News and general opinion, often privacy, security or computer related, but could be about anything really, including religion, politics, the environment, business or audio books. "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence/stupidity/neglect." -- Hanlon's Razor
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Free SMS Software Gets Better
There's nothing quite like watching a program already in use to improve it further. Three weeks ago I released the first version of my free SMSQ program, which allows a database program to send and receive SMS messages.
The program has been in constant use for over 2 weeks already, and numerous minor improvements have been made. We are now on version 1.0030, and there is a support utility called SMSsend that allows you to generate messages from a batch file or shortcut. For example, you can send the administrator an SMS whenever the server reboots, or you can use the Windows Task Scheduler to get the SMS program to run file maintenance on the weekend.All of these features arose out of a genuine need when running the system in a live production environment. Today I installed the software on an old Windows 98 clunker, and discovered that the MDAC files were missing or out of date. I also added some other minor cosmetic changes. There's nothing like a real world problem to make software better.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
The Great Defrag Shootout XXIII: IObit SmartDefrag 3.1 beta
IObit SmartDefrag 3.1 is not particularly smart, in spite of the name. This program is a very bad combination of beta software and ad-ware: if it did its job of defragmenting the hard drive all this would be bearable, but my frustration with this package has grown over time, not diminished. The fact that it is free is one of its few redeeming features.
The screen display is a fixed size, and doesn't follow the usual Windows UI, but rather enforces its own, so on my system ("Windows Classic" theme) it sticks out like a sore thumb. Because you can't resize it the advert messages down the right are partially obscured, which is just irritating. I'd rather see a complete ad than 3/4 of an ad.
The disk display follows the standard WDD method, but with less detail. The "Comprehensive" defrag took all night, so it isn't particularly efficient, in spite of the web site claim to have "the world’s fastest defragmenting engine". There is no documentation on what the different methods do.The "before" and "after" display shows what was done, but the comprehensive defrag didn't completely defragment my hard drive, even after several hours of work. The report on what was done (see below) is fairly useful, but it would be a lot more useful if you could resize it to see all the details, instead of having to use scroll bars which are a waste of time. Fortunately you can sort the columns, even if you can't see them properly.
Even more frustrating is the "Auto Defrag" feature which presumably is what gives the package it's "smart" name. In spite of my best efforts I have yet to figure out what exactly it did, other than keep my hard drive active. There is a graph type of display that seeks to reassure you that it's busy doing something but not slowing you down. Unfortunately it fails on both counts. There is a noticeable delay when you click to open a new application because the drive is busy, and if a program is trying to access the hard drive without using a lot of CPU cycles then it also has to wait its turn.I tried to make a suggestion by clicking on the "feedback" link, but it doesn't work. I wrote to the email address that was provided on a previous version when I encountered a crash, but my suggestion got nowhere because they insisted on a screen shot of the problem. How do you do a screen shot of a missing feature? Grrr ...
In spite of leaving the machine running all night without doing anything else for 3 nights in a row, the the auto defrag made no attempt at defragmenting numerous fragmented files on my drive that were not in use. Perhaps this can be explained by the settings that allow you to defrag files that are either "frequent visited files" [sic] or "recent used files" [sic] or system directories.
A useful feature at the end of the "Analyse" process for manual defragmenting is a "suggested action", a feature also available in PerfectDisk.This program is not PefectDisk, and its auto defrag feature is not nearly as good as the one found in O&O Defrag, which actually works. It does not have a boot-time defrag facility, and the end result of using it for a week is not particularly encouraging. There are random gaps all over the drive, and the free space is not consolidated. Of all of the programs that attempt to do an "automatic" background defrag, (Buzzsaw, Ashampoo Magical Defrag, mst Defrag 2.0, O&O Defrag 10) this has to be one of the worst. It slows the machine down but appears to achieve nothing. While it has some nice ideas, the implementation is poor and frustrating. I cannot recommend this program, even though it is free. If you must have automatic defragmentation, use O&O Defrag 10. Personally I'll stick to the JkDefrag screen saver: at least I can see what it's up to.Friday, August 17, 2007
Online Software Inspector
I've always relied on Windows Update to tell me if my system is up to date, but of course it only checks a subset of all Microsoft products, and leaves out all programs from other vendors. I recently heard about Secunia's Software Inspector web site, which requires Java, and can check the version of a whole bunch of software. There is also a beta product called Secunia PSI, which I tried out. I found the interface a bit confusing, and it is beta software, but it's still worth the effort.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
The Great Defrag Shootout XXII: UltraDefrag 1.0.5
UltraDefrag is the second open source defrag program, the first being JkDefrag, which I use regularly. You can find the project details of UltraDefrag on sourceforge.It's still early days for this project, and version 1.0.1 didn't do much on my system at all. Version 1.0.5 is a lot better, and it took 6 hours to defrag my main drive. That's not particularly fast, but OK. The end result is shown below.
The program uses a process driver to access the hard drive, but there is very little documentation available to explain how it works or what it does. Hopefully that will come later.There is no boot time defrag option, but there is a command line version for batch file usage or scheduled operations. The screen display is clunky and a bit sparse, and some of the colours used in the display are not explained. At this stage I would guess that the capabilities are roughly the same as the built-in Windows Disk Defrag utility, and not much more. I guess we'll have to give it more time, but it is worth watching.Saturday, August 11, 2007
Saturday, August 04, 2007
The Great Defrag Shootout XXI: WinContig 0.75
WinContig gets its name from the word "contiguous", not from Mark Russinovich's program Contig. When I first saw the name I thought it was a program similar to Power Defragmenter, but it turns out to be something completely different. It's freeware, developed by Marco D'Amato, with 11 language options, including English.The basic idea is that you set up one or more file/directory groups, and then save this as a "profile". You can then load and defrag the profile either from the command line or interactively. I set up a profile with some of my most difficult files (see picture) and WinContig failed to detect that some of them were badly fragmented. Granted, this is only version 0.75, and when presented with smaller, less troublesome files it worked well.There is no boot time defragmentation, so it isn't in the same league as PerfectDisk, but the ability to select specific files and defrag them either by means of a shortcut or batch file, makes this a nifty utility that may meet the needs of some. The engineering needs a bit more work, though.Friday, August 03, 2007
AccessOpener 1.20 now supports Access 2007
Microsoft Access 2007 has been available for some time, but I only recently downloaded a trial version to experiment with. As a result I can now announce version 1.20 of AccessOpener, the utility that allows you to open an Access file with the same version of Access as it was originally created, assuming you have it installed on your PC.The biggest problem with getting the new version to work was Access 2007's insistence that it is the only Access program on the PC, which wasn't true. I kept getting the screen shown below:
It took several attempts to eventually figure out why Access 2007 was doing this, and the new version of AccessOpener seems to work correctly with Access 2007. I have not been able to test it with Access 2003 or Access 2000, but it still works properly with Access 2002 and Access 97 on Windows XP. I suspect there will be trouble with Windows Vista, but haven't been able to confirm this yet.I have also improved the "train" function, which should make setup a bit more simple. The installation program is also a bit more intuitive. Please report any bugs here or write to me directly.
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