My Cantina

All PC users are faced with a never ending onslaught from rogues trying to gain access to their PC. They may want to steal your personal details or hijack your PC and use it to send out a flood of spam.

There are various things you can do to prevent such nefarious events from occurring.

First never ever open an E-mail attachment unless you know who sent it and why they sent it. And remember anyone can spoof the senders e-mail address, so you need to verify that the e-mail really is from who you think it is from. Checking the full e-mail headers should alert you to a fake e-mail or failing that e-mail the sender and ask them. Opening bogus attachments is the easiest way to get your PC infected.

Antivirus programs are the next line of defense and you absolutely must be running one and ensure its virus definitions are updated daily.

Next comes Firewalls. Firewalls prevent (Internet) traffic from entering and exiting your PC, thus blocking unauthorized access while permitting authorized communications. Firewalls excel at helping to protect your PC, however they are usually complex to setup, manage and use correctly. Firewalls come in two types; Hardware which runs in your Router etc. and Software which runs on your PC. We are only discussing Software Firewalls here.

The Microsoft Windows Firewall is easy to use, however it is limited in its functionality compared to third party firewalls such as Comodo and Agnitum Outpost. I have no intention of discussing the merits or otherwise of any particular Firewall, suffice to say searching for “Windows Firewalls” on Google will give you plenty to read.

Now it’s time to come back to the title of this article “Firewalls are wonderful things except when they aren’t.” I mentioned that Firewalls can be complex to setup and manage and herein lies the problem. In fact I was prompted to (finally) write this article after a brand new Surfulater user Peter, ran into problems on day one. Fortunately he took it in his stride, but we all know from experience how frustrating it can be when something (new) doesn’t work as expected. To make matters worse this was on a weekend, so normally the issue wouldn’t have been resolved for a few days. However we’d had a Surfulater promotion that week and I wanted to ensure all the new users were happily using their latest acquisition, so I was keeping a close eye on our Support Forums and E-Mails.

A picture or two is worth a thousand words. When you open the sample Surfulater Knowledge Base and select the “Atlantica Blended Wing Body” article this is part of what you should see.

And this is what Peter saw. None of the images shown in the screen shot above are being displayed.

After a few e-mails back and forth the cause was discovered and the issue resolved. You’ve probably worked out by now that Peter’s Firewall was the culprit that prevented Surfulater from displaying images. If so you are correct. Now let me explain why.

The Surfulater content window (in the screen shots above) is in essence a Web Browser and like a Web Browser it retrieves its images from a Web Server. However in this case the Web Server is not out on the Internet, but built-in to Surfulater. In fact Surfulater’s Web Server is used for a variety of tasks beyond serving up images, including for example providing the list of matching tags for Tag auto-suggest. Now if your Firewall is set to Block Surfulater’s Web Server, it is unable to do its job and serve up the requested content resulting in missing images etc. etc.

When you install and run Surfulater for the first time your Firewall will pop-up and ask you whether to Allow or Block various requests it makes, as shown in this screen shot using Outpost Firewall.

For Surfulater to operate correctly you must set your Firewall to Allow Surfulater to perform all activities. Anything less will cause problems. Depending on which Firewall you are using, there can be several of these pop-up windows, which you need to confirm, to allow access.

Firewalls will also prevent Surfulater from checking to see whether there is a new release available and informing you of such. This screen shot shows the Windows Security Alert prompt which is displayed the very first time Surfulater is run.

When we do the check for a new release no information of any sort is sent back to us, so you do not need to be concerned about your privacy. Further the automated ‘Check for a new release’ is completely optional and can be turned off or on at any time. When it is off you can still use Help|Check for a New Release to perform a manual check. We therefore request that you select the Unblock option here as well, so that we can deliver an optimal user experience.

Clearly there is a perfectly legitimate and necessary requirement for applications such as Surfulater so send and receive both local and Internet  traffic and therefore not have Firewall Blocks put on them. You need to judge the veracity of Firewall block/unblock requests on a case by case basis, taking into account where the application came from in the first place. If it was purchased directly from a reputable vendor there should be no reason to block its access.

I hope you found this useful and that it will assist future Surfulater users, should they run into the same problem Peter did.

If you’ve had any specific good or bad experiences with Firewalls or applications which abuse your trust, comment away.

The current Surfulater Firefox Extension does not work if you do a clean installation of Firefox Version 3.6. If you upgrade to Firefox V3.6 from an earlier version of Firefox the Extension will continue to work correctly.

The folks at Mozilla have removed some of the code used by extensions prior to Firefox V3.6, which is preventing our extension from working. Specifically none of the Surfulater menu items appear on the Firefox right click context menu, even though the Extension appears to be installed ok. That’s the bad news.

The goods news is I have updated the Surfulater Firefox Extension to bring it up to date with the latest Firefox Extension specification. I have also taken this opportunity to update and improve the Extension code. A few Surfulater users have tested the new extension as have I and all is well once more.

The updated extension will be part of the next Surfulater release, Version 3.30, due out early next week. There are some great new features and enhancements in V3.30 which I’ll talk about in the next blog post.

I’m heading back to finish updating the Surfulater Help for the new release, then on to the release packaging and final testing.  I’ll see you all on the other side.

I was contacted by a long time ED for Windows customer yesterday who had visited our Surfulater Web site and commented on the quotes we have there, adding his own “Hope is not a plan”. I’d not heard this before and it took me aback thinking how appropriate it was in terms of Surfulater and more broadly anyone who uses a PC.

Most everyone with a PC spends time on the Internet, sometimes just stumbling almost randomly from site to site, but often searching for specific information to solve a particular problem. It could be researching the purchase of a new TV, Camera, Car etc. or trying to gather information on a medical condition, plan a family holiday, get help with a school assignment and on it goes.

We all know the Internet is an addiction and that we can and do spend countless hours trying to wheedle out every last piece of relevant information we can. But what happens with all this hard won information? For most people, not much. They’ll read as much as they can and do their best to absorb it. They may also set a bookmark in the hope they can find the page and content again, so they can research some more.

But “Hope is not a plan”; can you find the bookmark, if not, are you prepared to put the time and effort into trying to find the web page all over again. And if you do just happen to find it, will the content you think you saw before still be there now! Worse still the entire site may no longer exist.

The internet has the potential to greatly enrich our lives by presenting us with a wealth of incredibly useful information. Wise readers will plan to copy and keep this information, not hope that they may be lucky enough to find it again in the future. And there is a good chance they’ll use Surfulater to do just that.

“Hope is not a plan” is a truism that applies everywhere. People hope that the hard drive in their PC never dies, if it does they hope they have a “good” and recent backup to recover their many, many important documents, financial records, family pictures etc. They hope that if a fire comes racing through their house they will survive.

So the takeaway from all this is make plans, test the plans and work the plans, because “Hope is not a plan”.

After writing Too much of a good thing I contacted the therein mentioned customer (Mr. T.) informing him of the blog post. To my surprise he wrote a lengthy rebuttal and with his permission here it is in full, along with another reply of mine and more from him. I hope you find this as interesting a read as I did.

(more…)

A new Surfulater customer e-mailed over the weekend wanting to know how to get Surfulater to automatically save each and every Web page he visited in his Web Browser. He commented that disk space is cheap and a 1TB drive only costs $150, so there is no reason not to do this. Well Surfulater doesn’t have this capability and it isn’t even one I’d considered, nor do I think has ever been suggested. I have to wonder is this wanting “too much of a good thing”?

I see several issues. First up out of all the pages one visits how many are of any real value - not many. Every time you do a Google search, do you really want the Search Results pages saved, and out of all the pages you visit from these Search Results, how many are of interest; when you are watching a Video on YouTube do you want that page saved, and on on it goes. Then there are issues of security! Do you want pages saved when you are doing your On-line Banking, or purchasing some goods with your credit card number shown - I don’t think so.

Yes disk space is cheap, no doubt about it. But if all these pages are so important, then backups must be just as important. We all know disk drives die, usually the day before you go and put a backup system in place! So you need a 1TB External Backup drive; no big deal and reasonably cheap as well. But this alone isn’t enough, well not for me, and would have to be complemented with a secure, reliable off-site backup. Ok now we are set with backups. But how long will it take to back up all these web pages, and how often will you perform the backups? And what about disk clutter, are these pages splattered all over the place as lots of individual files, or stored in a database. And what overhead is there in actually capturing them all in the first place.

This leads on to findability. There is little point storing large amounts information if you can’t quickly and easily find the specific gems of interest again and again. The more information you store the more difficult it becomes finding those needles in the haystack. If say 60% of the saved information was never of interest in the first place, then you’ve just made findability all that much harder. Computer people have a saying “garbage in - garbage out” and that is what we have here.

Organizational capabilities, such as Tagging, placement into Folders and adding Cross-Reference links along with the ability to add Notes and edit Captured content all aid greatly in findability, but I find it difficult to believe anyone would undertake such tasks for each and every web page that popped up in their Web Browser. And everyone that uses Surfulater knows just how important organizing content is, in aiding findability.

Now I doubt any of this will make any difference to the aforementioned customer and others like him and that’s fine as we can and should be able to use our computers in whatever way we feel works best for us. This simply seems like a bad idea to me, or for me. I want to be in control, saving the information I consider to be of real value and not cluttering my world with lots of useless crap I need to weed through.

Let me finish on something which is a good thing and that is the next release of Surfulater should be out this week.

Surfulater price update. Starting November 2007 the single copy (2 licenses) price of Surfulater will be $59. If you’ve been holding back on purchasing Surfulater or you know of any colleagues or friends who may be interested in Surfulater, now is a great time to buy before the price rises at the start of November.

I’ve collected some great stories from Surfulater users recently and with their permission I’d like to share some with you.

Hi Neville,
 
It has been a while since I’ve emailed you about your product but I just want to say that it has been over two years since I purchased Surfulater and I find myself using it for everything from research for work and graduate school papers, to my kids homework assignments, to keeping recipes, tracking travel information,etc. I do a lot of purchasing on the internet and I use it for those tasks also.  For school research I use it to track the results from my first line of investigation, eventually transferring some of the information into EndNote once I have made my final bibliographic selection.
 
I have a very short list of software products that I recommend to colleagues, friends, and family and Surfulater is always on my list.
 
Great product…still going strong!
 
Thank you,
Fiona Best

Why I bought the program: In the late 1960s, I took photographs for a Chrysler Motors comic book in which my parents had the only speaking parts. I still have an old, mouse-chewed copy of that comic book; the comic was published on the Internet two years ago, but taken down after only a month on-line. I wish I’d made a copy.

Finally, I hope Surfulater can help me to organize some of the mess of Internet
pages and illustrations I already have stored on my computer. This is something
I need more than a web spider or another note-taker.

M.B.

I thought I’d let you know that the reason I decided to purchase Surfulater after weeks of researching and testing different type of Web research management tools is because of your courteous and fast response to all my questions (not so common to see great customer service these days especially I wasn’t even a customer yet) and also the features that I was looking for in tool like this seem to be missing from the others (there were a few things also missing from Surfulater, but I’ll mention them later).  I literally have tried or looked at all the similar software out there.  I’ve tried Onfolio, NetSnippets (which has stopped their development), Web Research Professional (it came down to this one and Surfulater), Evernote, General Knowledge Base, iMiser, Furl, and quite a few other ones. 

Another big reason that I decided to purchase Surfulater is also because that you seem very open to the input to your customers’ suggestions and endeavor to improve the product.  The active and continual development of this software convinces me that this software will continue to get better.

A. Chang.

I’ve always encouraged users of our software to tell us what they honestly think about what we’ve delivered so far and where we are heading and I’m very pleased that quite a few do. At the same time there are many folks we never hear from, which may be a good thing or then again, may not be. It’s just as, if not more important, to be told any bad news, so we can ensure we address issues in the best way possible. Our support forums along with e-mail provide effective means to have these conversations.

If you’ve been holding back, reluctant to contact us why don’t you go and do it now. If we never hear from you, how can we meet your needs.

I was never able to find the time, nor the motivation to try the Vista Beta releases, so it wasn’t until the real release before I laid my hands and eyes upon it. I’ve been using Windows and developing software for it since Version 3.0. In fact I’m in the midst of a big cleanup at present and stumbled across the Windows 3.0 Floppy Disks this past weekend. Oh the memories.

Back to the hear and now and I have to say I was really impressed with Vista. It was without doubt the quickest and easiest install of any Windows version that I’ve ever done. What impressed me the most was it was able to install and work with a range of nVidia Video and nForce LAN drivers without me lifting a finger. On Windows XP on the same hardware I need to manually install these drivers from the CD that comes with the Motherboard. Installation of RAID drivers has also greatly improved and you no longer need to create and use a Floppy Disk during the initial Window install. The motherboard on this PC has Dual Video (monitor) support which I was never able to get working properly with Windows XP. Again Vista had this working from the get go.

Vista itself felt really nice to use. There are a variety of subtle improvements like the “Back” button which makes it easy to backtrack through Control Panel screens. And far more comprehensive Hardware and Software monitoring capabilities. Also things seemed smoother and seemed to work better. For example  I always seem to have problems getting Networking to work, but on Vista it just worked.

You’ll hear and read a lot about UAC or User Access Control. These are windows that pop up and require confirmation before you are able to do most any Administrative task. They clearly can be annoying, however UAC along with the new Protected Mode in IE7 should go a long way towards stopping Malware, Trojans and other undesirable software from infecting your PC and making your computing life a misery.

Vista has a very attractive new User Interface called Aero which I think looks great. You also get a neat 3D Task switching display, with the window for each running application stacked in a 3D space. Each small window shows what each application is doing in real time. So if you are watching a movie for example, you’ll see that in its stacked window.

Back to my opening question: To Vista or not? My plan was to run Vista on the new PC I built for Cherryl,  however after a few days of futility I succumb and installed Windows XP. What was the problem? It was simply that I wasn’t able to get several of her mainstream, can’t live without, applications running. Now take note that I’m not putting Vista at fault, nor these applications, as they weren’t Vista versions. The problem was there weren’t Vista versions of these programs available at that time. A Vista version of one has just been announced, but not the others.

Now you may be lucky and your Non-Vista programs will work or more likely appear to work on Vista, however from what I now know after doing the work to updating our software products for Vista, is that there are some quite fundamental areas which must be addressed for software to work correctly on Vista. For example programs can no longer write to any files in the “Program Files” folder or any of its sub-folders. Vista gives installation programs special permissions to store files on these folders, however when applications try to write to them, Vista makes mirrored copies of the files in the “Application Data” folder and writes to these instead. This can quickly get very confusing with multiple ‘different’ copies of the same files in different locations.

These changes aren’t in fact entirely new. Programs that are designed correctly for Windows XP and therefore run properly in Limited User (Non-Admin) accounts, should also work properly in Vista or at worst may need only minor updates.

So my advice is, if you want to run Vista, only do so once you have Vista compatible versions of all of your mainstream (can’t live without) applications. Anything less isn’t going to give you that WOW experience and will likely cause you some degree of grief.

I endeavour to spend a bit of time over the Christmas/New Year break trying out and learning about new things as these opportunities don’t present themselves much through the year. On Friday night over dinner, a good friend Russell Robinson mentioned a virtualization product XEN, which was being put to very good use where he does some contracting work. I’d heard of XEN but didn’t know anything about it. I still have Cherryl’s new PC that I can play around with, so this seemed like a good time to check XEN out. (more…)

I’m trying to keep abreast of what is happening in the world of Web Applications (vs. Desktop) and this includes Ajax, Web Application Frameworks and Web Languages, Web Operating Systems and all things Web 2.0. My main interest here is to have Surfulater or a subset thereof, running over the Net in your Web Browser, one day.

Stan Schroeder has recently put together a very good overview of 10 on-line operating systems which is well worth a read, if you are interested in Web applications. The articles comments provide very good feedback and mention a number of Web OS’s that Stan hadn’t included. (more…)