Learning French

I have been trying to learn to speak French, but so far I can't say it's been going well. It would have been nice to have the change to live there for a year or so, but I suspect with the current economic outlook, it's not very likely.

I have a few books on the country and some teaching aids, so to get a deeper understanding of the country, I have read or am reading:-

Sixty million Frenchmen can't be wrong

50 things to hate about the French

The discovery of France

The complete Merde

Unleash your inner Gaul

Two lipsticks and a lover

For the language itself:-

Teach yourself French in 3 months

BBC the French experience

Michael Thomas

Accelerated learning French

I'm still working my way though them, Michael Thomas has a good reputation for his European languages, but I have yet to see how the Chinese course works.

Can't say I found French For Dummies very helpful, it was very dry, and not very interesting.

There is also Rosetta Stone software, I hear it's very good. But these days I use Linux at home, and it's Windows only

I would love to spend some time in France hopefully in July, but that is when the French all take holidays.

It's also a case to decide what part of France to visit.

The history of the country is surprisingly diverse, at least as written by Graham Robb. Much more than the simplistic ideas than the Anglo Saxons moved in after the Romans left.

I've been to Paris once before, and Calais twice, and living in the UK for so many years I really would like to see more of Europe.

We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be, detested in France.
The Duke of Wellington

F***myslife

GoSpeed Racer has started http://fmyslife.wordpress.com/

I hope it becomes a place of angry venting :-)



Life may suck, but it beats the alternative.
-Anon

Censorship and who is touching your ports.

The Australian Senator Steven Conroy has had a few set backs recently, the main one being his blacklist being published on Wikileaks, this brought the entire list under scrutiny.

What was found was not impressive, I quote from the Brisbane Times

But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

Clever isn't it. Blocking a Dentist.

I used to work and help run an ISP in Australia, and the Govt have been trying to find ways to censor it for over ten years. I remember having discussions about it in 1999.

Remember this is for our own good, just like the Australia Card was supposed to be as well. This was a National ID Card for everyone, that was to be implemented in the 80s, it never got off the ground. Two years ago, the Howard Government was going to give it another try. But it would only be needed to access the Government provided Medicare system, so as long as you had enough money for private heath care you were fine. (HA!)
BTW I asked Vint Falken if they had ID cards in Belgium, they do, and you can find a list of countries that have them here.

So what else other treats to the Internet have surfaced recently?
SCO have a Morality police section it seems.

SCO is short for Santa Cruz Organisation, they are, or were a major player in the Unix software field, but when faced with declining sales due to Linux, they decided to take Linux to court. So they have taken Red Hat, IBM, and Novel to court for various things, and have found to be totally wrong in pretty much everything they alleged.

They also share with this group cp80.org an intersection of Mormons

So this group of Mormons want to stop all porn and objectionable material from TCP/IP port 80, that the main web browsers port. Weird.

I understand Mormons are very popular in California right now in the way they made sure that Prop 8 didn't pass.


It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.”

Robert Heinlein

Transformers 3 in July 2011

A Transformers 3 movie is now officially planned: Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures are aiming to release The movie Transformers 3 on July 1, 2011.

The studios didn't say much more, but we all know that Shia Labeouf and Michael Bay will be back.

Want to get really excited about Transformers 3? Just think about the technological advances in CGI and other special effects that this movie will benefit from!

Let's knock on wood for Transformers 3 to be released in due time!
:)

The RDP protocol component "DATA ENCRYPTION" detected an error.

The following entry is logged in event viewer on a windows 2003 server when trying to connect using RDP from another server or XP desktop:

The RDP protocol component "DATA ENCRYPTION" detected an error in the protocol stream and has disconnected the client.

Source: TermDD , Event ID: 50

This is a known issue and can be resolved with a simple registry change. below is an image of a registry change made on a server. Unable to connect to the server using RDP, this registry change allowed the connection. The registry key is circled. Below the certificate entry in the right window pane, is the certificate entry that was originally there and was renamed - hence the double dash (--) in front of the name. The registry change was made and no reboot was required. Just tried connecting again from another server and the new certificate entry was entered automatically into the registry on the server.

The old and new entries in the registry to fix the RDP problem look the same but the data value does differ. The string is a long entry that's not shown in the image. All the way to the right the numbers/characters start to change.

This is a known issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;323497

Link to this port, add to favourites...

E_BLOCKMODEL_NO_RANKED_RESOURCES_FOUND

Vista Desktop Resource Monitor

Just click on any of the graphs to expand the related section for more information.

Vista has some surprisingly interesting and sometimes useful new features. One such feature I stumbled across is the desktop resource monitor. This is a nifty little tool whose access was added through task manager. Task manager is a tool I use religiously on every desktop I operate and even those that I don't regularly use but I'm in a position to have to clean up malware or other bad programs or solve other problems. In fact, I have task manager running minimized at all times on my computers (hide to tray option) to enable me to watch CPU usage on my desktop or laptop.

One of things that I have found in Vista to be useful but required third party monitoring type applications on XP for the same purpose is Vista's resource Monitor. A nice step beyond just task manager, Vista's desktop resource monitor reveals more information in an instant that can be useful for those of us that need that kind of information. Information such as what programs are communicating on the network and with what remote computer. Although there are command line tools in both XP and Vista that can display a list of applications that are listening on the network and also talking, having this information at the ready through a GUI interface I find to be much more handier.

Though not common, a useful effect of having it in GUI form through resource monitor is if there is a need to show a regular user some information about their computer, they will understand the pretty GUI side more easily than they would the command line output on the desktop even if it showing essentially the same information.

Resource manager can be found simply by starting windows task manager on the desktop or laptop. Then click on the performance tab and then at the bottom click on the resource manager button. This new button when clicked open resource manager on the desktop and a world of more information about what the desktop or laptop is doing.

In a quick glance, you are able to see some vital information and insight to what your computer is doing. CPU, disk, network and memory information are all at fingure tips reach. The one I find useful now and would have liked to have had this in XP over the years is the the network resource overview.

The network resource monitor will show all the running programs that are "talking" on the latop to the network. This is a useful view of what's going on in that if there is a network latency at a glance, this resource view may be able to give a way an application on the desktop or laptop that is using too much bandwidth or that should not be using any at all.

Remote Support

Why waste time travelling to a location to provide computer support or even worse in many cases, trying to talk a person through steps on the remote computer through the phone. This is, in my opinion, even worse that going to the location unless of course the place where the computer, desktop,server, or laptop is located is too far away.

Talking people through troubleshooting steps is a very painful task. A simple process that could take an experienced person several minutes to maybe ten can turn into an hour with a person on the remote side that has no idea of how to perform the actions or functions that you are requesting or have never even seen a command line. Remote support is the best alternative and solution to make more efficient use of computer skills and efforts.