Ask Felgall

I needed to reinstall one of my printers a few days ago. The reason I needed to do this was that I wanted to shift the printer from being connected to a specific computer to using a print server to connect it directly to the network. This would allow the printer to be available to print to from any of the computers without requiring a specific computer to be turned on in order to access it.

The actual install of the print server onto the network and enabling each of the computers to see the printer again after the move went through without any problem. Where the problem came was when actually trying to print to the printer from certain programs. For some stupid reason the printer insisted in installing itself with a configuration to use some obscure paper size that the printer itself doesn’t even have a paper tray for instead f configuring itself to work with the standard paper size that it does support. Every attempt to print to selected programs would just hang the printer since it knoew that it couldn’t print to that size.

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I just came across an absolutely horrible blog. I don’t know exactly what wwas on the page because I gave up on waiting for the page to load after waiting several minutes. I had scrolled down around four or five times while waiting and the scrollbar was still nearly at the very top.

Obviously the owner of the blog had inserted the entire content of each page for their blog in such a way that it would appear in its entirety in each page that referenced it rather than just displaying an introductory paragraph or two and then using the <!-­-more-­-> tag to provide a link to a separate page to display the entire article like this:

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It looks like Microsoft did not proceed with the planned forced upgrade to IE 7 on 12th February as they had previously indicated was scheduled. As yet I have found no explanation for why this didn’t happen. Given that IE 7 is actually a major security patch to IE 6 is ought to have been a “must have” upgrade from day one but for some reason Microsoft do not seem to want to push this anywhere near as much as they ought to be doing.

I have just been comparing the recent browser stats for my site with those from a few months ago and the comparison is quite interesting. The percentage of visitors to my site who use IE 7 has actually fallen from 29% to 26% over the past few months while IE 6 users remains relatively static at 27%. This means that once more there are more IE 6 visitors than IE 7 visitors. It also appears to indicate that people have stopped upgrading from IE 6 to IE 7 and that those who did upgrade to IE 7 have started upgrading again to a better browser than IE. The combined toal for IE visitors is now down to 54% while those using Firefox and Mozilla are now at 41%. Opera and Safari users make up most of the remainder.

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After mentioning yesterday about people buying computers with Vista and then reformatting to install XP, the relative difficulty of installing operating systems was the next thing that occurred to me.

The main reason why people run Windows rather than other operating systems is because Windows comes pre-installed on their new computer and so they do not have to go through the relatively complicated process of actually installing an operating system and getting it to work with their hardware. At least that applies to those who buy computers with XP installed,, those with Vista installed who decide to revert back to XP still have the problem of doing the Windows XP install themselves or getting someone to do it for them.

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• IBM 1981-1995 - 15 years
• Microsoft 1995-2009 - 15 years
• Google 2009-

To me it seems like Microsoft is currently in approximately the same position that IBM was in 1994. Back then IBM was top dog on the PC and had been since releasing their micro-computer which they called the PC in 1981. We still refer to PCs and IBM compatible even though our current computers are thousands of times more powerful than a PC and are not compatible with anything IBM produce. IBM actually outsourced their operating system supply to a small insignificant company called Microsoft because Digital Research who they wanted to supply the operating system refused to talk to them. DOS was actually a temporary measure as was the original PC as Intel hadn’t quite got their 32 bit chip working properly yet. The plan was to migrate everyone onto AT computers running OS/2 as soon as possible but the popularity of the PC and XT computers made that impossible.

Microsoft released the OS/2 operating system in 1987 but few were interested even though it could run multiple programs at the same time and had a graphical interface. Still there wasn’t much interest in graphical interfaces for DOS back then either and GEM, Deskview, Topview, Windows etc were basically ignored. Even combining Windows and Topview (IBM’s GUI) together and releasing them as Windows 2 was ignored.

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Use of that major security hole of the internet more commonly known as Internet Explorer 6 has fallen since IE7 was released until now where the number of people using it is just below that of IE7 users (at least on my site where Firefox users make up about 35% with IE6 and 7 making up just over and just under 30% each). Thatis about to undergo a further significant change.

To celebrate the first birthday of IE7 Microsoft removed the genuine advantage test from IE7 so that anyone with Windows XP could install IE7 regardless of legitimacy and privacy concerns. On 12th February Microsoft are taking the next step with changing the status of IE7 from being an optional download to being an essential one. This means that anyone who has windows update set on automatic who hasn’t already upgraded to IE7 will be doing so automatically on that day.

The really surprising thing about this is that given the 600+ unplugable security holes in IE6 that Microsoft have taken until now to make the upgrade to IE7 an essential security update.

Obviously there are a few people still using IE6 because their computers are still running older versions of windows and for one reason or another they can’t upgrade to a better operating system - hopefully most of these people have got the message about IE6 being a security hole and are using Firefox or Opera instead. As far as anyone deliberately choosing not to install the upgrade to IE7 on 12th February in order to continue using IE6 all I can say is your computer is a disaster just waiting to happen (security wise) and once just about everyone is using a better browser the really weird quirks that make catering for IE6 a job and three quarters to code for will mean that many web sites will stop adding all the extra codes needed to get their pages to work properly in that antiquated browser and you will find that the pages on the internet that don’t work in really old browsers such as IE6 sarts to increase dramatically over the next year or two.

I recently had a reason for looking up how to get to a particular location in order to be able to attend a course. I decided that the easiest way to find out how to get there was to use one of the online map services that covers my local area to get the directions on how to get there. I figured that the locally run service should be more aware of local traffic conditions than one of the big international sites.

The site offered several options that you could select from in order for it to work out the best route for you such as including or excluding toll roads, shortest distance or shortest time. I started out by requesting the route using the default settings of using toll roads where appropriate and shortest time just to see what it would come up with. The result was a route that used toll roads almost exclusively and which followed a circular route to get to the destination (obviously far from the shortest way but then it wasn’t looking for the shortest way). Unfortunately given the time of day I expected to be travelling I expected that far from being the quickest way that following that route in the middle of peak hour traffic travelling in the same direction for most of the way would probably be the slowest rather than the quickest way. The site didn’t ask what time of day I would be travelling and so obviously didn’t take differeing traffic conditions through the day into account (not that it would be easy to do so in any case and so you can’t really blame the site for that result).

Selecting to exclude toll roads gave a route that went more across the peak hour traffic rather than with it and so would probably work out to be faster and was certainly somewhat shorter. The route that it chose though has one major flaw. As it happens I am very familiar with the first half of the route that it suggested and the particular turns that it suggested to make in order to follow that route require making a right hand turn at an intersection where no right hand turns have been allowed for at least the last 20 years and probably a lot longer. You would think that the site could at least give you a route that can be followed without having to break the law. It would be understandable if that intersection had the no right turn added recently but that intersection has had that sign there since before the web existed and the web site still seems ignorant of its being there.

From what I have heard, all sites offering to give instructions on how to get from one place to another suffer from flaws and do not always return a practical result. I wonder if GPS navigation systems in cars do any better?

There are thousands of different web editors available for you to use on your own computer to create your web pages. The following is a small selection (including some that are free downloads) and most of these are available for both Windows and Mac (and in some cases Linux as well).

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