Save the PC Users..

As I sit in bedazzlement (not a word....yet? -eh?...oh well..or is it?) staring away at this computer LCD monitor connected to two KVM switches which connect 11 computers all to one monitor keyboard and mouse, I see funny lines...

I actually see several strange slightly slanted bars continually streaking in an endless marquee over the desktop. They seem not to care that when I switch to another PC on the selfsame switch it won't do that. Why then, does it do it on that one may I ask?

It sure doesn't seem apparent why it would do this singly on that one particular computer. No, its not a virus, and no its not something wrong with the PC (I don't think anyway..) It may only be me, but how often is that the case? ...no really.

Actually it brought to mind when I heard about how having too many electronic devices running in a concentrated area can actually increase the chances of getting CANCER or something else terrible. I don't know if that's true, but it would seem that it may have some credibility. Afterall, look at that movie back in the 90's with Keanu Reeves... "Johnny Mnemonic". It was quite a cool movie, ...quite gory however, but great graphics.

Ah, to reminisce the good old days of sci-fi action movies..Anyway. Uh, well, if you consider the plot of that movie, you see it has to do with a disease that came about from "too many electronics". You too might get this if you're a computer IT guy with way too much time on his(/her) hands and surrounded by a mountain of electronics and computers all operating simultaneously with no real point or rhyme or reason or sanity!

If only it were that easy, ...oh man we could buy a huge cancer policy and then just sit and wait for it to come. Then get it operated on and quit our jobs and then just wait for the checks to start pourin' in. --and then if you believe in resurrection...and you bought good life insurance, ..then just go back to work and never go home or leave for any reason, and then die, your wife (or beneficiary) gets the money and puts it in off-shore accounts, then they get another loved one to "bring you back", and you all go enjoy life stress-free in the Bahamas!

Oh, I guess I didn't intend to go off like that, but it was fun wasn't it? I really meant to bring up the serious point.. that is, all of these electronic circuits operating at such high capacity may actually be harmful ...atleast to your concentration or mood.

Oh see now look what's happened...I've gotten tired and cranky and got the munchies....and it just so happens that Paula has a little slice of chocolate cream pie and she's hoarding it all to herself. *pout!*

That should be about enough of this melodrama and.. I'll leave you to sit and ponder the side-effects of taking medication for headaches induced by absorbing the highly amplified electro-magnetic fields that encompass a massive mound of high-tech electronics craftmanship all running simultaneously without a purpose to speak of. Good? Good. Let it be good.

Or mostly good anyway..

Somewhat good?

Maybe almost good?

Just .. GOOD.

Crap.

See what's done to me already?!
..(or maybe its really because I haven't gotten a lot of sleep and I've been up since 5 AM?)

Game Style Windows Console

MAN, am I just an idea GENIOUS or what? Don't say what...cause I know its not true.

I was just thinking about how the command prompt in windows has evolved into the windows "console". You want to know what I think of when I think "console"?

Imagine any FPS game since DOOM...I mean Quake I, II, III, IV, Half-Life I, II, Unreal Tournament, you name it... How does the console work in an FPS? You press the tilde "~" key and it pops down. Press it again and it pops back up and disappears.

Thats how the windows OS console should be. It should be flashy and sweet lookin like in a game console ....even with animated graphics and translucency so whats behind it is visible. It should automatically put the keyboard focus into the console's input area and should be accessible at any time from the touch of a key or mouse button. It should always be there ...behind the scenes and monitoring everything. It should be available to go back and read anything that happened while you were away.

How sweet would that be?!

PC OS DVR!

Another great idea...it just might change the world.

I commonly wonder about the things we miss when watching or listening to something that streaming over the internet on our computers. I go, ..."what did they say??" ..or "what was that web site address?".

Don't you? Or, ..what if you saw something you wanted to see again that only happens once each time your computer is booted. What if you installed something and your network / IT guy comes around and says, "what were the options you chose when you installed that?" or "what web site were you on when that program installation came up?"

How about this...you're online entering information in some forms, ..of course, you can't go BACK and see what you entered into certain parts of the form because they "expire" when you do that. You then wonder, .."what did I put in for my contact number?"

Well, the technology is simple enough to make for every day PC use, and its been used for years now in Satellite TV receivers. Its called DVR (Digital Video Recorder..or alteast I think it is). Why can I rewind live-tv or record a program or movie with outside video signals using a remote control, but I can't record my own computer??

Here's what I believe either Microsoft needs to put into Windows Vista, or somebody needs to come up with and make on their own:

PC Operating System-Based DVR
* Rewind your own PC up to any amount of time that you pre-specified in the settings. For example, 30-45 minutes?

* Record your own PC and everything about it, or just the audio from it, or just the video output.

* Include audio and video output when "rewinding" your PC.

* Schedule recordings of audio, video or both.

* Schedule to record temporary videos of the PC throughout the day for checking on what the kids are doing.

* Schedule to record video/audio of the PC whenever the computer is no longer idle. (-Have a video log of your computer every time it is accessed! Who got in to your PC and logged into your bank account online??)

* Set periodic or non-idle based recordings to upload to a web site for you to monitor when you're away from your computer.

* Set your web-cam to record at the same time your periodic or non-idle events do, then see who actually was in front of the computer when it was being accessed!

* PAUSE your computer screen or audio or both in real time...then let it play back when you're ready.

* Share your recorded sessions with friends online or on a CD/DVD.

Shouldn't "Rewinding" your PC be more powerful than Satellite TV rewind? I think so!
Why not make the rewinding's auto-record feature allow you to actually SET BACK your PC to the very moment you are looking at in the rewind....all changes to memory and hard disk could be logged all the way back to as far as you want...and then restored instantly.

Oh imagine! You download a game ....instantly your computer is infected with spyware and trojans....hmm ..... zzzzip. ...rewind to before installing..click a restore button...and BADA BING BADA BOOM - Your computer is free from utter DOOM!

I love this idea. I want to have this on every PC I use. Just think of the possibilities...think of the time it would save, and the problems it would fix...and the convenience of it.

What if you need to show up for one of those online meeting things, but you know that you don't need to interact...you just don't want to miss it is all. Just schedule it in, and then later go and play it as if you never missed a beat.

What if you watch TV online? I do and its frustrating that I can't save the shows I watch and see them later, especially if I miss them. You could record just the portion of the screen that is showing the show, and then when you watch it again, you can watch it full screen (just the show), or in a window like it was originally.

What about the internet radio show you always miss. I know I always miss one. I never seem to remember that its on until after its over. If I just schedule a windows Scheduled Task to load up the internet radio station, and schedule my computer to record the audio, then I'll never miss it!
This should come standard with any pc. Yes, of course it opens up more issues regarding privacy and intellectual property and copyright laws. Because anybody would easily be able to record a DVD movie being played on their pc, and then send it to all their friends and mass distribute it online ...possibly trading with other people for software or music or any other type of media that's being shared right now on peer to peer networks. The fact is, that knowing whats going on with your PC is your business, and should be your right. Knowing that you can restore your PC by backing it up rewind style to protect it from malicious software like viruses and spyware should be a constitutional amendment and every PC owner's right...just like to speak freely.

Right now most of this is already available in separate packages and sold usually for a hefty price. People usually use it for recording tutorials, and some use it to capture things on the internet that they can't easily save...like some kinds of quicktime movies and other stuff.

I wish I was a majorly talented developer and could do it myself, but too bad...I'm not and I can't.

I'm just trying to learn how to develop web sites in a professional way...and web applications. I'd like to be able to do games too...but I'm learning bit by bit. ...haha...no pun intended.

A Browser Idea So Great..

Ok, come on. When you hear this you gotta stop to consider it and wonder why was I the first to come up with it? Or atleast, why I'm the first voicing this idea...or ...was I? Hmm... don't worry about the way I started this article out...I think this is such a great idea, that no matter how it starts it will be good.

*AHEM* ... (and now our feature presentation)

I was just looking around at some CSS / DOM / Javascript stuff. Wonder what crossed my mind just now?? Yeah...the suspense is killing you huh?

I thought to myself (as I usually do, ..but sometimes voice it aloud for others too), "Why not end all this best browser nonsense and messing around with web developers and actually make a browser which integrates a core rendering engine that can be UPDATED as new standards are released?!"

Yeah, I'll break it down for you even though I left that all by itself in the last paragraph..I know it might be hard to digest it with all of the hype I used. OK, you have web browsers right now which want to be the better browser...and they all are competing with one another. Meanwhile us web developers are the ones suffering. We are constantly striving to know the latest standards in web languages and what is cross-browser compatible. WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE WAKE UP AND POKE THE CORPORATE BONE-HEADS WITH A FORK AND BE DONE WITH THIS?!

My goodness! You have to use 150% more of your brain capacity just to make sure that every browser, and ever person using your site will have the same exact experience and all of it wouldn't be necessary. We've made ourselves slaves to two browsers if not more.

I want to lay out this idea plain for everyone, and hopefully for the browser developers and standards committees so that soon we won't have to grieve ourselves over it anymore. I will start with the framework and move on into the benefits of this great and bold idea.

First, you have a browser that wants to have its own features which make it competitive. Fine, but don't make it competitive because you believe your way of rendering a web site is better than another which another very popular browser uses.

Lets use our "standards" like CSS and XHTML, etc and put them into a platform-independant, common standard rendering schema. You can use this schema dynamically across all versions of your browsers and always render the same way no matter how old the browser is.

Use a checker in your browser which tests to see if it has the latest version of the schema downloaded and is using it. If not, then it should download the latest automatically from an XML feed on www.w3c.org or whatever/wherever it may reside. It should be a small enough file that you wouldn't need to worry about the time it takes to download...even in this modern day of DSL and cable internet.

Even better - Allow the use of any version of the schema. Let your users choose which version of the schema they use ..even for each page or site they visit by allowing them to switch and refresh the page.

Better still - Let there be a meta tag or css or something, which allows a page to identify itself as being best rendered with a particular schema. Then by default you may want it to automatically render it with that version, or have an option to turn off auto-adjusting the schema version based on the page's "best rendered with" tag.

Use your own custom schema mods for your browser to enhance its usefulness or security or even ACCESSIBILITY. You can store these schema mods as separate browser-based schemas which could possibly be downloaded from the browser developer's site, or a public schema domain.

No longer build a rendering engine and re-invent the wheel and cause more and more people to conform; be standardized and allow for modifications or individual adjustments based on a user's preference - not an across-the-board "way it is" standard which cannot be fixed except in a downloaded updated browser version.

Use updates to the browser itself to employ new ideas and features and things which are actually useful rather than trying to implement or fix rendering issues.

If your new version offers a new way to render old usual things with a new flare, add the option to revert and render using old methods, not be forced to down-grade to an older version if they (your users) don't like the new methods.

I hope I've caused a little bit of friction in your minds eye in order to get the itch scratched and atleast get to thinking about a common rendering interface for browsers. This is something thats been a long time coming and I wonder why it hasn't been mentioned before now.

Just imagine the clarity it would bring to a developer's world. Just one standard to write code for. Just one way of doing things that won't get confused across platforms. I can safely continue using just one old thin version of my favorite browser and never again worry that it isn't showing me the sites I visit correctly.

Think of the day when this is possible. We'll look back and wonder why we struggled so much in the beginning and wrote so much extra code and wasted so much unneeded time.

Then, when we have set these standards and can operate on all modern and old web sites with one simple browser no matter its version, lets make a simple THIN browser which can stand up to its name. The browser with so few additional features added that it can run on any OS and any platform no matter how powerful or weak. Of course there would need to be many portings of it so that it would run on all of the old OSes like Windows 3.x, 95, 98, 2k, me, xp, 2k3, vista, etc. All of those old linux and other unixes, and the Mac OSes, etc.

Just stop and say to me - "YES - WE CAN!" ..we CAN do it. Because we really CAN. One day this bogus browser nonsense is to be a thing of the past.

A great idea isn't it? Isn't it? Yeah! WOOOT!

Bad information has been spreading

I've just come across another misleading bit of information for Windows on a web site that looks like it is run by a large corporation that would likely have the right information. So much of this goes around in the tech media that it almost disgusts me. No, maybe it DOES disgust me.

Here's a 99 tips/tricks how-to guide for tweaking Windows XP:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1590&page=3

Actually that's just the page of it that has the first misinformation that I came across. The article is portraying to us that System Restore "by default" takes up a whopping 12% of each drive it runs on. *AHEM* ...this is simply wrong. If they had known what System Restore DOES, they would know that on any modern system its highly unlikely that it could fill up even 2% of the drive. Another mis-nomer here, which this article seems to also encourage is that System Restore actually does something useful in the event that your computer is screwed up.

Let me make something perfectly clear: System Restore is only useful if you know what you're doing and you happen to make a mistake in tweaking your Windows registry. Thats IT. People think it is a whole backup of their system and that if something goes wrong they'll get everything back. Now if you'll look - it doesn't say anywhere that it will do that. However, the wording that it uses DOES imply this functionality, it just simply is mis-understood and does not achieve this by a long shot.

My recommended advice on System Restore: TURN IT OFF. There is nothing worse when dealing with today's modern spyware and viruses than a tool that brings the dang things back when you use it just "thinking" that it will take them away. Turn the stupid thing off because in all reality you'll never use it for any good anyway.

I'm not saying this article at PCStats is all bad. In fact it also talks about restoring the BIOS defaults if anything goes wrong. I would note however, that restoring it from the CMOS jumper on the motherboard isn't recommended for a "beginner" as this article says it is written for. The best way is to enter into the CMOS/BIOS Setup and use the Reset BIOS Defaults feature and save the settings. This may be a bit difficult to achieve for some beginners though, because it involves learning how to enter the Setup of your system and how to navigate it. Many motherboards that are designed for a brand name like Dell or Compaq/HP have the "Press [x] key for BIOS Setup" hidden and therefore you won't know what key to press. Its likely that it is one of the following keys: DEL, ESC, F1, F2, F12, listed in the order of likelihood. The most commonly used is first, the least commonly used is last.

Is it a good idea to be mucking around in the System's BIOS Setup? If you feel you're more than a beginner in tech capability, then maybe. I find that many times I need to use the BIOS Setup to fix or check on something. I do this for a living though and know what I'm doing. The best thing if you're not sure, is to go in and learn how to navigate the Setup and just look around and see what options are available but leave the settings as they were. Leave setup without saving any changes and you'll be well off.

I haven't read through the whole guide here, so I'm not recommending it or saying that it shouldn't be recommended. Its simply something I'm pointing out which has some bad info and potential for a lot of good info. How about letting me know if it has any truly useful tips? I usually don't sit and read through a lot of information....sort of like just scan through for useful things or look for a particular topic I'm interested in at the moment.