Technitard

If you own an Acer Aspire PC running Windows Vista, you are no stranger to problems and frustration. Microsoft, in it’s infinite greed, decided to release a basic home version of Windows Vista that was completely useless. It did this so PC builders such as Acer would be compelled to fork over an additional 10% for the premium version of Vista. Which they did. Acer, however, did not take into account the additional memory requirements of the Vista Premium, and unloaded a bunch of underpowered computers that do not run satisfactorily as purchased. There is a pending class action lawsuit to address this ripoff, fraud, or whatever you want to call it. But I digress.

If you attempt to install MS Outlook Enterprise on your system, but every time you start an Office application, you have to go through a lengthy configuration process, this is probably what is happening – > When you purchased your Acer system, you had the trial version of MS Outlook installed. This installation had an add in in an Acer application called eDataSecurity Management. When you uninstalled the trial version of Outlook, this add in was not uninstalled. Now, when you start your shiney new Outlook Enterprise, your add in triggers configuration based on the old trial version of Outlook.

Solution: The quick answer is to uninstall Acer eDataSecurity Management. The more lengthy, and probably better solution, would be just to remove the add in. A subject for another post.

I have an HP 2550L Color Laser Printer, and I was defrauded when I purchased it. Nowhere on the box or in the sales literature did it say that the printer would stop working when counter chips glued to the toner cartridges and imaging drum reach some arbitary number. Not when the toner cartridges are empty, or the imaging drum produces degraded quality. Just when the counter reaches a number determined by HP, apparently to force you to buy supplies at an increased rate. So when you see the flashing orange light, bend over and smile!

There are three remedies for this fraud.

1) Make HP pay you for the waster toner and imaging drum impressions they force you to throw away. Good luck with that.

2) Reset the counter on you toner cartridges or imaging drum. This sounds promising, but I couldn’t get it to work. If you would like to try though, here’s the procedure (remember this did not work for me, and MAY mess up your printer, so use at your own risk. It had absolutely to effect on my printer, but was claimed to have worked for others):

1 Turn the printer off.
2 Press and hold the GO button (blue-green).
3 Turn the printer on and continue to hold the GO button (about 30 seconds).
4 After the Go, Ready, and Attention Leds all turn on, continue holding until the Attention and Ready leds switch off (GO led still on).
5 Keep pressing the GO button AND now keep pressing the red button (about 15 seconds) until the 3 leds stop blinking.
6 Release GO and red buttons.Reset is done.
7 You may have to re-install HP drivers from CD . You can now continue printing without changing drum or toner.

You may have to follow this procedure many times until you get the timing exactly right. I gave up after 10, and went on the the next option, which did the trick nicely.

3) Buy an after market chip. These will cost you under $10 including shipping. All you have to do is pry the old chip off with a screwdriver, then apply the new self-adhesive chip to the cartridge or drum. Worked like a charm for me, and sure beat paying $200 to replace a perfectly good imaging drum.

It all started when I noticed that my Bing Local business listing was still pending review, 2 months after I verified my address by mail. Not only was my local web design business not listed when I searched “Pleasanton Web Design,” but neither was any other web design company in Pleasanton. Web design companies in Livermore, Fremont, Sunnyvale and Alameda were the closest Bing could come up with. I wrote about it on my blog. To make a long story shorter, I titled the article “Bing Local Search Drives Traffic to YellowPages.com by Sucking.” Do I have proof that it is deliberate? No. Is it happening? Sure looks like it to me.

If not one pleasanton web design company is listed in a Bing local search for “pleasanton web design,” I’m obviously not the only person who is having problems with Bing Local. As a sidenote, try searching “Bing Local Sucks” on Google, and Google will remove the word “local” from your search automatically. You have to click on a link at the bottom to have the word included, even though you typed it in the search box.

As I am accustomed to do, I checked my rank on Google for the term “Bing Local Yellowpages.com” the next day to see how I was indexed. I had a preliminary hit on page one, really the Digg of my article. The next day, however the Digg listing was gone from the Google index, as I determined by searching the exact title of the article with quotes. The article itself has not been indexed, which is not that unusual as it’s been less than two weeks, and it can take that long. I have a number of blog posts written since that have been indexed and are ranking well, but I’ll give it another week before I suggest that the listings might have been removed.

Can a huge corporation pressure a search engine like Google to remove unfavorable information from it’s index? If so, is this censorship? Search engines have a lot of power in shaping our view of the world by controlling the information we see. If accurate, negative reviews or other embarrassing information is removed from the search engines, it does a disservice to everyone, except those unscrupulous businesses who would prey on people as long as they can fly under the radar.

Google has a new “feature” or ”function” or “f*ck you,” depending on your mindset. When searching using a multiple word term, sometimes the results will be delivered with one of the terms left out. You are informed of this by a “Tip” at the bottom of the results page that says “These results do not include the word (your word here) …”

Example:

1. “Let me type these three words in, and Google will serve the results I am looking for.”

2. “So far so good! Look how many hits I have for my three search words that I typed in and which are conveniently listed for me by my friends at Google”

3. “WTF!?! No wonder this S.E.R.P. was C.R.A.P. Google left out the middle search term, and informed me with a small “Tip” at the BOTTOM of the SERP, which contradicts the “Results” statement at the TOP of the SERP.”

Yes, the “Tip: These results do not include the word ” thing is a travesty. Is Google going the way of Microsoft with their “Vista” and their “Bing?” Or is there a something else going on here. Let me know what you think.

A number of people I know have been deciding not to renew their AT&T  Yellow Pages.com online advertising contracts. I’ve consistently heard two reasons:

1) They are really expensive
2) They do not get significant traffic or leads from the service.

I also have personal experience with AT&T online advertising. I was once a customer myself.

When Bing launched, I immediately went to their local business center and signed up for a listing. By the second week in June I had verified my mailing address. By the second week in August, my listing was still pending review.

I have a web design business located in Pleasanton California,  so I think it would be appropriate for my listing to show up as a local listing on Bing for the search “Pleasanton Web Design.” It does in the top 4 slots of both Google and Yahoo.

Unfortunately Bing’s results for the same search contain not one listing of a business located in Pleasanton. In fact, only one of the four has the same area code as Pleasanton:

No Results in the Same City

Why? Well, lets say I was a searcher looking for a local Pleasanton Web Design company, and all I see in Bing’s local listings are businesses out of the area. Might I be more likely to click on the “more listings” link? I think so.

Once I click on the “more listings” link, I am immediately presented with 3 sponsored links from YellowPages.com, then 10 listings, none of which are located in Pleasanton, then 3 more YellowPages.com ads.

Yellowpages.com ads on Bing

In fact, if you can believe this blogger  “the traffic to Yellowpages.com coming from Microsoft’s search engine more than doubled since the Bing launch.” That’s good news for Yellowpages.com. Many of their customers are ready to jump ship. In this tight economy, they are finally asking the question: “Why am I paying so much money for so few clicks, when I can go to Adwords and get much better bang for my buck?”  Well, maybe if the YellowPages.com sales people can show some decent traffic to their customers through this partnership with Bing, they can retain more of them. How long can they, or will they keep this up? Your guess is as good as mine.

This partnership is also good news for Bing, who is probably getting a pretty penny for those Yellowpages.com clicks. Certainly more than they would get if someone were to click on my Bing Local Business listing. If it existed, that is.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the Firefox browser, and find many of the third-party extensions very useful, if not indispensible. The first problem is that is loads SLOW! Very slow. Disabling extensions and all the other hoops they have you jump through doesn’t seem to help. It also hogs a lot of memory at times for no apparent reason, so not only can I do nothing on Firefox, I can do nothing on my compute until I force quit it.

The second problem is that I do my Internet-facing tasks on a limited user account. Everything is fine until Firefox needs to be updated. Of course it won’t update on the limited user account, but even if I “Run As” and administrator account and update, I still get the “can’t update” error message always and forever, from then on. The most promising solution I’ve seen so far (i.e. the one I haven’t tried yet, and therefore hasn’t failed) is running Firefox as a limited user from and administrator account. The problem is, I do a lot of Internet facing activities all the time, not just from Firefox, and don’t WANT to use an admin account unless it is absolutely necessary.

I suppose if I have a free day at some point, I can troubleshoot Firefox slow loading, or run Firefox on a limited account, but until then I’ll just use Internet Exploder and Google Chrome, which have neither of the problems I have experienced with Firefox

Elgg is a pretty good open source social networking application. I found an implementation of an older version here http://www.fanclubhelper.com. Looks like the site is still in development or something, but it shows the potential for Elgg. I especially like the Social Distortion and Cacti Widders pages!

Users can add their own band pages, start their own blogs, insert video and more. Pretty cool!

I like to look at the little graph that shows how many visitors I have, but why does Google Analytics tell me I am reaching zero percent of my goals all the time? It makes me feel bad!

Well then, just set up a goal and you will feel better. Start with a contact form submission.

1. Go to the Google Analytics dashboard and find the site that is bugging you and click “Edit” on the right-hand side.
2. Second box down labeled “Goal Conversions and Funnels” pick one of the unconfigured goals and click ”Edit” under settings.
3. Goal On? Duh
4. Match Type: You are using seo friendly static-looking URLs right? Good job. Use exact match. Otherwise use one of the other ones that will sort out your crap.
5. You have a thank you page for your form don’t you? Well type or paste the URL in the ”Goal URL” box. 
6. Goal Name: Whatever you want it to be. Like “Form Submission.”
7. Case sensitive: I guess if you have some kind of crap-ass scripting showing in your URL – go ahead and make it case sensitive.
8. Goal Value: This is for ROI, especially if you are an Adwords user. If you aren’t, guess at your ROI. If you are, I can’t help you. Sorry.

Forget about the Funneling. You need to walk before you can run. Let’s take that up at a later date.

How about this for an invitation to a hack – “This website is based on Joomla – here’s the copyright date, now guess the version?” That’s about what you are saying to would-be hackers by leaving that damn generator meta tag in the head of your html document. Get rid of it already! I’m tired of looking at it.

1. Open includes/frontend.php
2. Find this code: $mainframe->addMetaTag( ‘Generator’, $_VERSION->PRODUCT . ‘ – ‘ . $_VERSION->COPYRIGHT);
3. Delete it.
4. Done.
5. Celebrate with a burrito and a beer.

You are now a stealthy Joomla! fella.

Technitard is a blog that will cover the technical aspects of life here in Silicon Valley, California.