Bytes and Bites of Internet
Posts tagged Babbling
Becoming administrator of my own machine !!
Dec 10th
I know, it sounds strange. But it is fact that when we install Windows 7 or Vista (say any non-server post XP OS ?), and even if select ourselves as local administrator we actually don’t become administrator !! And due to that even if you disable that notorious UAC notifications you will still sometimes need to run apps as admin by right click and say “Run as Administrator”.
Now, it is really annoying and I feel helpless that even though MSFT says I own my system, I still not own it ?? When I says I want to be an administrator that means I want to be an administrator, and I don’t have to run any stupid program with elevated privileges by right clicking on it.
Ofcourse being a Linux user I am sort of habituated with these annoyance of Administrator and Power user. And I truly believe that sometimes they are very useful to have specially for users who don’t know much about computers and have administrator rights to screw system up (well, even if they don’t have admin rights they still screw system up, but that is another subject of conversation )
One of my favorite “How To” site, has posted a way to enable real Administrator account in Windows 7 and I am sure it is not recommended for general user, but for power users it is really useful.
Over Clocking my AMD Processor
Oct 7th
If you don’t know what overclocking is then there is from Wikipedia,
Overclocking is the process of running a computer component at a higher clock rate (more clock cycles per second) than it was designed for or was specified by the manufacturer. This is more usually practiced by enthusiasts seeking an increase in the performance of their computers than professional users, as overclocking carries risks of less reliable functioning or even damage. Some purchase low-end computer components which they then overclock to higher clock rates, or overclock high-end components to attain levels of performance beyond the specified values. Others overclock outdated components to keep pace with new system requirements, rather than purchasing new hardware.
As this definition says, there is a risk involved with this process as you are making your processors to work beyond their “recommended” capacity. And it worst case scenario there is a risk of physical processor damage is involved.
But despite of all these risks, I tried (succeed ) to overclock my processor. The main reason of this is I have AMD Thuban X6 (2.8GHz, hexacore processor). Good thing about this series is they can be easily overclocked upto 3.2 GHz. After some digging I actually found that AMD has a utility called AI Suite, and with it’s help you can overclock these processors with just a single click !!
Side effects of User Account Control (UAC) of Windows 7
Oct 6th
When I used it for first time I thought that UAC was really annoying feature of Windows Vista. I mean for each and every app it was required me to confirm, if I wanted to perform some task which required access to core system. It was more like low level mimic of Linux. But after using Vista for about 2 years (yesssssss … I did used Vista that long, poor me ) I was sort of used to of this feature. So when I upgraded to Windows 7 (tell me who didn’t upgraded from Vista to 7, except old XP users ??) I enabled UAC in it as well.
But I think I am going to fed up of this really dumb feature. Well, the feature itself is not bad its just it is not just at par with its counter part of Linux. And biggest annoyance is if you run some application and it failed to run due to UAC, Windows just don’t say it. Instead of this you will get all sort weird errors.
And finally it is here !!
Sep 13th
Yes, after month of speculations and rumors (and news of fake torrents) finally long awaited Windows 8 is here. Though MSFT has already mentioned somewhere that “Windows 8” is not the final name of OS for now it is known as Windows 8 to all of us. It has been said that it will be finest of windows ever (but I don’t want to hold my breath on it after my experience with Vista ) but by looking at all snapshots on net and presentation videos I am sure that it will be a bit different.
Since introduction of that tiny square computing machine (ahem …. iPad) the computing trend has sort of shifted towards portable computing devices called Tablets. And this new OS of Windows is said to be designed to specifically for those devices (or devices that supports “Touch”).
I am kind of more interested in laying my hand on Metro UI (famous UI that is being used in newer Windows Phones). I’ve played with it on Windows Phones (I personally like to live free, so I am using Android ) and I really liked it. The look is really refreshing. And I would like to see how they have implemented navigation of this UI to devices which don’t have touch support (laptops and desktops). And of course built in AV and Hyper-V are also feature that I would like to test.
X Files are real !!!
Jul 16th
Well, not real as in some FBI agents trying to solve cases with unexplained phenomenal activity (or may be there are some ! who knows) …. well, for me X file case is like occurrence of some unexplained event and there is no clear explanation of what actually happened. That is exactly what happened yesterday !!!
I am not super enthusiast but I have a small fish bowl that has had only two fishes (originally there were 4 but now it just 2 left but that’s another story). As usual I take out fishes into another container while I clean up that bowl. Yesterday I did exactly same while cleaning up that bowl. As we all generally use tap water, we need to process it to make it OK for fishes so we need to add some chemical into it that removes chlorine and other chemicals that are harmful for fishes, this process requires some time (about 20-30 mins) so I left fishes into that container and added that chemical to bowl and left for dinner.
But when I came to put fishes back into the bowl, I found that one of the goldfish was missing !!!! I investigated “crime scene” but found no evidence that fish somehow jumped out of that container and fell off to ground, nor I found that someone intentionally thrown her out (yup, you have to consider everyone as a suspect at first) !!
One more reason to use Linux
May 21st
I’ve been user of Linux from past few years. I got interested in Linux perticularly in Ubuntu when I took a class for Linux in my school. Since then, I have Linux as my second OS in my dual boot Laptop. I think that there are so many things that Linux can do effciently but Windows cant do it well. But major drawback of Linux is, if you are transited from Windows environment, you are kind of habituated for point and click tools, that makes your life hard in Linux because many time you are required to run some command or some script or something like that. Also since most of the tools are open source, some tools are not so polished and hard to use. Or sometimes I just cant use Linux because of my work, but I dont have that complain anymore because I can work using MONO 😀 …
Till now, I’ve been using Window Live Writer, which is no doubt really great blogging tool. But if I am working on Linux then I have to reboot into windows just because I wanted to blog on something. But today I am testing this new blogging tool in KDE. It is called "Blogilo". It has almost same feature as WLR, and I am hoping that I will use this tool in future.
That Is it…
Email from LastPass
May 11th
If you are in current news, then you might already know that LastPass one of the major password manager “felt” that it was somehow breached and some of user data was stolen in hashed form which will not be of any use to that hacker. But for me this is the indication that no matter how secure your system is there is no better way to store password then keep it in your mind … Anyways, I got this email from LastPass yesterday “suggesting” that I should change my master password. Luckily, I don’t have any important passwords stored there because I don’t trust these services at first place …