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I have recently been persuaded that the firewall that comes with Windows Vista is not a big improvement from Windows XP built-in firewall. It can easily let in viruses, spyware, malware and other unwanted and dangerous executable programs too. Don’t get me wrong - it does protect against some stuff, it also restricts the permissions for some programs already on the pc that behave suspiciously - but this is as good as it gets.

This is why in all cases I urge people to consider an additional firewall or, if they want to go all the way, the complete Internet Security package that contains a firewall as well as an antivirus. There may be some other additional modules included in the solution like email scanner or Google search results scanner, but the two I’ve mentioned are the main ones.

A normal modern firewall not only monitors the Internet traffic but also monitors events occuring on the computer like new program installation or scheduled program run or automatic updates to the already installed programs. Every suspicious activity should be (and will be if specified) checked and the question or alert will pop-up stopping the program execution and informing a user about this suspicious activity.

An antivirus in my view is less important than a firewall because the threats these days mainly come from the Internet, not with an odd disk passed from person to person like in old days. A computer user might download something dodgy from some dodgy website by himself or herself and open it - this is where an antivirus would come handy but if all websites a user visits are legitimate and well-established then there’s almost no risk to get a virus.

There’s also a risk to get a virus through email but again if a user is careful with his or her emails and opens attachments only from the known senders, the risk to get a virus - again - is minimal.

So please get the third-party firewall if you don’t yet have it on your computer (Kerio or Outpost or Comodo or any of the good paid ones like Kaspersky or Norton or McAfee etc), install it and enjoy the safe browsing and safe work on the computer. Don’t forget to switch the Windows firewall off - you won’t need it any more.

Please also remember that having a third-party firewall on your computer doesn’t mean you have to stop updating Windows or indulge into careless Internet browsing downloading and running programs with unknown credentials hoping that the firewall will pick the “baddies” out and tell you. A firewall is only effective when a user is careful with what he or she does on the computer.

In the last couple of weeks my friend have had two people who came to him regarding the laptop “mechanical” if I may say so problems i.e. not connected with their own failures but with failures caused by a person working on the laptop. The failure reason in both cases was the water that was spilled on the laptop’s keyboard.

In the first case, the impact was light: a couple of keys on the keyboard stopped functioning. The laptop was opened up, the keyboard was cleaned and checked but after putting it all back together the keys still wouldn’t work. The replacement keyboard would have sorted the problem but a customer decided not to go ahead with the keyboard replacement at that moment but instead decided to add an additional USB keyboard and use it for the foreseeable future.

In the second case, much more water was spilled, so the impact was much higher: the computer continued to work but the high-pitched noise on the startup has been informing a user that there was something wrong with some of the laptop components. And a roughly half of all keys on the keyboard wouldn’t work at all too. When my friend opened the laptop, he found that the water has sipped through (it wasn’t the case with the first laptop) and definitely damaged the motherboard. The short-circuit might have occurred at the time so some components of the laptop have probably failed. After finding all this, my friend has returned the laptop to the owner and advised to seek help at the laptop manufacturer service centre because only they can switch the laptop components in order to find out which one has failed and then replace it.

Why have I wrote all this? I just want to point that laptops require greater care than the desktop computers. When water is spilled on the desktop keyboard, the keyboard can be easity changed and the computer itself is never damaged because the computer case is not under the keybord.  It is more difficult, more time-consuming and more expensive to repair the laptops because all of them have different structures and configurations, the components cost more and finding the source of a problem takes more time. So if one have opted out of buying a desktop and bought a laptop instead, he or she should take proper care of it when working on it and when not working in order to avoid the problems afterwards:

don’t eat or drink in front of the laptop;

lift and put the laptop down very carefully;

buy a special padded computer bag to carry the laptop around;

don’t use the laptop on the heat, under the direct sun, during the sandstorm, under the rain, in the bathroom, in the freezing temperature and in all other conditions when the damage can be caused to the laptop;

when not working with the laptop, store it in the safe place where no one can damage it by accident.

Following the simple rules above will ensure the long life of the laptop computer free from the failures caused computer users themselves.

It would eventually happen to anyone who works with the computer - a message that reads like “there’s not enough space on your disk, please delete all unnecessary files” appears out of nowhere. And that is when you’ve thought there’s enough space there to put much more data than you would ever need.

So what would you do? Well, do as I told, go and search for some files that I can delete? Stop right there! There are more ways to get more free space on the computer without deleting the files that you might need at some point in the future. Below I mention some of them.

The first thing one can do is to clear the Recyce Bin. Files deleted previously and not fully erased from the hard drive are still present there, invisible and archived and ready to be restored. By removing them from the Recycle Bin, you’d be erasing them freeing the space on the hard drive. After the files have been erased, it will not be possible to restore them using normal method of undeletion from the Recycle Bin but it will probably be possible to do with the special programs that restore hard disk information. There’s no guarantee though that the information will be restored fully, so an ordinary user might assume that once deleted from the Recycle Bin, the files will be gone forever. So if you think you might need them at some crazy day and time, burn them to the disk before deletion and put this disk somewhere far away for safekeeping probably in order never to be found and read.

The second thing one can do to free some space on the hard drive is to delete all temporary files. This option and the option 1 (Recycle Bin) can be accessed via Windows Explorer - just go to the local disk root directory (like C: or D:), right click with the mouse, then select “Properties” and then in the opened window access “Disk Cleanup”. The temporary files are there because some installations or applications have needed them at some point in time but no longer need them and for some reasons these files have not been deleted by these installations or applications. It’s quite possible that some errors occurred or the applications have simply been dodgy, but never mind about that now.

The third option to get free space is to uninstall some applications. Ask yourself a question: do you really need everything that is installed on your computer? That is because you might have installed some programs long time ago to test them and have forgotten about them. You could also have installed some games you’ve played through to the end and never removed from the pc. You can also have some files you’ve downloaded, used, and don’t need any more and would never need (just in case you do - you might think to yourself - you could always download them again from the Internet, download new versions of these files that is, which is even better).

The fourth possible way to get more space is to make the hard drives compressed. This is how it works. If the disk is not compressed, the information is stored there normally. If it is, all the information stored there is compressed i.e. zipped up like with WinZip. In order to obtain this information, the computer needs to do an additional work - decompression. This leads to slower access to the files when compared with the uncompressed drives. This is why the compression of the main hard drive where the operation system is installed (usually C:) is not recommended. If there’s only one disk on the computer, and the space is urgently required, one can compress a directory, not the whole disk. But remember not to compress the directory where the operation system is installed (usually C:\WINDOWS). I also would not recommend compressing C:\Program Files and C:\Documents and Settings (or C:\Users in Windows Vista).

In order to compress the whole a disk, in Windows Explorer go to the local disk root directory (like C: or D:), right click with the mouse, then select “Properties”, tick the box against “Compress drive to save place” and click OK.

In order to compress a directory, in Windows Explorer go to this directory, right click on it with the mouse, then select “Properties” and on the General tab click Advanced. There, tick the box against “Compress contents to save place” and click OK.

The last easily available option to get more free space for your files on the computer is to buy another hard drive. The hard drives have become very cheap these days and even for 30 or 40 pounds it is possible to buy a good capacity USB hard drive. Pop down to your nearest electrical retailer, get one and connect it to the computer via USB cable. Windows should automatically recognise it, after which you can use it straight away. There’s no need to do any formatting. I am talking here about external USB hard drives - in my view, they are the easiest option for an ordinary computer user.

In addition to USB external hard drives, also available:

— wireless disk storages  (NAS - network-attached storage server) - they are more expensive as have more hardware inside and need to configured to be a part of a wireless network;

— internal hard drives - they go inside the computer case and are less expensive because don’t have the additional power supply. In order to add them to your pc, you’d need to have some computer hardware knowledge;

— firewire external hard drives - similar to USB hard drives but connected to the computer via firewire port rather than USB.

Please note that in my experience it’s better to buy several average capacity hard drives rather than one big capacity hard drive i.e. two by 250 Gb rather than one by 500 Gb. That is because the big capacity hard drives are more prone to failures than the smaller capacity ones. And also if your hard drive breaks down, it takes all information with it, so you’re always better with several hard drives that possibly share the data (RAIDwire,nas 1 type of storage). Only go for several devices if you need a lot of additional storage and you have enough space to add several hard drives to your pc instead of one.

So this is it. Above I have mention the common ways one can use to get more space on the computer to store more data, pictures, videos, or have more programs installed. But it is up to a particular person how they want to do this.

When carrying out the web development, it is sometimes necessary to get some information from the http request about the requester - a type of browser, IP address, various path values and so on. For that, so called server variables exist - their values are obtained from the Request object.

I personally don’t remember all of them and what sort of values they supply, so I wrote a piece of ASP code that prints the values of all the server variables for the requested page. Because I mainly work with ASP, I wrote it in VB, but the Request object is available in all programming systems that deal with web development, so the code below can easily be written in any of them. Here it is:

<%

for each x in Request.ServerVariables

response.write(”<p>” & x & ” = ” & Request.ServerVariables(x) + “</p>”)

next

%>

This should return all the server variables values, one in each line.

Today I have been updating my newly created blog, which I’m still very passionate about, to a new version 2.7. As a very straightforward and hopeful man, I decided that I don’t need to do any backups and everything’s gonna go very smoothly.

Copied a new code and on the first screen I saw was the initial blog screen “Please enter the blog title”. That’s odd I thought but entered it again, added email address, clicked ok and received an empty screen… Tried to see the blog, but nothing was shown in the browser. Tried to go back to the previous version (2.6.5), forgot that it wouldn’t work on my database and received an error.

After that went as back as 2.6, everything was ok but the database appeared to be new and empty(!) with only one automatic blog entry. Thinking that I’ve lost all my previous blog data, I went directly to the database in my hosting provider’s PHP Admin Panel and saw that the new duplicated wordpress tables have been created. I have been accessing exactly them with 2.6 and all my old data was safe but not at that moment accessible.

So what has happened?

Somehow, the $table_prefix value in wp-config.php was not treated correctly by the previous versions of Wordpress. I have had the value “wp_ec_blog” there but all my old table had only “wp_ec” prefix. Wordpress 2.7 got installed and created a new set of tables with the prefix “wp_ec_blog” as should have happened the first time round.

That’s it!

I fixed the problem by renaming $table_prefix from ” wp_ec_blog” to “wp_ec” in order to access my old tables and the information in them. I hope that from now on everything is going to go smoothly and I won’t encounter this sort of Wordpress bugs. And I will always - always back my data up before even the minor upgrade.