How to fix your computer freezing after the latest ZoneAlarm upgrade

After the latest ZoneAlarm update (I got it on Friday, May 28), my computer started slowing and freezing. I'm running Windows XP on a five-year-old computer, 2.8 GHz processor and 2 gigs of RAM. Not the best, but it had served me well right up until that upgrade.

Sometimes after boot-up, nothing would work. Like I'd click on something and after five minutes it still hadn't loaded, and even the Task Manager would freeze. I also started getting errors when launching Sims 3, "Application failed to initialize properly." I tried a system restore to before the ZoneAlarm upgrade, but that didn't help.

The ultimate solution ended up being to uninstall and reinstall the ZoneAlarm upgrade, but not installing all the components. Unfortunately I failed to write down the exact name of the interface items, but there's a window with three checkboxes asking what you want to install. The first checkbox is the regular firewall, I forget what the second is, and the third offers to put a ZoneAlarm security function in your Google toolbar. If you uncheck the second, the third is greyed out.

The first time around (which caused all the problems), I'd chosen all three. The second time around, I chose only the first of the three. The installation went smoothly and there have been no problems since.

In this blog's ongoing tradition of taking credit for everything...

After thoroughly enjoying Google Pacman on my speaker-less work computer, I came home to realize it has sound. This is inconvenient since I usually leave my browser open and on Google by default, so I asked them on Twitter if we can have a mute button.

Shortly thereafter, a mute button appeared. (It's in the bottom left corner.)

I can't find any googleable or tweeted evidence of anyone noticing the presence of a mute button before I sent the original tweet.

You're welcome :)

Open Letter to Blogger

Dear Blogger:

I would like to suggest a feature. You used to have a form to let me do this, but all I can find now is this publicly-viewable forum.

I don't want to post my feature suggestion in a public forum in case people laugh at it. I'm shy and insecure that way. I just want to be able to send it to you quietly, and if you laugh at it you'll do so where I can't see you.

I don't require support, I don't require a reply, I just want a way of getting my feature suggestion in front of the eyes of someone who might be able to do something about it, without having to show it to the whole world.

Please bring the form back so I can do just that.

"helped me alot in my college assignement"

In a recent post about the Star's apparent inconsistency between print and online as to standards for what constitutes graphic content, I received the following comment:

Anonymous said...

Good fill someone in on and this enter helped me alot in my college assignement. Gratefulness you on your information.

"Interesting," I thought, "that must be why every college program I've ever looked at has a mandatory English communications course." I then proceeded to continue going about my life normally.

Then, a bit later, on a post containing nothing but an inconsequential analogy, I received the following comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice dispatch and this enter helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you as your information.

"That's odd," I thought, "there's no possible way that post helped anyone with a college assignment." Then I realized that that comment sounded kind of familiar. So I went a-googling, and found 155,000 hits for "helped me alot in my college assignement."

Based on the first few I clicked on, all of them are anonymous comments, none of them link to anything. What kind of spam is this?

Things They Should Invent: load content before environment

Especially when using a slow computer or network, I often find myself staring at the header of a website while waiting for the actual content to load. The browser is processing the header and the sidebar and the widgets and the archives and the ads, and I don't care about any of that stuff. I just want to see the content.

So what we need is a new web standard: load content first. This would mean that the space in the template for content would be at the top of the template document, and would then be followed by the headers and sidebar and any in-body style sheets and widgets whatever other detritus is on the page. The result would be that if the page is loading slowly, we'd first see the content in the default font without the surrounding environment, and then the environment would appear as the page loads. Stuff might shift around as the page loads, but at least you could start reading the article right away instead of having to stare at the header while you wait for stuff to load.

The Amazon.ca / Eddie Izzard mystery

So I pre-ordered Eddie Izzard: Live from Wembley on Amazon.ca. The release date was yesterday. Normally when I preorder something from Amazon I receive it on the release date, or worst case it ships on the release date.

Then I receive an email from Amazon saying that there's a delay in my order, and the new ETA is Nov. 18 - Nov. 23. I appreciate the notice, but I'm super curious as to what exactly happen. Did they run out? Is there a flaw in the distribution chain? A brief perusal of the fandom doesn't turn up any other instances of this happening. Is it just me?

And to add to the mystery, there are now two Eddie Izzard: Live from Wembley DVDs on Amazon.ca: one released yesterday, which I ordered, and one with a January 2010 release date. I can't find any evidence of this second DVD with the January release date from any other retailer, including US Amazon.

This is all very odd. I've never had anything like this happen with Amazon, or with Eddie's material, or with preordered new releases of any sort.

Everyone look at the xkcd website today

Even if you normally read it through a feed reader, make sure to click through to the main page today.

It's beautiful!

I've posted so many analogies in my blog that it has become an analogy

There are some people who have the attitude "I can do X, so anyone should be able to do X." This often comes with connotations that the people who can do X are just being lazy, and if they'd be diligent they'd be able to do X just fine.

So here's my analogy:

I average two blog posts a day. (Yes, I've been lazy lately, but two a day is the mathematical average.) Approximately 50% of my posts (based on a random sampling of several archive pages) contain original creative or critical thinking (as opposed to being links, quizzes, youtubes, diary entries, liveblogging, or emotional angst). I've been keeping up this pace for years.

So before you go assuming that because you can do something anyone can, I'll ask you this:

Where's your blog?

Now I know that there are several people reading this who can blog at a steady rate. But I think we've all seen enough dead blogs to get the point.

"Microblogging site Twitter"

Sometimes when news articles refer to Twitter, the first mention describes it as "microblogging site Twitter".

Is there anyone - even one single person in the world - who knows what microblogging is but doesn't know what Twitter is?

I did hear of microblogging in passing before I became familiar with Twitter, but the concept didn't make sense to me. Then, later on, when I found out that various famous people I want to stalk like and admire were tweeting, I went and checked out their Twitter feeds and from that got a sense of what Twitter is. And from this, I groked the concept of microblogging.

But there has been no point in my internet experience where my concept of what Twitter is could ever have been clarified by describing it as a "microblogging site."

Real-life Things They Should Invent

Voting for Project 10 to the 100 is finally open! You can vote here!

I'm trying to decide which one to vote for. Obviously my first thought is either the one that will give the most help to the most people, or the one that would be most beneficial to me personally. But then I started wondering whether I should also be thinking about feasibility? Which of these projects can actually be achieved (or have significant progress be made) with $2 million? Which of these projects could Google actually make happen (as opposed to being dependent on external factors)? So I'm going to have to give it more thought before I vote.

You should go check out the finalists and vote too!

Things Google Should Invent: gcourriel (or would that be courrig?)

I was verbally giving someone my email address in French, and without thinking I simply uttered "gmail" exactly like I pronounce it in English, without bothering to spell it out.

Not a huge problem since most people are aware of gmail. However, as we all learned in Grade 4 French, the way we pronounce the English letter G sounds closest to the French pronunciation of the letter J, so it could have been misinterpreted as "jmail."

The inherently English name of gmail is a problem for non-English speakers who nevertheless wish to use this very convenient email system. In English, we just say "gmail" and it's obvious how to spell it, but in other languages it might be less instinctive.

So what Google should do buy a bunch of domains that serve as translations of the word "gmail." For example, the French would be either gcourriel.com or courrig.com, whichever sounds better to the Francophone ear. This would increase the number of gmail addresses available and give people the option of having multiple addresses to accommodate multiple languages. The ideal implementation would be to give the owner of each gmail.com address right of first refusal for the equivalent gcourriel.com address (et cetera for each language), but most likely having multiple parallel email addresses in different languages would only be of interest to a very small proportion of users.

To what extent is the delay in Google's Project 10 to the 100 a translation problem?

Project 10 to the 100 was originally supposed to be open for voting last January, but they say they got more response than they ever anticipated and it's taking way longer than expected to sort through the responses.

I wonder to what extent this is a translation problem?

They accepted submission in, and I quote, "English, German, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Korean, Russian, Swahili, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Arabic, Hindi, Greek, Czech, Hebrew, Danish, or Thai". If I'm counting right, that's 25 languages. So they all need to be translated into the preferred language of each of the people helping select the top 100, and then the top 100 all need to be translated into each of those 25 languages. Skimping on the translation will prevent ideas from being assessed fairly.

If I recall correctly, the submissions had to be very short. On one hand, this reduces the translation workload because there are fewer words. On the other hand, fewer words means less context or background, so it may well happen that there are cases where the translator honestly does not understand the problem they're attempting to solve, especially since Google seems smart enough to use target-language-mother-tongue translators, which means the person translating Thai into English may well be living in the states and not grok the, say, technical problem with rice paddies that the proposal is attempting to solve.

Also, I wonder if the word count requirements were the same for all languages? How would this affect the quality of the ideas? How would this affect the quality of the translations? (Imagine translating English to French without exceeding the English word count!)

Open Letter to Firefox

Dear Firefox:

Please let me have different Google accounts logged in in different browser windows. Internet Explorer lets me do that!

If you're changing your twitter location to Tehran

If you're changing your twitter location to Tehran, please consider writing it in Farsi. Not all Iranians are going to be tweeting in English.

I believe this is how you say Tehran, Iran in Farsi:

تهران ، ایران

It should be copy-pastable.

I'm not 100% certain - I can't read Farsi - but Google's Farsi interface doesn't correct the spelling and it returns results for things located in Tehran.

If the Farsi is wrong, please post the correct spelling in the comments and I'll update this post and my twitter.

Edited to add: It occurs to me that if you were actually IN Iran, you wouldn't write "Tehran, Iran" as your location. You'd just write Tehran, like how I just wrote Toronto. So here's Tehran in Farsi: تهران

Things They Should Invent: universal standard exemption from Godwin's Law

The problem with the generally-accepted application of Godwin's Law is that it assumes that a comparison with nazis is always hyperbole.

This is not necessarily true. I'm sure we can all envision, even if only hypothetically, a situation in which the best possible analogy is a comparison with nazis, and discourse would suffer from not having this analogy readily available.

Someone - ideally a committee of big-name internet people with a wide variety of political opinions - needs to standardize criteria under which a comparison with nazis is apt. If these criteria apply, people aren't allowed to shut down their opponents by shouting Godwin at them.

Twitter is bringing back the good old days

In the olden days of the internet, it was kind of socially acceptable to email someone just because you saw their posting somewhere and had something to say. There weren't that many people on the internet, so the fact that you were both on the internet was very nearly a suitable pretense for initiating contact. As Miss Manners puts it, the (virtual) roof was an introduction.

Then, of course, the internet got bigger and that became unworkable. Now you have to sort of establish a relationship in some online community before you can start talking to someone one-on-one.

But I think Twitter is bringing back this "roof is an introduction" idea. You can totally tweet at someone just on the basis that they're on Twitter. The low-commitment aspects of Twitter, the very things people say makes it rude - the fact that it's only 140 characters, the fact that Twitter etiquette makes following and replying purely optional - are what makes this possible. If everyone emailed everyone on a whim with no basis for introduction, we'd quickly be overwhelmed. But 140-character messages that it's acceptable to ignore make it once again manageable.

For example, Wil Wheaton recently tweeted a question at the Twitter spam team. I was interested in this question too, so I replied asking him to retweet their answer if they send him one. That's totally allowed and not particularly presumptuous. Wil didn't reply to me, which is also totally allowed and not the least bit rude. Wil Wheaton also happens to be my first adolescent celebrity crush. But because we're working within a 140 character limit, because there's no requirement to introduce oneself (i.e. no "Um, hi, sorry to bother you, but I loved you in Star Trek and I read your blog all the time...") there was no room for fangirl awkwardness. It's simply sharing information with another internet user, like back in 1994.

YouTube language settings problem

In an attempt to achieve more language-neutral browser behaviour, I added multiple languages to my browser's language settings.

Problem: YouTube consistently and automatically sets its interface to the third language in my list. I've experimented, I've shifted things around in the list, it's always the third language. The first two are English and French, which YouTube does speak, but it skips right to the third.

Weird, eh?

Things They Should Invent: language-neutral browser settings

A Google search led me to a French-language government page, and a dialogue box popped up helpfully noting that my browser settings had English selected as primary language and asking if I'd like to go to the English version of the page.

I can totally see how that would be helpful for normal people, but I was looking specifically for terminology that could be found on the French-language page.

I have the same problem with Google. It localizes its results to the user's interface language, with the assumption that if you're using Google in English you'd probably prefer English-language results.

Again, extremely helpful for normals, but hinders my terminological research. Every time I want to verify whether a term is idiomatic in a given language as opposed to being a calque from another language, I have to change my Google interface to the language in question.

Solution: a language-neutral browser setting. In the bit where you set your language preferences, there's a "Neutral" choice. Web sites read this and make no effort to accomodate your language preferences, instead letting you read whatever language you've landed on. Google reads this and delivers language-blind results.

The vast majority of people in the world could ignore this and go about their lives normally. But the few of us who need it could make use of it, and the result would be better quality translations, terminology, and linguistic research for everyone. It would also slow the anglicization of other languages because it would neutralize the annoying habit of US English being considered a default and enable us to land upon phraseology that is more idiomatic in other languages.

Best tweet ever

My new goal in life is to one day twitter something as awesome as this.

I wonder if Twitter makes people more likely to give others the benefit of the doubt

I've heard before people theorizing that twitter and texting make people rude because messages must necessarily be so terse.

I'm wondering if the opposite might be true - I wonder if extensive use of twitter and/or texting will make people more likely to give others the benefit of the doubt.

When you receive an ambiguous message on twitter, you practically have to assume the sender's intentions are benign specifically because of the restrictions of the medium. The whole thing would have imploded by now if people didn't. So I wonder if a person who is accustomed to that medium will be more likely to give people IRL the benefit of the doubt on statements that could be ambiguous.