Tech Tidbits

Ran into a site that "recommended" that it was best viewed with Flash Player 10.x, so did the usual upgrade thing. Only problem was that after installing and enabling Adobe Flash Player 10 in my browser, discovered that it did not work! Even tried enabling and disabling both versions in my browser "add-ons" window, all to no avail.

A search pointed me to an Adobe bulletin that in effect said "for Windows and Mac, you cannot just do an upgrade on the plug-in". In order to get the new version (10.x) to work, you have to uninstall the old version (9.x), and you have to use the Adobe Flash uninstaller. This was on an Adobe KnowledgeBase article that you can find HERE. Better yet, download both the uninstaller and the new version as executables to wherever you download things. Then shutdown all other applications (browsers, word processors, email, etc.) and run the uninstaller.

After the uninstaller has completed, you should then run the appropriate install depending on your browser – I installed both the Firefox plugin and the IE plugin, simply because there are times when IE is the only browser that will work with some web sites.

Here are the links for what is required:

• Uninstaller for Mac 10.4 and higher
• Uninstaller for Mac 10.3 and lower
• IE/ActiveX PlugIn
• Other Operating Systems/Browsers

Many of us backup our data, but then what do we do with it? Backed up to a CD or DVD makes for an easy recovery at some point. Backup to a portable hard drive is a good thing, but what if that drive gets accidentally dropped (you're saying "Yeah Joe, that ain't going to happen.") Worse yet, someone picks up that drive and accidentally not recognizing it deletes a critical directory. So much for your backup.

One of the things in the business world has been multiple backups, with copies kept onsite and offsite. At one point, there were incremental backups (only what changed since the last time the file(s) were backed up) and full backups. Confusing? You better believe it. Eventually every business needed a backup management plan, with a computer just in charge of backups, and then a person just responsible for backups.

Well, on a more personal side, we need to backup data files to multiple places. Let's face it folks, what happens when your computer crashes and the drive gets reformatted by somebody before they realized (or were told) that ALL your photographs were on the drive. Talk about a sad day in history. That will go down in history with the house fire that destroyed ALL their family pictures (sometimes covering 100+ years).

Work out some kind of backup plan that preserves the good and important stuff. With all these digital cameras, there's usually not a bunch of prints floating around the country. People see what you post on some web site and "ooh and ah" about the pictures, but all that is entrusted to some kind of media (hard drive, flash, etc.) which could be gone in a flash – earthquake, tornado, hurricane, accident, you name it.

Was getting this 40-90 second delay in showing the contents of some folders when I clicked on them. Answer turns out to be an easy fix, but hard to get information from Microsoft.

The major reason for the slowdown is how Windows Explorer treats zip files. WE wants to treat each zip file as a folder, so it spends time reading through each root folder in that directory to find out how many files or folders are in that folder. With the zip file being in the directory you have clicked on, WE is slowed to a drag looking through each compressed file to get the names of every file in that folder

There are three things to do to resolve the issue, and I did items 1 and 2 but the real fix or speed up came with number 2.

1. In Control Panel/Folder Options/View, set or check "Do Not Cache Thumbnails"
2. Move all zip files in the offending folder into a separate folder
3. In a Command Window, type regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll This will "unload" the dll that treats zip files as folders system-wide, not just in the directory where you may think you are having the problem

The saga began over a month ago – seemed to take an interminable amount of time to load pages into a foreground tab. Also got lots of “server not found” error messages. Then came the Anti-Virus subscription expiration and new software, and "it seemed to run slower". issues. This was happening on both desktops (mine and my wife's). Thinking something was wrong with the computer, I started there, because they were Celeron 2.4 GHZ machines, and had not been cleaned up for some time. Actually, our 1.7 GHZ ThinkPads (Pentium M) were running faster! General cleaning – dust out, check cables, run diagnostics, etc.

Corrected an error in mismatched memory and installed new NICs (onboard NICs were ranked as abysmal!) Nothing in hardware was going to solve the problem. Actually found that one of the replacement cards was at least 300 times faster than what was onboard!

After getting started on the software cleanup, remembered that just last year, I had replaced my hard drive (second time) using "Maxblast" to move the HD over, there was a full reinstall after that, because it was not acting right (yes, everything was reinstalled), so it couldn't need a Windows reinstall again (well, with Windows anything is possible). However on my wife's machine, there had not been a cleanup for over two years since a malware attack chewed throw her machine.

Registry cleaning with Registry Mechanic found lots of errors, but nothing seemed to resolve the 100% CPU usage. On the other hand, both our laptops were fine – no hangs. Did searches on Google and Mozillazine for anything closely resembling "Firefox Slowdown" or "Firefox Tweak" – nothing! Even followed the Mozillazine list of how to diagnose problems in Firefox. I got really familiar with "about:config" and supposedly how to make Firefox faster. Still nothing!

Another point – both our machines have been upgraded from Netscape (Windows and OS/2) to Mozilla 0.x (zero) to Mozilla 1 then 2 and now 3, bringing over profiles and settings each step of the way. In fact, some of the entries in "about:config" were from when the profile covered both mail (now Thunderbird) and web browsing, so there was lots of junk to clear out.

Had found a work around that involved a batch file to change the priority at which FireFor runs, but did not think that was the right answer (although it kinda/sorta worked).

FINALLY my search for "Firefox 3 high CPU use" led to the blog of GMG (Green Mountain Geek). He had actually seen all those posts from people who were mad as hornets about the poor performance of FF 3. On top of that he was encountering some of the same problems and could duplicate them. His answer was to change a parameter in "about:config". Seems that his testing indicated a problem with memory cache.

A light bulb went off in my brain! Celeron processors do not have a lot of cache, and what was happening was that FF was trying to stuff bytes in someplace that does not exist. On a full Pentium you have much more cache, which could easily account for why the ThinkPads did not exhibit the same problem.

Made the change, and it was like a miracle! BAM! There was the web page without the 30 to 240 second wait.

Thank you to Kirk at GMG for finally finding the answer, and for posting it to his blog.

Well, have determined that I am not the only person in the world who is witnessing a slowdown in my browser. Finally dug deep enough on the Mozilla site, and found that this is an open and festering sore! Sure hope that someone is paying attention to all the posts that have a definite indication that 3.X has a problem.

Some of the key signs are slow page loads, interminable delays in even starting to look for a site and slow page rendering. Maybe the Mozilla team needs to have a "Go To Meeting" (notice, not a MS "LiveMeeting") to discuss what people are finding across operating systems! There are posters on Linux, Mac and Windows all having the same problem, so it is not in the "port".

FF used to load and run faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Now people are having to go back to IE because of the problems.

Guys, this should be easy – look at what you changed from 2.X to 3.X. Get a profile from a user that is having problems, run it in your lab and see what is happening and then work on fixing it.

Maybe I need to report the problem to "Bugzilla".

Got my January issue of IEEE Spectrum – all about the work of members of IEEE. The cover picture featured this arm – was that ever a shocker. Work is going on to make new prosthetic arms that will allow the user/wearer to touch, feel and control with their own nervous system! Reading about the work gives new meaning to "nanotechnology." This issue of Spectrum was about the "Winner and Loser Technologies of 2009".

The article begins by telling of an engineer who is playing "air guitar hero" (take off on "Guitar Hero") without a guitar! "More to the point, he is playing without his right hand, having lost it in Iraq in 2005." He quits only after beating the high score of another engineer who just happens to have two hands.

The winner had controlled the muscles in his forearm, and the electrical impulses had been wired into a sort of "Wii-like" device. This is all part of research to provide better, more realistic artificial limbs to people who have lost theirs and is all part of a U.S. Government program for veterans, but the reward will be to all amputees.

Sally Adee, writer of the article says that it is much more difficult to create artifical arm/hand combinations than artificial legs. "Legs require only 4 degrees of freedom, where an arm and hand combination needs about 22 degrees of freedom plus the ability to feel heat, texture and force."

If you can get to your library and check out the issue, I would highly recommend it. It is not a science article, and talks in non-techie terms.