Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, freedom of speech, information access, and more
I upgraded to IE10 recently, but have been driven crazy by one ‘feature’. When I type in the address box a few letters of one of my regular sites, it shows me a whole list of url’s which I have never visited and in which I have no interest. This infuriating trick must be commercially [...]
When I wrote the PHP scripts that support my Roman cult of Mithras site, I incorporated some code to tell me if anyone was looking at the pages. Specifically it tells me which pages are popular; information that is useful to me when deciding what to work on. Each page is accessed using an address like this: [...]
A correspondent draws my attention to Tesseract, a Google-hosted project to do Optical Character Recognition. The Tesseract website is here. Tesseract is a command-line tool, but there are front-ends available. I am a long-term fan of Abbyy Finereader, and, let’s face it, have probably OCR’d more text than most. So I thought that I would [...]
I’ve spent each weekend for a couple of weeks now trying to get my new Samsung RF711 laptop set up to use a solid-state drive (SSD). It has been an experience of unmitigated pain. Today is gone, and nothing to show for it. Not that this is the fault of Samsung. Their kit works well, and [...]
Well, it seems that I spoke too soon. Once I started to fiddle with the disk drives, everything stopped working! And you can’t get it back very easily either. Several hours of reinstalling and rebuilding now …
A week ago I accidentally installed what I believe to be malware on my main PC, a Sony Laptop. I uninstalled it at once, and scanned for malware using Kaspersky, but the damage was done. Kaspersky could find no indication of malware. But there is no reason why anyone would camouflage an installer as a [...]
I’ve found a number of articles online which seem to contain useful security advice. How Not to Become Mat Honan: A Short Primer on Online Security How to secure your Wifi while travelling Traverse corporate firewalls All tedious stuff that I’d better read carefully.
I’ve managed to install some malware. Oh bother. It’s something any of us might do. I was accessing a site which was offering the download of a book. The link took me to a site called “blitzdownload.com”, which downloaded an exe called “<book title>.exe”. Naturally I presumed that the thing was an executable zip. So [...]
Most web space these days comes with the PHP language, usually running on the Apache webserver, with the MySql database. When developing scripts of one’s own, ideally one replicates this on the PC. But frankly, installing all this stuff is a faff. This week I came across the Wampserver package. This allows you to install [...]
Microsoft do make some rubbish software, don’t they! This evening I sat down to work with the new Mithras pages that I am working on. This involves running a little web server on my PC, so that I can run some PHP scripts. Last weekend I installed (with some difficulty) IIS, FastCGI and PHP on [...]