Yet another mile-stone was reached in the realm of RouterTech today when we reached over 1000 registered users on the site. Seeing as we purge users that are clearly registered for the purposes of spam this means that all users have registered to post or download our firmware and software. This can only be a good thing and I for one am very pleased with the whole thing

I was directed yesterday to a very interesting article on the subject of content protection in the new Windows Vista and how it is increasing the cost of hardware and increasing the likelyhood a user will have problems with audio and graphics output as a result of content protection measures inbuilt into Vista.

All sources are creditied and despite seeming to be biased in places the article is actually very fair given the information available. You can read it on the link above. Comments on this would be most welcome.

It struck me the other day as I was looking at the stats for RouterTech that we really are all over the web. Folk from blogs and forums are linking to us because they find our site and forum useful, and while each link doesn’t attract much traffic on its own it all adds up to spread the word.

Its all getting very exciting though and this month our hits look set to exceed 700,000. We’ve also got a lot of interesting stuff in the pipeline that should be ready in time for Christmas, including some brand new router and networking orientated software from our development team, further improvements to our firmware, more hardware reviews and guides not to mention of course updates to our website functionality, including a bug tracker for our open source projects.

We’ve also got a really cool announcement that we will be making in the near future so stay tuned for that. This is certainly a very interesting time to be a part of the RouterTech team and as ever my thanks are extended to all the team members who literally spend hours of their own time everyday making all of this possible, in particular the development team, thechief and biro - you guys rule.

Recently I was sent an interesting link about recovering data from a seemingly broken hard drive by putting it in the freezer for 24 hours and then having a small window afterwards in which amazingly the drive works as normal - long enough in most cases to take a full drive image. You can read this article and the responses here.

What amazed me the most about this article is the number of people who have tried it and found it to be successful. Normally some crack-pot writes something like this and people try it to find it to have little or no success. While this is one of the craziest solutions to recovering data I’ve heard to date, the success rate is impressive. It’s also reported to be used by a fair number of recovery companies, so seemingly it might be worth trying this technique before giving up and shelling out hundreds to a company to recover your precious bytes.

Of course nothing should be a substitute for regular backups but accidents can and do happen with spinning discs and its nice to know that for once there may be a way to fight back against the data munching broken drives of doom.

It was good to see that the humour wasn’t deadened by the success of the technique though as indicated by one comment recieved to the article

When I have that problem, I always take my computer and drive to the North Pole. It works real well, though one time an Eskimo named Nanook shot my computer with a harpoon

Nice one

A spate of great amusement hit the web this afternoon when some genius with a lot of time on their hands announced the release of Microsoft Firefox 2007. It was reported in an article on the register which shows how well they managed to fool people.

The thing about this is that its not serious, its a joke, and one that is made at Microsoft’s expense all the way. You can see the hilarious feature list here so you can see just why its so funny. Kudos to all involved in this, its truly hilarious

Right I’m sure many of you don’t even know what modernbill is, but for those that do I’m going to have a little moan about what really should be working in a stable production environment copy of their latest v5.1 release but infuriatingly isn’t

• Importing of TLDs from eNom reseller account - you have to enter every TLD manually at the moment, a total nightmare when there is over 40 to do.
• Disable credit card forms - for sellers who don’t take credit cards and set their admin panel as such still have their clients presented with the ability to pay by and store details of a credit card in the client area. Totally stupid.
• Paypal links to settle outstanding invoices are not included in the client area or on reminder e-mails so customers can’t complete their payments. Sellers go without being payed and clients run up a debt while we wait for modernbill to fix the issue. Doing business is like getting blood out of a stone with this problem.
• Disabling of the FAQ - I have my own FAQ, why can’t I stop the empty one modernbill provides from coming up in the client area?
• Helpdesk integration - v4 handled Intellodesk fine, why can’t v5 do the same instead of just spitting out some message about settings not being available?
• Documentation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen documentation for such a large released piece of software being so scarce. If you are lucky enough to find something in there that even mentions what you are trying to do you can be rest assured that it doesn’t go into enough detail about it to actually be of any use.
• Developers refuse to accept that the above (and other issues) are not acceptable in a stable release of the application

So there you have it - a total disaster. As someone said on the modernbill forums, I feel like an alpha tester here, call this a release version? *sheesh*

I really hate it when this happens; you’ve got so many things to be getting on with but somehow every single one of these things ends up being stalled because there is soemthing you are waiting on in order to complete every single task. Strangely reminiscent of an SY21 lecture on scheduling algorithms I know, but still, its happened to me today.

I’m working with several very new pieces of software for a project I’m trying to complete but at present there is a problem with every piece which requires a response from a third party which I’m just sitting around waiting for. The main reason why its so annoying is I have a little less work to do for my course right now so I was trying to use the extra time to complete the project. Looks like its going to be delayed by weeks now though, all because of a load of problems hitting me at once in the space of two days, and in another two days I’ll have a load of coursework again. I really hate being a developer sometimes

Users of AVG free for windows may have recently been confronted with a dialogue saying that their anti virus support would cease in January 2007. This is in fact not true and is just an adertising gimmik to try and make you buy one of grisoft’s paid for products. Do not hand over your credit card details!

While it is true that AVG free version 7.1 will cease to work in January 2007 you can download AVG free version 7.5 that will continue to work after that date and long into the future without paying a penny. When you see the dialogue pop up, click the tiny link on the bottom left, then on the web page that comes up you will see a load of products. On the bottom of that page click to download AVG free 7.5, again the link text is small. Installing this file and restarting your machine will leave you protected (as long as you download regular updates as normal) for a long time after January 2007.

Just thought I would warn everyone who might otherwise end up feeling they have to pay to get continued protection - you don’t - AVG free is still going to be just that, free.

In line with the latest WordPress release the core code running this website has been upgraded to the latest version. This update closes some known security loopholes as well as providing a few tweaks to the admin side of things which should make brining content to you even less hassle free.

I encourage all users of WordPress to upgrade to the latest version to avoid potential security issues. You can get the latest release on the WordPress site

The encryption used by Apple to ensure iTunes music can only be played on an iPod and not on any other form of music player has been cracked. While this has in fact been possible for some time, this latest development means it will be possible for members of the general public with very little technical know-how. Read about it on the BBC here