Time affects Truth

Documents with Dates can be better qualified for the truthfulness of their statements. Only pronouncements of absolute, immutable truth may dispense with time. The validity of temporally dependent information changes trivially.

Shake off the parasite creatures of digital advertising

To keep your PC or laptop creature free of excessive advertising fleas, and other such undesirable digital creatures, the simple solutions of a custom HOSTS file is excellent.

I was browsing the www.tomshardware.com site for information about Intel Core i7 motherboards, and I felt overwhelmed by the excessive assault of advertising. Tom has apparently sold his site to an aggregator, and they have diluted the content:advertising ratio to a ridiculous point.

The solution is to "trick" Tom's site, by diverting its attempts to fetch ads. When a web page at Tom's tells my browser to get advertising from annoying.ad.doubleclick.net, it has to rely on DNS service, if my own computer's HOSTS file doesn't know where "annoying.ad.doubleclick.net" is. And most HOSTS files don't.

The trick is to list in your HOSTS file where to go when Tom's ad-overloaded site want to get its overwhelming and undesirable commercial advertising distractions. Send it to a source that will give it nothing. That way, the desirable content you want to view is unencumbered with parasitic and superfluous drivel.

A good place to get the details on how it’s done and get a good list of sites you would want to block this way: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

UI hassles in Garmin land

The user interface in Garmin's nüvi satellite navigation devices is good, but it could be much better.

¿ Why must one laboriously type the city name, again and again, to specify an address, when perhaps 99% of the time it will be in either 1) the city I'm in already or 2) one of the neighboring ones ? ¿ Why isn't there a convenient list of the most likely choices ? ¿ Why doesn't it default to the current city we find ourselves in if I make no choice ?

¿ Why must I press BACK umpteen many times to get to the navigation map when I am deep in the sub-menus ? ¿ Why is there not a MAP button available at every level in the menu tree ?
(After talking with Garmin support, the did reveal that if one presses and holds the BACK button, it will skip directly to the home page, at least.)

And when I go to "Favorites", the logical order of choices on that list should be by most-requested, (like a top-40 music list), not by what is closest. At least the choice of this ordering should be a configurable item in Setup.

And what about street names ? When a poor user mis-types a street name, give them some slack! Use Donald Knuth's SOUNDEX algorithm or something similar to propose the closest matches. Why not make a stab a finding nearby streets that are similar to what the bloke is attempting to spell ??

Go GARMIN !!!

The Ancient Dame

The Ancient Dame
2600 was her name.
A Hitachi processor made her heart tick to fame.
Francisco shortened made her apellation tame
But what was it ?
An electrical hiccup in the line ?
A night full of wine ?
She lost her table
to connect she was not able
and so Sangoma came into the fable

Spyware Elimination

My computer is my domain. I want to know what goes on here. Microsoft provides some sort of list with the "Windows Task Manager", but it is wanting. In particular, the svchost listings are practically useless, since there are so many of them and they are non-specific.

How can I know if a process or thread running in my machine is something I do want to be running ?

The Task Manager window should be the primary control on the activities in the PC, and the primary way to end malfeasance, malware and viruses.