Keyloggers and why you should be afraid

Ever reluctantly, I decided to have a little look to see just how difficult it is to capture everything someone types in on a computer.


Simples.


Worringly simples and all but impossible to detect.


Even using a high level language like VB it's pretty simple to hook into the keyboard and see every keystroke typed in every application.


Getting the application being used is trivial as well. So all we have to do is either capture everything and send it somewhere via email or http (also easy) or just wait until we see a sequence of numbers that look like a credit card.


It took me about a day to research this and have something working in a half arsed sort of way.


Good job I'm so honest...

Honest.

BBC iPlayer on Sony Xperia

Ever since updating the ROM on the "not very good as a phone" X1 it's been unable to play iPlayer live with sound.



There doesn't seem to be a fix available and the Vodafone web site is not particulary helpful.



What does seem to be a solution is to download the SkyFire browser. This has some annoying features like a reluctance to save bookmarks but will play iPlayer with sound.



The only caveat is that you have to make sure it connects via a Server in the UK. If it doesn't iPlayer will not let you connect as it will think you are outside the UK.



If you get this problem after installing Skyfire, check the Server it is connected to by Menu -> Help -> About -> More Info.



If the Server address starts with 10.110 it has connected to a UK server and iPlayer should work.



If it is anything else it has connected via the US and iPlayer won't work. To fix this you need to delete the Prefs file in Application Data \ Skyfire and reconnect and repeat this process until it connects via a UK Server.



Once this has happened it should always use the UK server unless it is unavailable.



I'd recommend taking a copy of the Prefs file just in case.



BTW, one you have started Skyfire, IE and Opera won't work until you exit Skyfire and force the data connection to Disconnect.

Windows 7 (Yawn)

A new version of Windows, gosh.

Now my only interest in this is whether my applications are still going to work.

I'd be very surprised if this isn't also the view of several million other users.

As threatened by Google Chrome OS all we want is something that "just works".

As far I'm concerned that was mostly Windows 2000 but I'll concede XP has a few useful features and of course enforces Microsofts licensing model.

So far we have downloaded the Release Candidate and installed it to a Windows XP VM running under Vista.

Much to my surprise this actually worked. Runs like a crippled slug though.

However, there is no upgrade path from XP to Windows 7. You have to do a clean install and then re-install all your applications.

Why would anybody want to do this?

On first impressions its just another annoyingly modified version of windows which means I've got to spend ages trying to find where Microsoft have hidden or disguised everything we are used to and work out what hoops we have to jump through in order to get our apps to function as expected.

For our next trick we will be installing Sage 50 and our applications to see if it all works...

Just as well there's a credit crunch...

Idiots.

Sage Performance and the Grocery Store

There’s nothing very mysterious about why some applications such as Sage Line 50 can run slowly, you just need to understand what the program is doing and it’ll soon be obvious where the problem lies.

Too many people babble on about Client / Server, databases, flat files, caching et al without really having the slightest idea what they are talking about.

What’s needed is to know what these terms actually mean and more importantly how they affect your systems.

To make an analogy we’re going to compare what happens in a program like Sage with checking to see if you have all the ingredients necessary to make a recipe.

(For the professionals amongst you this is not intended as a precise comparison, just to indicate the general way in which things work)

Lets say you are seated comfortably in the lounge with your cook book and all the potential ingredients are in the kitchen.

The recipe calls for a bag of sugar. You get up from your chair, go to the kitchen, look for a bag of sugar in the cupboard and return to the lounge. The next ingredient is an egg, so it’s back off to the kitchen, check the cupboard and return. You repeat this process for every ingredient. It’s not very efficient and takes a long time.

This is what happens when you run a computer program. It has to trot off to the kitchen (hard drive) to retrieve every piece of data it requires.

In a Client Server application by contrast, the client (you) shouts through to the kitchen to the wife (the server) and asks “hey, have we got eggs, sugar etc?” (cooking’s not my strong point). The Server checks in the cupboard and yells back the answer. In the meantime, if you can multitask (apparently impossible for males), you can get on with something really important like drinking beer and watching the TV.

Result is a single interaction without you having to go backwards and forwards to check every single item. Much faster if a little annoying to the wife who may have been doing something else.

There’s a little twist to this scenario called caching which is how computers seek to speed up this backwards and forwards process. Using a cache, the first time you go to the kitchen, you keep a list of everything you found and take it back to the lounge. Then instead of going back to the kitchen for every subsequent item you just look on the list.

This is obviously much quicker, but runs the risk that in the meantime someone has used one of your eggs (changed the data) in which case you have to go back to the kitchen and rewrite your list. This is what is generally called opportunistic locking and works as long as someone tells you they’ve nicked an egg which as in life isn’t always the case.

In a Client Server application, local caching doesn’t really matter as the Server is doing all the work, but caching still has a role to play on the Server itself as it only in turn has to look in the kitchen cupboard once rather than checking each item individually before shouting back the answer.

Now on a single computer the Client Server thing doesn’t really apply as there is only one of you doing all the work but it comes into its own on a network.

With a network you no longer have a kitchen cupboard. All your ingredients are in the grocery shop.

So instead of a short trot to the kitchen you have now got to get in your car, drive to the store, and see if they have the sugar in stock.

Then you drive home

Then you drive back again to see if they have the eggs.

Repeat.

Takes a lot of time.

In a client server program you drive to the store, hand over your shopping list and they (the server) delivers the items to your home (it’s an old fashioned store). Result is only one round trip to the store with them doing all the work instead of you so you can carry on with those important things (drinking more beer) again in the meantime.

Now if the store does caching as well, they will have kept a list of the things you need to buy and they’ll only have to search all the aisles once (unless of course someone else buys something on your list) so even without client server applications, caching on the server speeds up the time taken to find your groceries and deliver them to you.

Unfortunately it all goes horribly wrong when the Store Detective starts work.

They want to check everybody (including store employees) every time someone walks down an aisle and possibly when you park the car and walk in the door.

The more mature detectives can be told to use common sense and just check certain people and aisles but the new brigade (mini filters) are having nothing of this. They check everything on their list even if you’re a valued customer just to make sure your not on the list so every single item you look for will be examined by the detective. Have a nice day sir.

And if the new brigade are in a really bad mood they’ll tear up your list (so we can’t use the cache) each time you visit the aisle.

The bottom line is that Sage and many other non Client Server applications can be quite network intensive for operations that involve searching though large amounts of data.

If the Store Detective (Anti Virus) is too intrusive this can seriously degrade performance.

Keep in mind that if you have 100,000 transactions some processes may involve 100,000 trips to the store, 100,000 conversations with the detective, 100,000 tearing ups of shopping lists (not using the cache) and will quickly compound in performance terms.

You can’t avoid the trips to the store until Sage bring out their new version in 2010 based on MySQL but you can make sure you have a well behaved Store Detective.

In our experience, the number 1 cause of poor Sage 50 performance is Anti Virus software.

For more information see www.sbslimited.co.uk/sageslow.htm

Safe as Houses?

After months of staring at Rightmove and trekking backwards and forwards we've finally made an offer on a house...

We paid 15K less than the semi realistic asking price (it was being sold in part exchange for a new house) and I'm hoping we're not going to lose money but I'm not holding my breath.

An identical house around the corner (with an extra parking space and a slightly better view) but no conservatory has just gone on the market for 40K more than we paid, which I'd like to take comfort from, but I think they're being hopelessly optimistic.

There's some evidence in our chosen area (alright, my wife's chosen area) that houses are selling at sensible prices so maybe we're near the bottom of the market now (or that dead cat is bouncing again).

The only downside is the neighbours appear to have kids, but then I've got 3 classic Hondas and a pair of Tannoy Ardens...

Back to the future

After another exciting day viewing property it's becoming apparent that asking prices have dropped around 15% in the last 6 weeks or so and, in the areas we are looking at, pretty much back to 2001 levels.

A few of the houses we've seen have actually sold now and I suspect the price achieved is probably less than the advertised reduced price. The agents tell me that sales are picking up which is probably true but only for houses that have very realistic prices.

It'll be interesting to see the Land Registry information for these sold houses to see the actual price they got.

In the face of a worsening economc situation I can't any reason for prices to increase any time soon. If you're buying now it's a 50/50 chance as to whether you'll have paid too much.

I'd say it's a cast iron certainty that interest rates will rise soon which will depress prices still further.

A useful web site I've just found is www.mouseprice.com

Another Reason to hate Estate Agents (and Bankers)

There seems to be the emergence of a nice little scam by the Estate Agents and their mates...

(This is first hand experience and not an anecdotal tale by the way)

A modern 4 bedroom house appears on Rightmove at a good price at the weekend.

The next day we ring the agent who a) is very offhand b) fails to mention it's repossesed c) can't possibly arrange a viewing until Saturday despite having the keys.

Now, apart from anything else, I find it extremely improbable that an agent is so busy they can't arrange a viewing until the weekend.

On late Friday afternoon the agent rings and tells us that they have had an offer which has been accepted and solicitors instructed so we are wasting our time unless we can offer more and are in a position to proceed...

Now as it happens we have the required dosh sat in the bank and we had already made appointments to see other property in the area so we said we'd view anyway....

Which must have been a surprise as they then had to reschedule the appointment.

Smells a bit to me.

Just might be they have a mate who has been been tipped the wink?

Everybody is happy except the original owner who's going to be liable for any shortfall.

And me of course.

Xperia Update

An update on the Xperia (literally)

With the customary reluctance I decided I might as well experience the upgrade the phone process....

It's a bit more long winded than you might like. First off you go to the Sony Ericcson site and download the Update Service to your PC.

This describes what you need to do, the first step of which is to back up your phone as the update destroys all your settings, downloaded programs etc. i.e. it returns it back to the state when you took it out of the box (but with the new firmware).

What it doesn't tell you is how to back up your phone...

The Xperia doesn't include any back up software so a quick trawl around the net found a couple of solutions. But before you can use these you need to install the ActiveSync software from the CD that comes with the Xperia.

I decided to try out the Sprite Backup software (10 day free trial). This seemed to back up to the PC OK (but note it does shut down the phone while it does it so you won't be getting any calls).

Before running the Update Service you need to make sure the phone is fully charged, remove the sim from the phone and turn off the wireless connection.

Then run the Update Service. It decided that new software was available for the X1 with a name of X1i vfe uk cdf 1215 0285. It appears to detect which supplier you are using and select the appropriate download. You then follow the instructions to reboot the phone ready for the update. This involves holding down 2 buttons which I fund a bit of a faff.

The Update then downloads the file from the web which took around 15 minutes, then uploads it to the phone (during this part of the process a progess bar is displayed on the X1).

The phone then reboots and you have to align the screen and set the date and time. It then installs the software updates which takes a few minutes (couple of new games etc).

After this, you need to close down and re-insert the Sim. The Rom is now shown as R2AA 007.

The next step was to restore the backup which sadly didn't want to play. As there wasn't much set up on the phone I couldn't be bothered to pursue this but I think in future I'd buy a memory card and make sure everything is saved to that instead.

Incidentally the wireless still doesn't work...

By the way the Tweak for the Xperia solved the irritating "backlight going off during a call" problem http://www.cliffords.nu . You can also download Remote Desktop for the X1 from http://andrewblock.net/?p=85 . Thanks guys.

Sony Xperia X1

Reluctantly (obviously) I decided to upgrade my venerable Nokia Communicator because 1. it's falling apart and 2. it's a free upgrade.

Having got used to having a keyboard I went for the Sony Xperia.

Apart from the dubious battery life it's not too bad. Internet access (which is a big must) is good, Wireless essentially doesn't work (it connects but won't use the connection), GPS and Google Maps is pretty neat and saves me having to buy a sat nav. Remote Desktop (which isn't there as standard but can be downloaded) is excellent.

But for a phone it's bloody annoying.

In normal use you're going to leave the phone locked.

So you get an incoming call, Screen lights up and you can answer the call. So far so good.

But let's say you want to put the caller on hold or use the touch tone key pad?

By now the screen back light has gone out (it only stays on a few seconds and there seems to be no obvious way of changing this for the phone) and the phone is still locked.

So you need to press the power button to illuminate the screen, then 2 buttons to unlock the phone, then you can finally use the key pad.

A masterpiece of design.

Footnote : I have since found a download that lets you modify this setting and others at http://www.cliffords.nu/ . I'll let you know if it works..

Gordon Brown - A False Economy?

So what happens next?

In reality inflation is already streaking ahead despite the official figures.

Food prices continue upwards and not surprisingly business has said that prices for imported goods (i.e. just about everything) will increase substantially due to the 30% drop in the value of the pound.

Just in case you don't get it, if the importer has to pay 30% more for the product he MUST put up the price you pay by a similiar amount or loose money on everything they sell (why would you do that? You're better selling nothing than selling at a loss).

You will have noticed if you've been paying attention that there are very few adverts for consumer goods now (like big screen TV's).

So unless you work in the public sector this is what you have to look forward to

Reduced wages, if you are lucky enough to keep your job.

Increased prices (up to 30%) for all imported goods.

Increased Council Tax (obviously)

Increased fuel bills (again)

Substantial interest rate rises very soon. GB needs to borrow so much foreign investors will need a strong incentive to lend to us. Expect to see a reduction in UK Credit rating.

Update : The Treasury failed to flog off all the Gilts offered at Auction today...

Increased Taxation. Tax is the only way the Government can pay back the money it is borrowing, especially since they have pretty much run out of things they can sell (gas, electricity, railways, nuclear power, post office, railways, PFI etc). At the same time Tax revenues from business have dropped like a stone, Banks won't be paying any tax any time soon, and the cost of unemployment benefits is rising.

House Prices continuing to fall because of reduction in real income and fear factor.

Private Pension values continue to throw themselves off a cliff.

Gordon Brown borrowing even more money in a desparate attempt to cling to power.

If you do work in the public sector, please don't complain. It really annoys the rest of us.

Get out the flares, it's back to the 70s.

(Just so you know the average wage for a nurse will be £31,974, a police constable £29,144 and a teacher £35,929)

(No) jobs for the boys

According to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, 35,430 non EU IT workers were granted work permits last year.

I don't believe for one second that there aren't sufficient skilled IT staff in the UK ; they're just not at the price that employers want to pay.

The Reluctant House Buyer

The Reluctant Developer now finds himself to be also a reluctant housebuyer...

Due to family circumstances (i.e. the wife said so) we are now trying to buy a house somewhere in the South of England, well at least south of the Watford Gap....

We are in the strange position of being a cash buyer which every single person you meet tells you is a good position to be in, but I have my doubts.

Firstly there is the fear that whatever you buy now may be a worth a lot less in the future. Or alternatively, the market has bottomed and if you don't buy soon all the promised lending by the the Northern Rock and HSBC (otherwise known as pre-election bribes by Gordon Brown) will soon start pushing prices back up or at least stop them going down.

Then there's what do you offer? In a normal market we know there is a unwritten protocol where the vendor asks for a bit more than they expect to get, you offer a bit less and agree on a price in the middle.

Honour is satisfied all round.

Now it is all more complex. Fear of falling prices means that I'm tempted to offer very low ; say £200K on a £250K price and I'm nervous that is still too much. Many properties we have seen have already been reduced by similiar amounts and still aren't selling.

Viewing modern houses in areas like Swindon is overwhelming. There are hundreds of them, not to mention the unsold new build, and they all look just the same. It gets down to trying to find the one that has slightly more parking space, or a garden just a little bigger than a postage stamp.

I'm also in danger of getting in trouble with the RSPCA since using a cat as a measuring device is causing them quite a lot of injuries (but at least you get 9 goes with each cat).

Out in the more rural areas prices are still in the "you've got to be kidding" territory. We've seen a concrete prefab bungalow on a reasonable plot but next to a main road in a not particulary attractive village that is on the market for £210K reduced from £250K and all you could do with it would be to knock it down and build something else.

This is apparently what happened to the neighbouring bungalow which now has a quite nice bungalow built at a cost of £150K, on the market at £420k reduced from £460K but isn't selling either.

My guess is the average house price will drop to around 120K providing Gordon doesn't totally bankrupt us by attempting to re-inflate house prices so I think at least another 20% needs to come off current prices.

The house now on at 200K needs to be more like 160K, 250K down to 200K etc.

I'll keep you posted...

Clouding your vision?

The loss of the gmail service for a few hours seems to have concentrated the minds of a few people at least as to the wisdom of depending on an external resource for essential business processes.

At best this is a poor idea.

You are dependant on the availability of an internet connection, probably to another country.

With a bit of luck the provider might be securing all your data against hardware failure, corruption and accidental errors and making sure that there are multiple data centres in physically different locations.

They will of course resist the temptation to have a quick peek at your data and may even not give it to the "authorities" on demand.

And they are doing all this for free out of the kindness of their hearts.

In this case every Cloud doesn't have a silver lining...

Open Source is for Idiots

Just why is it a good idea to have free software?



Presumably all the people that are using it aren't turning up at the office every day and working for free.



If you are using the stuff to write your own applications do you give them away as well?



Apart from anything else free software just hands over the world to the Far East. They already make all the hardware and once they can bundle up a nice package based on the Wests freely published information they will.



You might not like Microsoft but that is a very narrow view. Sure Microsoft are incredibly successful and some of the products are less than perfect but what about the taxes they pay, people they employ etc etc etc. Would there be a good reason for Hollywood to spend millions of dollars making films and then let you watch them for free or Boeing to give away aeroplanes?



I can't think of any other industry that seems so hell bent on destroying itself. You might not want to get paid but I'm pretty keen on the idea.

Is Sage Slow and is it their fault?

Sage 50 has a reputation for not scaling very well and suffering from poor performance on networks.

Until Sage change the backend to MySQL (next year?) they are always going to be hampered by the old flat file structure that it uses. No database technology here. In some respects it's amazing it works as well as it does.

But after spending years working with Sage Line 50, developing our own Sage applications and installing and supporting networks I believe a lot of users would benefit from making sure their systems are correctly configured before pointing fingers.

I see huge differences in Sage performance on very similiar kit. Often Small Business Server 2003 is maligned in this respect but with a proper benchmark on identical correctly configued software there was effectively zero difference between XP and SBS as a Sage Server.

We have recently written a test program that tests some aspects of Sage performance by reading all the Header Transactions and calculating a Rate per second to read a thousand records. With initial tests on just a few systems the result varied from 0.65 of a second to over 7 seconds. Our benchmark was 1.2 seconds on a Pentium 4 notebook configured as an SBS Server.

The program also checks some common configuration issues.

You can check out our test program at www.sbslimited.co.uk/sageslow.htm

Sage Line 50 and Microsoft Office Accounts 2008

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water along comes a new Accounting Package in the form of Microsoft Office Accounts 2008.

Despite being annonyingly slow it would seem to offer some huge benefits to the average small business, namely that it's free. Zip, Rien, Nothing.

Yep, the "Express" version can be downloaded for free. The Professional Version is £149 which gets you Order Processing, Stock, Multi Currency etc. And then you can add further users at £149 each.

Initial impressions are that it's fairly easy to use and if you are new to accounts no more difficult to learn than Sage 50.

A huge advantage is that it can allegedly handle Pay Pal transactions and simply import data from Excel spreadsheets.

Sage developers will be interested to learn the SDK is free, and that you can "hook" into the application itself, customise Labels on forms and add your own menu items and corresponding forms that can access data in the application itself. And it's free (I think I might have mentioned that already). Bad news is that you will have to finally learn dot net.

Downsides are probably that you won't be able to find an accountant who has it or knows what to do with it. Similiarly your average book keeper will run screaming from the room. Then there's the queston of Support which is something that Sage are (albeit expensively) quite good at. With accounts you have the dual problem of supporting users who may have problems with the actual software but also have absolutely no idea what a debit or credit is never mind a nominal ledger.

I predict that Sage will suddenly acquire some new features and pricing structure...

The Lesser Spotted Sage Line 50 Developer

I got to wondering about how many Sage Developers there really are as opposed to the 750 odd that Sage claim on their web site. The 750 figure presumably includes Developers for all the various Sage products.

For Sage Lne 50 my guess is that there are probably around 40 paid up members of the Developer program.

I've based this guesstimate on the number of Developers you can find on Google without looking too hard, working on the basis that if you have paid £1500 for a Sage Developers license (then £1200 every year) you are probably going to want people to know about it or have a product that uses the Sage Data Objects.

Enough to give the Sage user a reasonable choice but not as many as you might think.

Vista, Sage 50 just call it Twap

I was bemused to find out a few years aago that Twain (a scanner technology acronym) stood for Technology Without An Interesting Name.

I think we can now coin a new term : TWAP or Technology Without A Point.

Prime candidates for TWAP are the Windows Vista and just about any new version of an existing program. To all intents and purposes software development for PCs is dead. I don't mean new innovations such as social networking etc but things like new versions of Windows or Office.

We only purchased new versions of Windows in the vague hope of getting something that actually worked. Once we got Windows 2000/ XP the job was done. As a business user you would have to be extremely stupid (or a Goverment department) to upgrade to Vista.

And for all you Linux fans you would have to be pretty stupid to migrate to that platform as well.

The single point that people in the computer industry fail to grasp is that most business users really really don't care about computers as long as they work. If I have Windows 2000 / XP and Office something I'm never going to upgrade because it works. Why on earth would I spend money when I don't need to. Windows isn't like a car or the photocopier - it doesn't wear out.

New versions of Windows and other applications such as Sage are now just concerned with generating a revenue stream for the vendors. That's it.

All technologies / industries reach a plateau where they just become part of the wallpaper. PC's are everywhere but they are now commodity items. Nobody is going to write a new OS because it isn't needed and it would just cost too much money.

If it works people won't fix it.

Sage 2008 : Nothing new there then

After the debacle of Sage 2007 you might have thought Sage would be a bit more attentive to getting things right in Sage 2008.

Sadly you would be mistaken.

Sage have already released 2 hot fixes to correct problems with the Sage Data Objects (SDO) that are used by Sage Developers and Sage products such as Job Costing that integrate with Sage 50.

There are also problems with Bank Reconcilation and Departments still appear to be a bit flaky.

I'm impressed with the speed that these hot fixes have been released but I'd be even more impressed if Sage had tested it in the first place.

As I've commented (ranted) previously, it's impossible to release a new version every year that actually works. This doesn't fill me with confidence that the forthcoming transistion to using MYSQL as the backend will work before hell freezes over (despite the effects of global warming).

The technical issues with just getting MySql to install on over 100,000 user machines without falling over are immense, never mind porting the whole of Line 50 to use the new technology. Support just doesn't bear thinking about.

Sage hasn't changed the underlying technology since it was first released a very long time ago. Sage users are by and large a fairly docile lot who are just trying to get the job done. 2007 will have tried their patience, 2008 is likely to try it a bit more and start them thinking about what they are paying for.

As usual the best advice is not too upgrade until you have to.

Microsoft :Malicious or just incompetent?

It's remarkable that my XP machine that has been working without problem for a couple of years suddenly started to lock up with monotous regularity at around the same time that Windows Vista is widely available.

After trying unsuccessfully to ignore the problem (when you're writing code your machine locking up is a tad annoying) I was forced to investigate.

The cause? Windows Update. Despite the fact that I don't allow it to automatically instal updates, Windows Update now causes the svchost.exe process to run at 100% cpu and effectively crashes the machine. Ending the svchost.exe process also causes several other essential Windows Services to stop working making the machine more or less unusable unless you restart all the Services you trashed by ending svchost.

Microsoft KB 927891 has a partial fix but apparently we have to wait until June before we get the final instalment. (the kb patches msi but apparently a new version of Windows Update is also required).

Anyway, the patch makes no difference. Just go to Control Panel and turn off Automatic Updates altogether and then wait until Microsoft finally fix it.

The big question is whether this was deliberate on Microsofts part?

After all the only reason most people upgraded from Windos for Workgroups to Win 98 to Win 2000 is because it didn't work properly. So if you've got W2K why would you want to upgrade? XP is just W2k with a different interface and license checking.

Why do I want Vista? I'd probably have to buy a new machine, have to reinstall everything, fight with applications and drivers that don't work under Vista and learn a whole new set of tricks for what benefit?

Unless of course my current operating system has started falling around my ears every day and I don't have the time, knowledge or patience to identify the cause.

I can only come to the conclusion that either Microsoft are incompetent and irresponsible in allowing the Windows Update process to introduce a major problem into millions of machines OR it was a cynical process to encourage desperate users to upgrade in the hope of fixing the problem.