Category: Internet

Remove ads from Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger Mobile
Look, Green - no adverts!

This is a very simple hack to get rid of the annoying adverts in Windows Live Messenger (and possibly older versions of MSN Messenger). It doesn’t involve any downloads or patches and the change is simple to reverse if it doesn’t work, or it causes problems which it shouldn’t.

Note that I have nothing against the adverts as such. It’s a great communication tool and MS are well within their rights to sell some advertising space on it. Generally I tune them out, but the “rollover to pop up” ones are a complete pain in the backside. It’s for these I went searching for a solution – and found three on DotNetWizard.net.

That post above lists three solutions. I found that the first did the job for me and I’ll sum it up in brief here.

  1. Open My Computer or Windows Explorer
  2. Navigate to C:/Windows/System32/Drivers/etc
  3. Right click on “hosts” and select “Properties”. If the file is read-only, remove that tick and Apply if necessary
  4. Double-click on “hosts” and when the window appears, choose to open it with Notepad
  5. Near the top of the file you’ll see an entry “127.0.0.1 localhost”. Underneath that, add a new line “127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com”
  6. File … Save then exit Notepad
  7. If the file was read-only before, make it read-only again.
  8. Log out of MSN if you were in it, and back in.

You should now find that the ads are replaced with a blank white box. Not pretty, but at least you don’t end up with adverts obscuring your desktop. This works on XP and Vista. I don’t know about Windows 7 as yet, sorry, though I assume it has the same file structure and use of hosts.

For the techies, how this works is pretty simple. All the adverts from Microsoft are served up via a server located at the end of the web address “rad.msn.com”. The hosts file is a plain text system file which tells the system where to look for certain resources – it’s a single-machine version of the DNS system in some respects.

As well as using it to point at local resources (such as 192.168.0.7 Steve_PC) you can get it to redirect any other network request. All we’ve done is told the machine that when Messenger goes looking for the advert server, it should – instead of heading out into the internet – look to the local 127.0.0.1 address. This is a standard “loop back” address used by all PCs (indeed, all networking equipment). Hence, Messenger can’t reach the server and the ads don’t appear.

Microsoft could easily fix this by hard-coding an IP address for the advert server into an WLM update, though this in turn could be blocked using other methods, such as firewalls.

Right now, though, I don’t have someone trying to sell me coffee every time I try to click on an icon in my tray.

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Experiencing BT Broadband

BT Group plc
Blinking Tripe

I’m staying with relatives for a couple of weeks and they’ve just had broadband installed. They decided on BT‘s Option 2 which has a 4.5Mb connection (I think) and a limit of 15Gb per month which should be fine given that it’s predominantly for my little cousin to access CBeebies and the folks to go on eBay.

BT’s policy if you go over this limit is also pretty fair, in my opinion:

If you exceed your monthly usage allowance your service won’t stop working; advisory emails will be sent to your BT primary email address if you reach 80 per cent of your usage allowance each month and further notification if you then exceed your allowance in a particular month. If you exceed your usage allowance for two months in a row, we’ll charge you £1 for each extra GB you use (rounded up to the nearest GB) starting from the second month you exceed your allowance. We’ll continue charging if you keep exceeding your allowance in the following months. These charges will appear on your BT bill.

So you actually get a “free” couple of GB as long as you don’t take the piss, the additional charges aren’t excessive and they do warn you in advance when you’re approaching the limit. Can’t complain about that.

Only there’s still one major issue. How do you know how much data you’ve downloaded at any one point in time? This can’t be difficult and BT obviously have a per-customer record of this that’s constantly updated. How else could they inform you of when you’ve gone over it?

To put this in context, I have my mobile from 3. I don’t have an internet usage limit on it, but I so have a certain number of calls and texts I can use before I get charged. At any time I can go online, either via my phone or elsewhere, and get an up-to-the-second list of every category of phone call and text (and internet, though it’s not relevant to me) used. That way I know as I approach the end of my billing month how much I have to burn through, or whether I need to throttle back.

BT do not do this. There is no way to find out how much data you’ve shifted. Their advice:

To monitor your usage, you can use a search engine to find and download an online-usage meter; search for ‘internet usage meter’. You may wish to try several until you find one that meets your needs.

In a word: pathetic.

They’re pushing wi-fi routers these days, the idea of which is that multiple devices can be connected at any time. A family may have a desktop and two laptops. One of the parents could have work laptop they’re not allowed to install software onto so that scuppers the idea. Then you have to go around all of the devices and total up the data used all the time.

What happens if a friend comes over, or you want to surf the net on your mobile? The 3G signal here is pants so I connect my phone to the wi-fi instead. There’s no such program for the Nokia E71 that I’m aware of and it would be pointless anyway as I’d only want to use it when I’m here. Likewise, if you pop a monitor onto a laptop, you have to ensure it’s only measuring data flow when you’re connected to the home network and nowhere else.

Essentially it’s completely unreliable and useless unless you have one solitary PC hardwired to the internet connection. If a mobile company can manage it, then why can’t BT? All they need is a “customer information” web page you log into which tells you. Easy as. If such a page does exist then they need to tell people about it.

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Firefox and Chrome have no security

Windows Internet Explorer
IE

Microsoft have a nice new page telling you how great IE8 is and how it’s miles better than Firefox and Google Chrome. Well, they would say that. The “facts” they’ve put forward, however, are dubious to say the least.

Apparently Chrome doesn’t have crash recovery or tab isolation. Well, as far as I was aware, tab isolation (where if one of your web pages crashes, it doesn’t take the whole browser down with it) was one of the major features of Chrome. This makes crash recovery less of an issue, but if the whole thing does go belly up, then trust me – Chrome will recover, send info to Google should you choose and then ask you if you want all your pages back. If that’s not crash recovery, I don’t know what it.

Firefox, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t have tab isolation. Although it may be in v3.5 which is due out at the end of this month. This version also features “private browsing” where your history and so forth aren’t recorded on your PC. This is to secure your privacy. And ensure you can look at porn without your wife finding out. According to Microsoft’s little table, Firefox doesn’t have this… which is true for about 2 weeks. Chrome, on the other hand, does already feature it. If you’re using Chrome, try hitting Ctrl+****+N and you’ll find yourself in “incognito”.

OK, technically the table says that IE8 has “InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering”. Given these are copyrighted terms then it’s fair to say the others don’t have them. For some reason, though, MS is effectively saying their privacy is better than the others’, but not justifying it.

Security: IE8 has it, the other two don’t. Well, unless you add extensions. A fair point “out of the box”, but the sheer volume of plugins available for Firefox alone says that it’s got better protection. If you want more protection, download AVG‘s free antivirus. It offers a cobble-on for IE and FF which protects against malware.

As for “compatibility”, for some reason MS are claiming that IE8 is better as it works with more web pages than the others. I’d be really interested in knowing how they tested this. The only way to check if a page has rendered correctly is to look at it. And I seriously doubt they sat a handful of temps down and got them to check several billion web pages.

Microsoft’s claim that IE8 is best for development as you don’t have to install other tools has a flipside as well – bloat. If you decide you don’t want to use the MS tools then you’ll have to install other ones alongside the cludge already there.

Then there’s something MS don’t mention – user base. Where’s the link on the web page to download the Linux version? Or the Mac? Both alternative browsers are available for both platforms (Chrome only in beta on Linux and Mac, admittedly), as is Opera. Even Safari is available for Windows.

At the end of the day, pretty much every Windows user will end up with IE8 as a part of Windows Update. Non-Windows users can’t get it. So why bother trying to plug it?

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One reason to like facebook

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
facebook

Generally speaking I don’t use facebook. I have an account because some people insist on trying to contact me on it so at least I get the messages and can tell them to send me a bloody email. I have three blogs (all with contact details on), an email address, mobile number, Twitter feed, Skype address and regularly use MSN Messenger.

As such I don’t feel I need facebook. The only thing it does is open me up to more arseholes I went to school with trying to get back in touch with me. As a very general rule, if I’m not in touch with them now it’s very likely I don’t want to be.

Anyway, for those who didn’t know facebook today/yesterday (not too sure, don’t really care) allowed all of their users to nab a personalised URL for their facebook page. There was huge demand for this – in fairness it’s better to tell someone your page is at “…facebook.com/SteveJones” rather than “…facebook.com/SteveJones1234”.

After a few hours they’d registered over three million of the things. The load on the servers must have been enormous, and credit to them there was no slowdown or system failure. Needless to say, the team were all in place to monitor the temperatures, wires and servers to ensure it went well. Mashable! has a good story on this from which I’ve pinched the photo below.

As I said, I don’t give a toss about facebook, but I can at least say that someone there has taste. Can you spot why?

Launching 3 million+ "vanity URLs". Thirsty work?
Launching 3 million+ "vanity URLs". Thirsty work?
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WordPress automatic upgrade problem

Image representing WordPress as depicted in Cr...
WordPress - now with added 2.8-ness

Full credit for this solution goes to “vtroia” on the WordPress support forum. However, just to ensure the information’s available in more places I’m popping it here.

Symptoms: When trying to use the inbuilt auto-upgrade of WordPress, you simply get a message stating:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress- …

The ending will vary depending on the version you’re trying to update to. Nothing else happens, or it’s just damn slow. There’s no way to tell.

My host is 1and1. I noticed others on the original problem thread had the same one, though I suspect the problem could relate to others as well.

Solution: You need to edit the relevant .htaccess file on your server. This is one of those “for crying out loud, make sure you know what you’re doing” situations, like hacking the registry. Do ensure you have a backup and do ensure you only make the following changes. Make sure you change the correct one, as well.

The problem is that WordPress is either using the wrong version of PHP on the server, or is confused as there is more than one available and it doesn’t know which to pick. Regardless, the solution is to tell it to use PHP5.

To do this, locate and edit the .htaccess file (you may have to download it, edit it and re-upload) and add the following lines:

# Ensure PHP5 being used
# For WordPress auto upgrade
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

The first two are only comments, but it’s useful to know what code is doing.

Once saved, retry your upgrade. I found that I now get a pause of around 15-20 seconds when I click on the “Upgrade Now” button, the screen refreshes and the upgrade is done.

Afterwards: Change it back again, or at least add “#” to the bottom two lines. I found that by not doing this, some functionality in WordPress was jiggered. Specifically, the display and edit of the Permalink underneath the post title as you’re entering/editing it. I’m also still missing the “Recommended Link” section from Zemanta but only on Firefox – it’s reappeared when I use Chrome since I restored the .htaccess file. This could be a caching thing, so I’m going to do some more checking and will update this post as and when I find a fix.

Update: The links issue was a Zemanta problem which they’ve swiftly repaired. However, I am now left with a half-functional dashboard page. This isn’t Zemanta – I’ve disabled it to check. I get only the left column of my opening admin screen and none of the pop-up menus work. As soon as I click on one of the non-popped-up buttons, I go to the relevant default screen and everything works again. It’s only the main admin screen. Gah.

Update 2: Seems there are a lot of issues with plug-ins and WordPress 2.8. If you can, check your plug-ins for compatibility before upgrading. However, note that some of the ones I’m having issues with claim to be compatible with this new release.

Update 3: I re-enabled the lines in the .htaccess and it’s resolved most of the issues. And created one tiny one that seems to be ironing itself out. By which I mean sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. Bizarre.

Just as a disclaimer, it ain’t my fault if you screw your .htaccess by doing this. Be sure you know what you’re doing before to edit it. As long as you only enter the lines shown, as far as I’m aware it will not cause any problems that you can’t sort out by removing the lines again but every installation and setup is different!

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