All Windows 7, Vista and XP users who currently use internet explorer will be offered a choice as part of the deal Microsoft reached with European Commission.

Microsoft IE sits awaiting the worlds judgment, like the American high school cheerleader who’s inexplicable popularity is for the first time being put to the test, as the not so popular kids elect a new leader.

A pop-up window will prompt people to choose and install one of 12 different browsers or let them stick with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Kraya recommends users choose anything but Internet explorer.  Users are able to select any browser of their own choosing however we would strongly recommend users pick from our top picks:

Mozilla Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Opera http://www.opera.com/

Google Chrome  http://www.google.com/chrome

Apple Safari http://www.apple.com/safari/

The big question is will the Anti-trust agreement and the fines totaling 1.68bn euros ($2.44bn, £1.5bn) that have been imposed by the EU on Microsoft make any difference?  Take a look at the BBC graphic below, IE has a massive dominance in the browser market in the main due to the sheer ambivalence and ignorance of its users, no one (or very few) choose to use IE it was the default, what they had to use and by the point they had learned that there might be a choose out there with had learned IE, so stuck with it not because it was superior but because its what they know.

Browser market share

Firefox has for some time been catching on IE but it still has a long way to go.  Its progress has been at lest in part due to its superiority as a browser over IE.  However recent updates have left Firefox slower and buggier than ever before.  For a browser that has never been advertised in main stream media, unlike Google Chrome, its rise to control a quarter of the browser market has been purely viral.

Google on the other hand has in anticipation of today’s changes embarked on a massive advertising campaign to push Chrome and gain even more control over the Internet, only time will tell just how successful Google ad spending has made it. The question now is will it be money well spent, or will Google find itself the next target of the EU competition and anti-trust regulators?

Only time will tell as is the case of Microsoft, I for one will be eagerly waiting updated browser market share statistics, as I’m sure Mr Gates will be.  However I cant help but feel that we have in no way seen the beginning of the end of IE, undoubtedly its share will slip, I just don’t think the EUs Settlement can break what are now years of ingrained habit and apathy.
Further information:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8537763.stm

I have an ACER Travelmate 6592, the power supply blew for it last week and after buying what I thought was a genuine replacement only to find it was a dud, I now have the genuine part (from a different supplier).  I have now started having issues with the back-light of the LCD display, it would hiss and flicker before dieing completely.  I should say this problem occurred on both Windows vista & 7 and on Ubuntu Linux regardless of kernel version.

Thinking the un-clean power from the dodgie replacement power adapter may have damaged the back light bulb I was all for buying a new one and embarking on the daunting task of changing the back-light, until that is I discovered this blog post by Aral Balkan

Running the laptop on mains with the battery in causes screen flicker / black screen, where as running it with just mains or just battery it works fine.

I should also say that if you are running a laptop on mains all of the time you will shorten the life of your battery, therefore removing the battery from all laptops whilst running on mains for a long period of time is not necessarily a bad thing.

The only question is do I want to pay acer to repair my now out of warranty acer travelmate 6592?

Hope this helps some others out there and a massive thanks to Aral Balkan for his blog post.

There Internet simply goes down for anything between 1 and 30 minutes.

As we suspected this morning this has now been confirmed as a BT Fault affecting all Customers on the BT Wholesale ADSL network.

More info from zen internet here http://status.zensupport.co.uk/index.php?serviceid=5&incidentid=1616&simple=1

As a result of work to rectify this fault some customers may have limited or no internet connectivity overnight tonight and early tomorrow morning. BT have given an estimate of 6am on Thursday 17th December for resumption of normal service.

We will continue to monitor the situation and bring you updates as we get them.

One of our Clients had their ADSL cut off this week as they had exceeded the usage policy.   Why?  Adobe Update Manager on one Windows XP PC had decided to download over 70GB of data over the course of a 7 day period.  It would appear that it was getting itself in a loop and just kept trying to update continuously, 70GB worth of continuously.

The Adobe website serves the update MSI binary files as content type Text/Plain, the Adobe Update client has a very short timeout and immediately opens another connection to re-start the download.  Hence if there is a slow connection or the caching server does not return the whole file in a timely manner the Adobe Update client enters the infinite loop of retries, causing the excessive bandwidth consumption witnessed here.

There are several forum threads including on Adobe’s own site http://forums.adobe.com/thread/392129 all linking this issue to a conflict between and old version of WebMarshall and Adobe updater; however our machines do not use WebMarshall and we do not have it installed anywhere on our networks.

We do however use Squid caching on our CentOS 5 servers.  The server in this instance seems to be fulfilling the requests on each occasion in a timely manner  – the issue is that each time Adobe updater passes a URL it is different in key areas, which Squid interprets as a separate request.  This is not abnormal and we have seen this before when we have tried to configure squid to cache Windows updates.  However rather than enter a loop of requests, Windows updates simply fail.  Other automatic updaters work well with caching systems and indeed most ISPs are now implementing different forms of web caching on their own networks.  Dose this mean the Adobe issue is affecting them in the same way?

The issue seems to only affect PCs (or at least we have seen no affected Mac users as yet), and it also seems to affect most Adobe products.

For now Adobe and the ISPs have remained quiet on the issue, however we have 3 other clients (and my own home ADSL ) who cannot update Adobe at all, access to ardownload.adobe.com appears to have been blocked by the ISP.  Quite when the Adobe update issue will be resolved is unknown; however we have also taken the decision to block access to ardownload.adobe.com from all of our networks, for the moment.

Richard, one of our Systems Admin Team has published a more detailed account of the technicalities involved here: http://richard.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/12/16/a-big-adobe-problem/

There have been a number of reasons:  Firstly, things have been very busy here at krayatec and more importantly, Angela and I got married.  Thanks to all who came to our wedding and I do hope you all had a good time.  We certainly enjoyed ourselves and I’m glad to report that after his wee trip to hospital my grandfather is well; one operation over and waiting on his second.

So what’s been happening around here?

Due to family illness Andrei has decided to return to Canada, so we are now recruiting for his position.  To help cover while we recruit a replacement, David will shortly return for Christmas, it’ll be nice to have him back for a while.

We have had some new clients come on stream in the last few months and have seen an large increase in the number of computers covered  via our existing clients.

With the VAT changes coming to an end this month, we have also seen a number of large hardware purchases as people seek to take advantage before the VAT rate returns to 17.5%.

There has been lots of other exciting news, some of which I will blog about over the next few months and some of which is already on twitter.

As we approach Christmas, I have also been thinking about new year’s resolutions and well, along with the usual ones like diet and putting the toilet seat down (can’t believe how much that annoys her – such a cliché! ), I have made myself a work resolution to Blog at least once a fortnight and tweet once a day.

We’ll see how I get on… As always, comments welcome.

You can read more about it here http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/ but one thing everyone wants to know is how dirty as the inside of my computer and whats the worst that you have seen.  So attached below are some photos and videos, not of the worst we have every seen but of a some examples of an old dirty PC.

You Shouldn’t look if your easily disgusted!

A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/

A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/

A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/

A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/

A PC Being cleaned as part of the Krayatec DaySpa http://stephen.blog.kraya.co.uk/2009/03/13/computer-day-spa/

Warning the Videos bellow are worse and sorry about the mobile phone quality

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOnTvEltTV8

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7o-sGcCdDQ

The email is a fraud and should be disregarded. It is an attempt to confuse you into visiting a fraudulent site and reveling your login details. We see these all the time, claiming to be from all kind of companies, with lots of different slants, but fundamentally they are just trying to get you to supply personal login information so that they may take over your accounts.

Please be very careful when you receive email like this! Do not click on any links unless you are certain it has come from a reputable source. The Antivirus and SPAM scanners we use are good but they can never be 100%. Rather than click on a link in an email open a web page and type in the address yourself just because it says Click here to visit Bank of Scotland Secure (www.bankofscotland.co.uk) doesn’t mean thats where the link sends you!

If you have any questions please just call us, or forward the email to us for an option.

Ps Any emails regarding changes to the email system would come from me personally.

____________________________________________________________________________________
FRAUDULENT EMAIL BELOW, Replace YOURDOMAIN.COM with your own Domain!
____________________________________________________________________________________

From: robot@YOURDOMAIN.COM [mailto:robot@YOURDOMAIN.COM]
Sent: Monday, October 19, 2009 11:42 PM
To: admin@YOURDOMAIN.COM
Subject: The settings for the admin@YOURDOMAIN.COM mailbox were changed

Dear user of the YOURDOMAIN.COM mailing service!

We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (admin@YOURDOMAIN.COM ) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:

MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from ” YOURDOMAIN.COM ” claiming to be http:// YOURDOMAIN.COM /owa/service_directory/settings.php?email= admin@ YOURDOMAIN.COM &from= YOURDOMAIN.COM &fromname=admin

Best regards,

YOURDOMAIN.COM

Technical Support.

During testing I came across this:

reCAPTCHA fail

Enough said!

Things have been very very busy in the office and on top of it all Angela and I get married in 4 weeks! When we set a date I joked that I wasn’t helping planning the wedding, in fact I said tell me when It is, I’ll go out with the boys a few weeks before and turn up on the day in a kilt and that’ll be the limit of my involvement!

Well the reality could not have been further from the truth. We have just this week finished sending out the invites to everyone and we still haven’t arranged a honeymoon yet, the stress of it all.

I am very pleased to say, things have also been amazingly busy at krayatec, with new clients joining, we are looking at some interesting acquisitions and as if that’s not enough, we have been working hard to complete the transitions I started when I joined Kraya. I am very proud to say that a project I told Shri would take me a year is almost finished 9 months in. All clients now have new email systems and thanks to some great work by the krayanet boys the behind the scenes email systems have all also been upgraded. The effect of this has been amazing, one of our clients is now
having 98% of their mail rejected as Spam! That’s over 100,000 messages a week! What’s more amazing is not a single report of a false positive (that’s a message getting blocked that
should get trough).

The last of our clients will be moved to new servers in the next 4 weeks and we have now begun rolling out our VPN system to all clients. This will make a massive difference to clients that use VPN and I’ll write about that separately later.

We have also had Dave move to Glasgow and Andrei join us form Canada.  Andrei and Richard are busy working on our new document management system, testing is underway and I hope to roll it out before Christmas.

Well the phone is ringing and we have a lot to do today, but I do promise that before Christmas I will start writing regularly again.

Till then ………

All of our internal servers will therefore be unavailable between 23:00 BST on Thursday 27^th August and 04:00 BST Friday 28^th August.

This will have the following Impact:

Email Services;

Some clients will be unable to send or receive email’s from external sources during this time.  Email’s sent during this period will however be derived within a few hours of service returning to normal at 04:00

Web Sites:

Our own and some client Web Sites will be unavailable during this time.

Support Services:

Our team will be unable to provide some Support Services during the Maintenance period.  We will however be after the maintenance has been completed, in line with standard out of hours support terms.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused, we have deliberately chosen this timing to limit the impact to all customers.

If you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to call me directly.