutions of 1920px wide are quite common – across double monitors even – and a 20Mbit cable connection is often laughed at.

Nowadays, it seems strange to read commentary that reminds me of those early Spartan days of the Internet, 20 years ago. But that’s exactly what John Naughton did in an article titled “Graphic designers are ruining the web.”

It’s obvious that John Naughton does not appreciate today’s abundance of imagery that did not exist in the early 90′s. He seems to forget that Internet infrastructure took off to the point that wireless connections often comprise a large portion of Internet traffic. The global use of cellular phones was practically non-existent in the early 90′s, and now 3G and 4G networks are on the rise.

If it were not for graphic designers, the Internet would look like Peter Norvig’s web page, whom John Naughton seems to praise because of his position as director of research at Google.

The future belongs to graphic designers, simply because humans are visual creatures. The next big advancement of the Internet experience will be full sensory immersion, the way William Gibson imagined his ‘Cyberspace’, thus leaving John Naughton behind to reminisce about the early days of the Internet that won’t be coming back.

There are probably several billion reasons to use a captcha on a form; as many as the amount of spam one is in danger of receiving.

The “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” works well when the characters are straightforward letters or numbers that must be entered inside an input box to validate its content.

All worked well, until this method was cracked by automated bots that could identify the letters and numbers with extreme accuracy, thus rendering the captcha useless.

The remedy was to twirl, slant, extrude or otherwise stretch letters so that they aren’t recognizable, unless one – presumably human – tries hard to read what the hell is the text to be typed.

But it has gotten ridiculous.

Perhaps it’s just that my analytical perception and vision have gotten worse as I’m aging, or maybe because with each new rollout of such captchas there is an extra degree, an extra amount of distortion to be overcome.

I’ve really had it. (Apparently, I’m not the only one.)

There are alternatives to captchas that seem to display letters as if they came out of the fire, all melted and gooey. This is the one I use on this very blog.