Knol by Google
July 23, 2008 Posted by James Oliver
Today, I found out about a site kinda like Squidoo or Hubpages. It’s called Knol by Google and a Knol is a unit of knowledge.
To test it’s effectiveness, I’ve created a knol entitled “Why Update PC Drivers?” to see how quickly it gets search engine results. If you’re reading this, please feel free to check out the Knol and post a comment on there.
We all know that Squidoo, and Hubpages are loved by Google. I wonder how much love they give their own service? 
Guess time will tell.
Been a while since a tech writing. I will post something soon if I find something really cool.
SOLFAN Consulting - Computer Repair, Networking, IT Consulting in Glen Rose, Granbury, Cleburne and Stephenville
July 16, 2008 Posted by James Oliver
This is a plug for my company where I do on-site computer repair in Granbury, Glen Rose, Stephenville, and Cleburne, TX.
When I first started my company over 5 years ago, SOLFAN wasn’t used as much as it is now. For those just reading this for the first time, I named my company this after stressing out over a really cool technological sounding name. I finally settled on “Sick Of Looking For A Name“.
I’ve done remote support all over the world for clients and friends. Primarily, I focus on on-site support in Granbury and the surrounding areas. Please visit my Services Page on my company website to find out more about the services I provide to my clients. Being in a rural area, it’s hard to list all the things I take care of.
Besides Computer Consulting, I also do Internet Marketing, SEO, and some small website maintenance.
Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the new website!
RegCure Scanner Review
Posted by James Oliver
RegCure is an application that scans your registry and cleans out all of the “crap” in your registry. This could be links to files that are missing. Perhaps you uninstalled something, and reminants were left in the registry. This application cleans all that junk out.
I’ve known it’s necessary for quite some time and could see how this might be useful, but I never figured I needed it. But, being that I like to try out new apps so that I can make the best recommendations for my clients, I try out a bunch of applications on a test machine I use.
It’s one of those download it, scan it, it found a load of “bad stuff” in my registry. Ok. Let’s clean it up… DOH! Gotta pay for it. Ok.. so I need to test this. I bust out the ol card and pay for RegCure. It finishes up the cleanup. And I restart the system. It had a noticable speed increase on my system. I was actually suprised. That was my test box. I decided I’d try it out on my main system that I run CCleaner (Registry clean option and file cleanup) and other applications as well.
RegCure still found crap on there. So, I’ve got it. It cleans the registry. It does in fact make your system run faster. I didn’t have any noticable errors, but I’m sure it would take care of actual errors since they proved themselves in other claims.
With all that being said, if you want to check it out, get it over at RegCure Scanner.com
If you’ve found this post interesting, by all means, bookmark the heck out of it.
Make FireFox Lightning Fast!
February 12, 2008 Posted by James Oliver
The following will be helpful to broadband users:
Step 1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return.
Scroll down and look for the following entries (it’s in alphabetical order):
- network.http.pipelining
- network.http.proxy.pipelining
- network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Step 2. Alter the entries as follows:
- Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true” (by dbl-clicking)
- Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true” (by dbl-clicking)
- Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. (This enables it to make 30 requests at once.)
Step 3. Lastly right-click anywhere in the whitespace and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0. (This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.)
By default, FireFox will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining, it will make several requests at once giving it a major performance boost.
You should see a MUCH faster response from FireFox now!
For more visual help, see the video tutorial in the members area of PCSetupGuide.com
Don’t Let Your Bank Account Be Exploited!
February 9, 2008 Posted by James Oliver
In the early part of 2007, a friend of mine was one of the speakers at the MySQL convention in Las Vegas (I believe). While attending, he was able to listen to speakers from companies like Google, Yahoo, etc.
One of the things he learned and brought back to me was an exploit using javascript that allows a website owner to check through visited links (history), for websites. This can be useful for seeing if they’ve been to competition, and then you could even redirect them to a page that compares against the competition.
However, a more sinister and likely use to a less than ethical webmaster might be to check for banking institutions (Chase, Bank of America, PayPal, etc.) to see which you visit. Once they have this information, they’ll know which site to target you for.
This script could be loaded into a 1px X 1px iframe within a page and never even noticed by the end-user.
What can you do to protect yourself?
Use separate browsers. You can use one for your regular surfing/business, but use another browser for your banking. Dedicate a browser for your banking. There are tons of choices out there. Opera, FireFox, Eudora, Flock, etc. The browsing history does not cross browsers, so the “attacker” would not be able to find your browsing history. This is the best and most solid solution.
If you are a dedicated FireFox user, you can add the SafeHistory Extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fi…x/addon/1502) and this will be helpful if you only want to use this browser.
There are no extentions like this for Internet Explorer because they don’t really care about security because they’re Microsoft and no one would ever exploit their browser
To Read More… Visit http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/tools/spyjax/ (Not my site. It’s just more information on the topic)
Hope this information is beneficial to you guys.
