Windows 7 SP1 upgrade went horribly wrong … NetBeans IDE 7.0 Beta 2, MailWasher and the Christchurch earthquake

Installing the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on my workhorse desktop system last Saturday turned into a total disaster for me, a really big-time FAIL.

Instead of the smooth ride I had expected, it crashed part way though with one of those inscrutably serious Windows errors, and despite  many hours of trying to recover I finished up with an unbootable system. (I’d rather not think about it any more, so will spare you the horrors of what I went through while trying to get it all working again. I certainly hope that it doesn’t happen to you -- wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.)

After a day or so I bit the bullet, reformatted the C: drive, and then carried out a clean “scratch” install of the original Windows (64-bit Ultimate version). After installing a few of my favorite make-life-easier basic utilities, the SP1 upgrade went without a hitch, although I must say that it took around twice as long as I expected.

I suspect that such an incredible amount of cruft had gathered on my workhorse system since August 2009 (when Windows 7 first hit the streets) that the SP1 upgrade crashed because it simply couldn’t work out how to handle some element of the tons of third-party software that it came across. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a bad driver, which is the common cause of Windows crashes.

Now that I remember it, prior to Windows 7 I had never managed to get Windows XP SP3 to install correctly. It always caused the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death during boot-up, most likely some hardware driver issue or other, so had to keep reverting to SP2 (which fortunately was a relatively painless process. nowhere near as complicated as the whole Windows 7 SP1 rigmarole).

Anyway, Windows 7 with SP1 is running nice and fast, and indeed some software that had been behaving quite bizarrely is now working well again. It looks as if the spring cleaning was worth it, despite the several days of effort involved.

In order to minimize building up all that cruft again, this time around I’m being very particular about which utilities that I find either essential or highly useful.

I might soon write about these while they’re fresh in my mind, but will mention right here and now that for real-time security and anti-malware protection I’m relying on the built-in Windows firewall together with Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE).

I switched over to MSE some five or six months ago (after many years of third-party security tools, some free and some retail). MSE is free, quite unobtrusive, gets its updates daily via the normal Windows Update process, and seems to be pretty darn effective.

 

SHATTERING NEWS FROM THE LAND OF THE LONG WHITE CLOUD
AND HOW MAILWASHER MIGHT HELP

Another essential product that I rely on day in day out is MailWasher PRO 2011 with its outstanding spam detection which a year or so ago was reworked and released with a beautiful new user interface plus significantly enhanced spam detection capabilities.

Based on how well it has worked for me, I consider MailWasher is a fantastic product. It was designed and developed by the team at Firetrust Ltd of Christchurch, New Zealand.

 

THE EARTHQUAKE

As you are doubtless aware, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the Canterbury region of New Zealand’s south island at lunchtime on 23 February this year (2011), causing widespread and severe property and infrastructure damage in Christchurch city and surrounding areas.

Far worse news is that, at the time of writing this post, the confirmed death toll is at least 160, many injuries were suffered, and several hundred people are still unaccounted for.

Officials are saying that it will take a decade to rebuild Christchurch and that it would be months before the quake-hit city could begin to reopen.

In light of this, I urge you to help out by trying MailWasher.

Following that, I’m pretty confident you’ll be quite happy to purchase a license to help support some of the Christchurch people.

 

Getting back to the mundane, after installing the above-mentioned essential various utilities, I’ve now also moved on to installing my preferred application design and development tools.

These include IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.2 (soon I hope to be replaced with version 8.5.3), as well as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and other related Microsoft stuff, plus Java IDEs including Eclipse and NetBeans (as well as a favorite of mine, JCreator Pro, which unlike the other two has an extremely light footprint).

I’ve installed the latest Eclipse Helios SR2 version (3.8.2) now available for download (a comprehensive assortment of packages to suit your taste).

When it came to NetBeans, now of course part of the Oracle stable, instead of the current production version 6.9.1 I’ve decide to try out NetBeans 7.0 Beta 2 which is currently available via http://netbeans.org/community/releases/70/ … I just hope they don’t plan to release the final build on April Fools Day!

NetBeans 7.0 does look and feel very nice indeed, with not only a range of editor enhancements but also leading-edge Java enhancements (JDK7, improved Java EE support, and more) that you could expect due to NetBeans’ close bonding with Oracle (and Sun Microsystems before that).

I’ve always found NetBeans installation to be more user-friendly than the way you have to go about extracting Eclipse from a zip file, creating a Windows shortcut to the eclipse.exe program, adding in plug-ins, and all the rest of it. Though I’ll certainly grant that Eclipse is far more extendable, for the past several versions NetBeans has been no slouch either.

Check the NetBeans IDE 7.0 Beta 2 download page for yourself.

I’ve gone the whole hog and installed the full bundle as shown in the rightmost column:

 

All in all, with Windows 7 SP1 now bedded in, and with such excellent tools to play with I’m a happy bunny.

The Internet–Vint Cerf’s re-think of its architecture, and NPR’s audio history

A very brief post, this one.

Watch Dr. Vint Cerf the “Father of the Internet” (or at least, one of the fathers, along with Dr. Bob Kahn, and others) – now the “Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google -- as he gives his fascinating recent talk at Stanford University.

This is indeed an authoritative presentation of  history of the development of the Internet, for the first 30 or 40 minutes. In the final 20 minutes or so he shares his views on how it needs to be improved.

Starting at around the one-hour point, the final 15 to 20 minutes is a Question & Answer segment, and this too is well worth watching for the additional topics that were raised by the audience.

In a similar vein, you can learn more by listening to the various segments of An Audio History of the Internet from the National Public Radio (NPR) Archives.

Mobile Calendaring–as you haven’t seen it before

 

For more, see the FAIL Blog.

The above image is from the There, I fixed it section of the blog.

I see that Mastering XPages, A Step-by-Step Guide to XPages Application Development and the XSP Language (for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino) has been released. Looks very good. Must buy!

On the subject of books, it seems that they can be useful in all sorts of ways, one of which is  shown below:

A world clock of life, death and the environment

Here’s an interesting variation on world clocks, click the image below to open in a new window …

It’s quite interesting to watch the statistics build up inexorably over a number of minutes.

But I wouldn’t keep it running all the time though, if I were you, since I noticed that it chews up a full 25 percent CPU (one of the processors on my quad-core system).

Scaling the heights and depths of the universe

Today I stumbled upon Cary and Michael Huang’s The Scale of the Universe animation (2010). Quite impressive …

Move the horizontal slider button (or click the left/right arrow keys) to zoom in and out across the scale. Click the down arrow key to improve the quality of the image.

In a similar vein, watch Cosmic Journeys: Cosmic Energy Powers of 10 …

Not enough for you? Then why not also watch From Quarks to Outer Space …

Here’s the same as a Java animation.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the classic Powers of Ten documentary produced in 1968, written and directed by Ray and Charles Eames:

And to finish off this post about distances across the universe, take a look at the smorgasbord of free videos offered by SPACE Rip called Cosmic Journeys – what a grand feast!

Lotus Notes needs extended thumbnail capability

Concerning thumbnails in Lotus Notes, several months ago I was investigating for a client what ways there are to show thumbnails of photographs taken while inspecting building construction sites and stored in Notes documents of a particular database.

We should all know that there already is a form of thumbnail support available …

This works extremely well for a single image (as in a business card), merely by selecting the option shown above. No coding required whatsoever, excellent.

Alas this doesn’t work at all for multiple images, such as my client’s database holds:

The trouble is,obviously, that you can’t tell from the above Rich Text field contents (the attachment name as generated by your digital camera, or the generic attachment icon) what each photo’s subject is.

Support for multiple thumbnails per Rich Text field would be the perfect no-coding-required  solution for my client, and I’m sure in many other such cases.

My client’s staff would then merely click on one of the many thumbnails to see that particular photo taken at a building construction site as a pop-up (rather than having to open the photo in an external image viewer program).

I hope that IBM will extend the thumbnail support to multiple attached images, and as soon as possible. Agree?

Planet Lotus–a gripe pops up from me again

 

I whinged and whined about this a couple of years ago, and here I am again older and even more of a pain in the proverbial ranting on about it again … An extra-squeaky wheel I am, I am.

I thought that it used to only my posts that suffered from this back then, but doing a random mouse-over of various entries in today’s Planet Lotus find that quite a few other people have submitted posts that yield this too.

Can’t we get rid of all that annoying HTML junk in the “tool tips” (or “pop-ups” or whatever you want to call them)?

“We aim for perfection” do we not?

IBM and the killer electric cars?

I’ve started writing stories again for iTWire, and while researching my latest story found out that IBM seems to have studied a literally shocking new class of electric vehicles.

Go to … IBM finds consumer interest in electric vehicles, but major barriers to widespread adoption

(refer to page 3 of the story)

TIP: How I got Acronis True Image 2011 to install (a workaround)

I’ve been using Acronis True Image for backing up drives on my Windows desktop system for a number of years. For me, it seems to work more consistently and reliably than other tools I’ve used in the past, such as Norton Ghost.

These backups have saved me on more than one occasion. I really like the way that True Image works.

SO when I found that Acronis True Image Home 2011 had been released, and what's more is available at a big discount and with a free copy of the Plus Pack add-on till 3oth November 2010, I immediately purchased a copy online.

I expected the installation to go flawlessly, as had all my previous installations of True Image, but this didn’t happen at all.

When I launched the installer executable, nothing seemed to happen, no error messages, nothing at all. On closer investigation, I noticed (using Windows Task Manager) that the installer would always terminate in a second or less.

So I jumped on to the Acronis support site, and tried to start up a chat session with a member of the support team. First disappointment was that theis support function was  available only during USA working hours – a BAD POLICY, Acronis, you should realize that you need to support your customers in all time zones and have offer chat feature 24/7 (that’s the reality of the Web, surely you know this).

Anyway, I waited up until after midnight and started up a chat. Without going into boring detail, the support session finally finished up at 3 AM Melbourne time with the support team member claiming that my Windows installer needed fixing/updating (I use 64-bit Windows 7), and asking me to download and run the Windows Installer 3.1 Redistributable (v2) but whn I tried this it “spat the dummy” and didn’t work anyway. I noticed on that page that a newer version (Windows Installer 4.5 Redistributable) was available.

However… being a suspicious type, I strongly suspected that I’d been given a “bum steer” about this supposed Windows installer Redistributable problem, so decided to do some alternative research before messing with Windows redistributables.

I did a Google search and found nobody reporting the same prpblem. A few people had mentioned (with this and earlier version of the True Image installer) that they got some error messages before the installer failed. However, as mentioned above, I didn’t even get a single error message.

In one of those eureka moments, I decided to peek inside the True Image installer executable, guessing that perhaps it was a self-extractor (zipped package) rather than a monolithic executable. And this is where my lucj changed, as per the following image:

Highlighted in yellow (1) is the True Image installer, and following the red arrow (2) inside 7-zip you’ll see that indeed there was and MSI Windows installer.

With fingers crossed for good luck, I selected the Open option (3) from the right-click context menu -- and much to my relief the installation commenced. After this, everything worked as painlessly as with earlier versions of True Image.

I hope this helps others of you out there. And Acronis, you need to examine this and fix up whatever problem there is with the monolithic installer package for True Image Home 2011  (the exe file).

Technorati Tags: Acronis True Image 2011,Installer,Tips,Workarounds

Earth Alerts ... Sometimes mother nature gets a little upset!

I just came across the Earth Alerts web site today, and found it fascinating.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, thunderstorms, floods, wildfires, landslides...

...these are the kinds of things our planet dishes out, which arouses human curiosity, fascination and fear.

I had never stumbled upon it before, despite a long-term interest in all things scientific and a web page dedicated in particular to oceanography, surfing, waves, tsunamis, earthquakes and the like -- to which page I have now added a link to Earth Alerts.

It comes in two flavors. Earth Alerts Version 2010 is a freeware Windows-based desktop program.

If you don’t want to install the above desktop application, then point your web nrowser at the online Google Maps version, which gives eye-opening results like the following:

 

Blimey, this is for a quiet day. Indonesia is suffering from continuing earthquakes and two volcanoes – one of the volcanoes being Anak Krakatau as if that hasn’t caused enormous devastation in the late 19th century (40,000 or more deaths).

There are volcanic eruptions and tremors all over the globe (but for some reason Iceland isn’t showing any activity at this moment, despite the enormous air traffic disruption that it caused earlier this year).

I’m really happy to be located in Melbourne, at the south-east corner of the Australian mainland (where the white hand-shaped icon appears). Australia is geologically a very stable continent, with few earthquakes strong enough to cause injury or damage.

I feel really safe here, except that maybe a Qantas jet engine might fall on me, just as one did on poor Donnie Darko …

TubeHome.com Video from everywhere!

Technorati Tags: Earth Alerts,Google Maps,Earthquake,Volcano,Tsunami,Qantas,Jet Engine Failure