Down Under Geek

As you may know I moved into a new house about a month ago - can’t believe its only a month - feels like 2 or 3 months !

Part of the “deal” with the the new house was that we probably wouldn’t have broadband access here for at least 6-8 weeks. Around September / October. Telstra had to upgrade the local RIM - the usual blah blah story as to why you can’t get decent internet access.

But we knew that coming in and I was reasonable happy to put up with Dial-Up for a month or so, plus going around to my parents place once a week or so to use Dad’s internet to move some big files around. The house was a great deal – a bit of a bargain in my opinion – so it was worth a bit of pain.

To be honest - Dial-Up wasn’t the nightmare I imagined. Sure I wasn’t going to be downloading 10 podcasts every day or surfing sites all day. But for general email and basic surfing it wasn’t too bad.

OK it still sucked but I wasn’t completely offline.

As I was telling all of my contacts about the change of address, phone number etc – I was contacted by Neighborhood Cable – an Australian company with an American name. NCable are a Victorian regional Pay TV / Internet company. They are in Mildura, Ballarat and Geelong. Unlike most ISP’s they install their own infrastructure and cabling – rather than running off Telstra’s backbone.

http://www.ncable.com.au/

Even though they also don’t have their cable running down my street – they have a new service called Wireless Cable Broadband. They have a transmitter in town on the water tower – click for webcam view which gives them about 25km of range. At my place I have an antenna on my roof that runs down into a modem in my office – and from there to my wireless router etc. From there its business as usual in setting up the internet etc.

http://www.visitmildura.com.au/quicksite/index.php?id=webcam

So I know have broadband where otherwise I wouldn’t have. And even better – its FASTER. Best ADSL speed I can get here is 1500/256. It will be a long time before we get ADSL 2/2+ in a country town like Mildura. So far the speeds I have been getting have been the equivalent of 3500/1200 !! And I’ve even complained as I was told to expect download speeds around 5000 !!

http://www.milduravictoria.com.au/

And because I am in a country regional area with no access to ADSL broadband – I got full subsidy from the Australian Government’s HIBIS program. The whole install cost me nothing !! Yai !!

http://www.dcita.gov.au/tel/higher_bandwidth_incentive_scheme_hibis

So far the quality has been excellent. No problems at all. The increased upload speed already has made a huge difference to my productivity. Instead of queuing files to upload overnight – I can do them during the day while preparing the sites. 100Mb used to take an hour on 1500/256. Now its like 10 mins. That makes a huge difference to my planning.

Really happy with it all so far. Will keep you up to date on my experiences as we go.

Tags: Geek by Michael Quinn
No Comments »

Just wanted to announce that normal service will be resumed – any other problems are therefore your own.

The house move took a bit more out of me than I thought. Didn’t get the office set up right away as I needed to get an electrician, pay tv, telstra and cable guy in. I now have a tower of wall-plates on two walls in the office. Plenty of holes to plug things into.

But because they had to work on the walls under the desk I didn’t want to unpack everything and get in their way. And then I was in Sydney / Bathurst for a week on the annual Batboys Pub Crawl Reunion. Great week.

While in Sydney I ordered an Apple 14” iBook – my first Mac. I have set up another blog – MacSwitch – where I will be detailing my switch from Windows XP to Apple OS/X Tiger.

So please check that blog out – should be interesting.

But I should be getting some more stories up on here now that things have gotten unpacked and mostly put away. Lots of things have been happening as usual. Nice to be back.

Tags: Geek by Michael Quinn
No Comments »

As you probably know, Microsoft announced last Friday that the official name for the next version of Windows will be Windows Vista.

At the time, in this previous post, I commented that it wasn’t a bad choice of name. I speculated that Windows Vista might be an “all in one” product that could be installed into many platforms – tablet, media centre, home PC etc. It kinda fits with the XBox 360 name – implying that this product will do a wide range of things.

Well, I have thought about the name Vista for a few days. Mentioned it to a few people. The response is pretty much a universal “what”?

It’s just a lame name Microsoft. It doesn’t inspire, excite, invoke passion. It sounds boring! Politically correct. Designed not to offend. Limp!

XP sounded like a statement. An exclamation! You had an XBox for your games box and a XP for your personal computer!

Vista sounds like the marketing wankers have taken over the building.

It reminds me of the time Sega renamed the Katana into the Dreamcast. Took a damn sexy name and let the marketing vegans change it. And that worked out well for them… Did the Dreamcast even last 12 months?

I doubt that Vista will cause Microsoft to fall into ruin. But I think its a step backwards rather than forward.

Tags: Geek, Microsoft, Software by Michael Quinn
No Comments »

It has been leaked to the internet that the next version of Windows will be officially called Windows Vista.

Known by the codename of Longhorn for several years while in development, it is expected to be announced at 6am Pacfic Time, 22nd July that the release shall be known as Windows Vista.

Robert Scoble mentioned an upcoming announcement on his weblog earlier today - he pointed to an announcement from Microsoft would be made available at this URL. http://scoble.weblogs.com/ http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/21.html#a10721 http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul05/07-22LHMA.mspx

Soon after, AnAndTech, Channel 9 and others spread the word that the name had been leaked.

Replacing the XP title used since 2001, Vista refers to wide ranging. Perhaps a good name referring to its ability to be installed on a wide variety of environments such as the home, office, servers, media centres, tablet PC’s etc.

Since XP spawned many variations such as the Media Centre and Tablet configuration. It has been speculated that they might be eventually rolled into one product that would install what was necessary depending on the system it was being installed on.

The advantages of having an “All In One” installer being balanced by a more complex installation routine, and perhaps some inflexibility of upgrading components of one system or another.

The term Windows Vista does dovetail nicely with the XBox 360 product. Another label that suggests a wide range of applications.

Tags: Geek, Microsoft, Software by Michael Quinn
No Comments »

For the last 12 months or more I have been using NOD32 as my anti-virus of choice.

http://www.nod32.com.au/

For years I used Nortons Anti-Virus and thought it was OK. But I think that had a lot to do with the fact I got free Symantec software as part of my old job. When you don’t have to pay for it - you care a little less.

But upon upgrading to the 2004 version - it was such a dog. Live update constantly crashed, the updates were 2-4Mb at a time - what the frack was going on?

So I tried the free AVG from Grisoft. Worked OK but was it didn’t scan emails on Thunderbird, and read a lot of reviews where it performed badly against trojans. Obviously worth every cent you paid for it.

http://www.grisoft.com/

I loaded up NOD32 - brilliant. Takes almost no resources, its fast, updates all day without bugging me except to tell me its done. Brilliant. Can’t recommend it enough.

Except it refuses to play with Google Desktop Search and completely screws up my bit torrent client Azureus.

http://desktop.google.com/?promo=mp-gds-v1-1 http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus/

Up until this week I have been living in the dark ages with no desktop search on my laptop as I refused to used another AV, and Yahoo didn’t scan my emails in Thunderbird. Pretty pointless having desktop search if I can’t search my emails. I know where my files are - it’s emails I can never find.

Why isn’t there a Global Search in email clients. Thunderbird (and Outlook) always make you search a particular folder. Bloody anoying. Maybe they do - might have to try to find that.

But with the new Yahoo Desktop Search I can now scan emails (can’t do Thunderbird contacts yet…. little steps I guess). And it seems to have no problems with NOD32 !

So if Yahoo can do it - why can’t Google??

http://desktop.yahoo.com/

Tags: Geek, Software by Michael Quinn
No Comments »