The Success of Cuil – Or Lack Thereof

October 6th, 2008

I would hazard a guess as to some of the reasons Cuil has not taken off in the competitive search business:

  1. Wow, a huge index list? That’s nothing unless you can display results in an accurate and relevant list. Google has had 8 or so years to develop technologies like Page Rank, and it is innovations like this that place Google at the top of the pack when it comes to search.
  2. Search is a critical technology which is required to use the Web. It demands efficiency, clarity. It is not a function which can be sold to people through a pretty Web 2.0 interface.
  3. There are so many other superb Google web products (maps, image search, gmail etc) that all their popularity and success is boosted by each other. People are more likely to put all their eggs in one basket, especially when that basket is such a free, functional one. Additionally, people trust Google and it has a brand image in a very positive light.
  4. Google’s search functionality and feature list – features of advanced search, like searching for specific file types, and from certain domains are excellent. These features are also available with commands like ‘filetype:xls’. You can type something like “time in california” or similar, when you can’t be bothered doing a time zone conversion, and Google will just tell you the answer! It’s the same with calculations. Along with suberb image search, scholar search and others, Google’s search feature set is not even worth comparing with Cuil’s.

When you put these and other factors together, it comes down to one simple thing; For users to switch to a c ompeting product, there has to be significant benefit to using the competing one. Google has so much going for them right now, that this would seem impossible for a new company to accomplish. Cuil had a slim chance with it’s huge index size, but this was obviously not enough.

Yet, Cuil is founded by former Google employees, so I wouldn’t lose complete hope that they might come out with something not only interesting, but successful some time in the future.

It was not very hard to resist the temptation of adding yet another Cuil/Cool pun headline to the internet.

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Keyboard Launching + XP vs. Vista

September 29th, 2008

My computer has been crashing in games lately, and I narrowed the problem down to the video card or software.

So, before burning completely through my pocket buying a new video card, I decided to try and go back to XP to fix the problem.

Unfortunately, once back to Windows XP my gaming stability did not change one bit. However, it made me think, what really are compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista?

Security Features such as DEP and ASLR would be more relevant if most developers coded with them in mind. Vista is certainly more pretty, with its glassy, see-through features. Also, there is the fact that all the security patches and upgrades you would have to download and apply after installing XP SP2 are already included or not needed in Vista

But after using XP again for a few weeks, the only thing I missed from Vista was the start menu and its bottom search bar. This may be something for the more keyboard oriented users out there. But I’m guessing most geeks can type quickly and are very at home at the keyboard. I prefer the ease and efficiency of pressing the start button on the keyboard, typing ‘word’ and pressing enter, to using the mouse to navigate the start menu.

XP does not have this excellent feature, but luckily there are several programs you can turn to, if you have not yet “upgraded” to Vista.

Launchy is a free, open source solution which I found on this Lifehacker article, Best 5 Application Launchers. It runs on Windows and Linux (KDE, Gnome)!

All you do is pick a keyboard combination to bring up Launchy. I chose Ctrl + Space. Then you begin typing the name of the program you wish to launch, and the results come up (which are indexed based on your start menu contents and desktop) in a Firefox like magic box, then you press enter.

The time I have saved by launching my applications via the keyboard is probably equal to the time it’s taken me to write this article, so just be grateful I’ve let you know about this excellent program.

Let me know if there are any features of Vista that would stop you from going back to XP, or simple productivity savers like this that you “just couldn’t live without”.

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How to kill Malware (Viruses and the like)

September 12th, 2008

Short Answer: Use the free tool Autoruns to stop malware running at startup, then scan and remove with AVG etc.

Slightly longer one: Having had many people request my services to rid their computers of all kinds of malware – viruses, worms, spyware etc – I have developed a simple toolkit and method for removing them, for systems that you can actually boot up, at least.

The weakness of malware is that they are not very dangerous if they are simply on your system somewhere, they obviously have to be executed. This is most likely to initially be the user themselves, but after that, there are many areas in the registry which control what programs, services and .dll files are to be loaded at the start-up of the system.

My most invaluable (what a very strange word, by the way – like extraordinary) tool when combating malware is Autoruns. Autoruns is written by some guys at SysInternals. It is a tool for listing, deleting and disabling all items that run when Windows starts up. This includes executables, shortcuts, Browser Helper Object .dlls, drivers etc.

Scroll through the Autoruns list and look for items which are not digitally signed at all (the publisher column is blank), and for ones with suspicious names like random numbers and letters. If you find one with no publisher which you are not sure about, just type its process name into google and see what you find. You can simply uncheck items you don’t want, and if this breaks your computer you can always return to Autoruns in safe mode and re-check them again.

It would be smart to double check tsnp2std.exe is legitimate, as it does have a digitally signed publisher

It would be smart to double check tsnp2std.exe is legitimate, as it does have a digitally signed publisher

I was tasked with removing viruses from my friends computer recently. There was some particularly annoying malware present that I couldn’t find inAutoruns, and AVG Free 8 did not detect it either. When I would try to browse to certain URL’s like support.microsoft.com, or windowsupdate.microsoft.com, (on IE and Firefox 3, but not Chrome) the browser would redirect to 127.0.0.1 and fail. The system32 Hosts file was not the culprit either.

Sufficiently disappointed in AVG for not finding this rogue piece of code in my system, I looked for other free tools to try scanning with. I would recommend Adaware as a great free tool for removing spyware, except that it did not find this Malware program.

Finally, my saviour came in the form of another miraculous free software product, Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware. I would highly recommend installing this product along with AVG Free. Malwarebyte’s program does not run on start-up, so it doesn’t take additional system resources. It would be a good idea to run this occasionally, in case AVG misses something nasty.

If you suspect that some Windows system files may be corrupted or missing, running the ’sfc /scannow’ will check all system files and replace them if needed. You will need your Windows install disc for this tool.

The Windows Vista install DVD is also very adept at repairing a Windows installation. You may need to use this option if you cannot even boot into Safe Mode.

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Software RAID On Linux

August 3rd, 2008

A couple of months ago I scored a free computer from one of my brother’s friends because it was broken. It’s some kind of Pentium 4 with 500MB of RAM. With the addition of one of my spare video cards, it was perfect for a backup gaming computer (well, games like Warcraft and BF2).

I had been hosting a couple of websites off my windows Vista computer and decided to move all the server stuff over to that extra computer. So I installed the Linux distro Ubuntu Server on it and moved the computer into my wardrobe, where I administer it from an SSH shell.

I had been hosting a cool website called Ampache, a PHP + MySQL solution that indexes all your music and lets you listen to it anywhere, from a browser (with a login). So the server was serving up the music that was located on my Vista machine, and accessing the music through Windows File Sharing. This was not ideal if I wanted to turn off the Vista computer or play around with OSX86. The hard drive I had in the linux computer was a 40GB, so along with the linux stuff taking up about 5GB, there wasn’t enough space to copy all my music onto it.

So I stuck a spare 30GB hard drive in the server and read up on Software Raid for Linux.

I decided to use the RAID specification called ‘linear’, which basically works by appending partitions together. When the first partition is filled, the next one is used seamlessly, with it all appearing as one partition to the system. But I couldn’t use the 40GB partition which had the Linux operating system on it, otherwise I would lose all the data on that one.

I found a distribution of Linux on DistroWatch.com called ‘Parted Magic’. It’s about 50MB and just contains the tools required to partition your hard drives however you want. I resized the Linux partition to 8GB (non destructively) and used the remaining space for a secondary partition. Combined with the second hard drive and Software RAID, this would give me about 60GB – perfect storage on the server for my music.

Back in Linux now, the steps required for setting up Software RAID were surprisingly few.

  1. Identify the partitions / hdds you will be using for the RAID device, i.e. find out their device names (/dev/sdb1 etc).
  2. Backup your data
  3. Run ‘cat /proc/mdstat‘ to check whether your kernel has RAID support. if the file is non existent, then either your kernel does not support RAID and you need to change it, or you need to load the kernel module. If typing ‘modprobe md‘ is successful, you have loaded the RAID kernel module. You will need to make sure this module is loaded on bootup, so add the ‘md’ module to your kernel startup file. This may be at /etc/modules.autoload, /etc/modules.autoload.d/, /etc/modules.conf or somewhere similar.
  4. Install the mdadm tool by running ‘apt-get install mdadm‘ as root or superuser.
  5. Depending on which type of RAID device you want to setup, refer to the Software RAID Howto for the specific command. Disregard talk of /dev/raidtab and mkraid, just use the mdadm tool. The command I used for a Linear RAID of 2 disks was: ‘mdadm --create --auto yes --verbose /dev/md0 --level=linear --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sda3‘
  6. If that is successful, you will see something like ‘mdadm: chunk size defaults to 64K, mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.‘ This has created your RAID device at /dev/md0
  7. Create ext3 filesystem with ‘/sbin/mkfs -t ext3 /dev/md0‘
  8. Mount: ‘mkdir /mnt/raid && mount /dev/md0 /mnt/raid‘
  9. Add entry to /etc/fstab

Excellent, a 60GB combined partition out of 2 hard drives. I could add more in the future if I want. All that was left was to create a SAMBA share, and then setup Synctoy 2.0 to sync my music to the server every night.

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Isn’t Wireless Great?

August 2nd, 2008

I was stupid and didn’t keep track of my downloads this month, resulting in a ’shaped’ (slowed to 64kbps) internet connection. It would have been easier to keep my sanity if there wasn’t a certain someone in my household constantly using the voice chat feature of Live Messenger. That voice chat seems to take all the crippled bandwidth for itself and doesn’t let anyone basically do anything on the internet. Unless you count 5 minutes to load CNET News ‘using the internet’.

So, I went in search of alternative internet connections, in the form of wifi access points. It was the last day before the end of the month (when my download limit resets), so I wasn’t going to bother cracking someone’s wireless encryption. But luckily I found a new unencrypted wifi access point with my laptop. The only place I could get a connection was near the front window of the house, with the laptop raised above my head.

So I shut down my spare computer which was running linux hosting all this web goodness, put an XP hard drive and wifi pci card in it, put it on top of a chest of drawers in that room and connected it to the wired network.

I wish I had taken a photo of this; it looked ridiculous. The computer at the window with no screen, and a huge stack of books on top of it with an antenna sitting at the top.

I used VNC to remotely configure the XP machine and set up a proxy server on it so I could use my neighbour’s wireless from my computer out the back. Unfortuneately, after all this effort it turned out that my neighbour appeared to have gone over his/her download limit also and their internet was no faster than mine.

I could have taken the time sans internet to catch up on some HSC study, but I instead elected to do something I hadn’t done in a few months and watch commercial TV for more than 10 minutes.

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