Archive for April, 2009

• Log On – Make the braai hotter

• Log Off – The braai is too hot

• Monitor – Keeping an eye on the braai

• Download – Get the firewood off the bakkie

• Hard drive – Trip back home without any cold beer

• Keyboard – Where you hang the bakkie and bike keys

• Windows – What you shut when it’s cold

• Screen – What you shut in the mosquito season

• Byte – What mosquitoes do

• Bit – What the damn mosquitoes did

• MegaByte – What the blerry mosquitoes do at the lake

• Chip – A snack food

• Micro Chip – What’s left in the bag after they ate all your chips

• Modem – What you did to the lawns

• Software – Plastic knife and fork you get at KFC

• Hardware – Real stainless steel knives and forks from Pick ‘n Pay

• Mouse – What eats the grain in the shed

• Mainframe – What holds the shed up

• Web – What spiders make

• Cursor – An old ballie who swears a lot

• Search Engine – What you do when the bakkie won’t start up

• Yahoo – What you shout when the bakkie starts up

• Server – The oke at the pub that brings out the lunch

• Mail Server – The oke that brings the post

• User – Your neighbour who keeps borrowing things

The Computer Guy

Just the mere mention of the word causes the kind of facial contortions one associates with stepping in a big, steaming pile of doggie shizzle. We’ve all been there at some point in our sad, digital lives…after rebooting more times than a bunch of thimble wearing elves in a cobblers den…you’re forced to make that call to the dreaded helpline only to be greeted by the mind numbing sounds of Pan Pipes!….then after hanging on the line long enough to miss seeing your children grow up you finally talk to an actual human being only to be patched through to the wrong department. This carries on indefinitely until you
a) smash the headset against the wall which gives you a nice warm, fuzzy feeling for about 3 seconds.
b) lose your mind and have to be peeled off the handset a drooling, jibbering wreck of a human being.
c) Press 9 for the next available operator because in your Oprah induced optimism you believe that this giant, money sucking corporation only has your best interests at heart.
…….and by this time the internet can be beamed directly into your brain and Pan Pipes is the name of a highly addictive drug found in most dance clubs!

If you work in a corporate environment you probably have to deal with a helpdesk on a daily basis. The trick with a corporate helpdesk is to phone armed with as much information about your particular problem as possible. You have to understand that most helpdesk personel probably have no IT experience to speak of, they’ve learn’t what they know from being at the helpdesk, solving the same queries day in and day out which usually consists of resetting forgotten passwords and telling you to reboot your machine.

Once you’ve explained to the person at the helpdesk what your problem is and you’re greeted with a deathly hush your query will be allocated to a network engineer who is one cup of coffee away from a caffeine induced aneurism. Once again you need to explain in detail what is happening on your screen…. Unfortunately, saying “ it was working fine an hour ago” is the reason why the evening news is littered with shooting incidents with shocked neighbours explaining what a quiet boy he was, always working on his computer. Seriously, the more info your Techie has the quicker he can figure out what the problem is. Also remember to check that your network cable is plugged in properly, even if it is plugged in, unplug it, wait 10 seconds and plug it back in again and see if the green and orange link lights appear, if they don’t you’ll know straight away that your network connection is faulty. Don’t forget to do the obligatory shut down and reboot before you phone, it surprising how many times that works.

If you’re a customer phoning an Internet Service Provider helpdesk that’s a different kettle of fish altogether, Telkom being the worst of the bunch, being a monopoly unfortunately hasn’t done much to improve their customer service levels, if you’re one of their ADSL customers you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you do happen to own an ADSL Modem there are a few things you can test before subjecting yourself to the Helpdesk. Firstly check that the ADSL link light on the modem is a solid green colour, if the light constantly flashes on and off it means that there is no connection between your modem and the Telkom exchange and you will unfortunately have to phone them so they can check the physical line, just remember that when your modem is turned on for the first time or you unplug the telephone line and plug it back into the modem it will usually flash for about 30 secs while it tries to establish a connection with the Telkom exchange.

If you do have a solid ADSL Link light but still can’t access the internet it could mean one of two things, perhaps your modem has managed to reset itself to the factory default settings which means that your ADSL username and password will have to be reconfigured via the modems control panel which I will explain how to do in a minute. The other problem could be that you’ve reached your bandwidth cap for the month and your internet access has been cut off until you either top up your account or wait til the end of the month for it to roll over. To check your bandwidth usage you should be able to go onto your service providers website ( yes, even if you have used up your cap ) and click on a link that should say something like “usage tracker” or “bandwidth meter”. If you’re a telkom customer you can go to this link: https://secure.telkomsa.net/titracker/ . You’ll need to put in your ADSL username and password before it will pull up the stats.

As I mentioned earlier, if your ADSL modem has been accidently reset you’ll have to log in to the modem itself to reconfigure your ADSL username an password. You can do this by going into your web broser and typing in the IP Address of your modem i.e http:192.168.01, if you don’t know your IP Address off hand click on the Start button, click Run, type in CMD, click OK and in the command prompt window type in IPCONFIG and hit enter, what you are looking for is the Default Gateway address, that is the IP Address of your ADSL Modem. Once you’ve typed that address into the address bar of your browser and hit enter a login box will appear asking for a username and password, don’t get confused between this username and your ADSL Username,, this one is purely to log you into the modem itself. The username and password is usually a combination of Admin, Administrator and Password by default you can always set it to something else once you’re in the configuration panel of the modem. Once you’ve logged in you should be able to click on the Wizard tab which will walk you through the process of configuring modem and entering your ADSL Username and Password.

If after all this you still can’t get your internet access running, give us a shout and we’ll be more than happy to come out to your premises and give you a hand.

later
The Computer Guy

It still amazes me that most small business’s are willing to fork out thousands of Rands for software that is freely available on the Internet that does everything they need it to do and more. What’s worse is that we’ve been conditioned to believe that if it’s free it must surely be inferior especially when it comes to software, no doubt the marketing genius who thought that one up is laughing all the way to the bank.

Maybe I’m a bit of a cheapskate but if I’m looking for some software either for a client or myself, the first thing I do is a “google” search to see if there’s a free software program that fills the criteria, 9 times out of 10 I find exactly what I’m looking for, it also gives me the chance to test the software out myself without having to open my wallet. You may have heard about the OpenSource movement…..for those who haven’t, it is basically a worldwide network of software programmers, network gurus and other computer geeks who collaborate via the Internet to write software that is freely available to anybody who’s interested…. to use, distribute, change and tinker with as long as those changes and improvements are made freely available to the community once again. The difference between “free” and OpenSource software is the licensing. A lot of programmers allow other people to use their software for free but won’t allow other programmers access to the underlying code of that particular programmer. With OpenSource software their is no licensing cost so you don’t have to worry about the Business Software Alliance dragging you from your home in the middle of the night because you didn’t bother to check if the software you have is legally licensed.

I use quite a bit of OpenSource software in my own business and have definitely saved myself a few bucks in the process. Here’s a list of programs I have on my Windows XP machine with a brief description of what each program does:

Mozilla Firefox: I love FireFox, as far as I’m concerned it’s the best Web Browser on the planet. I don’t know what I would do without tabbed browsing. What is tabbed browsing I hear you ask? Well for the uninitiated Ttabbed browsing lets you load Web pages in separate tabs of a single browser window, so you can jump between them quickly and easily instead of filling your desktop with new, unorganized browser windows. If you use Internet Explorer for web browsing you’ll know what I mean. Firefox also has a built in ad pop-up blocker and loads pages a lot faster than Internet Explorer does plus it doesn’t attract every single virus and spyware program under the sun due to the fact that it isn’t intergrated into the Operating System. Security holes are patched before you even realize you were at risk because you have a whole bunch of programmers from around the world checking and updating the code.

Thunderbird:is an e-mail client similar to Outlook Express except that it comes with a built in Junk Mail filter to block all that unwanted spam. You can also import all your mail and address lists from Outlook Express into Thunderbird at the click of a button.

OpenOffice: compares to the Microsoft Office Suite which includes things like Word ( for word processing ), Excel ( for spreadsheets ),PowerPoint ( for presentations ) and Access ( database ). The OpenOffice equivalents to those programs are: Writer ( for word processing ), Calc ( for spreadsheets ), Impress ( for presentations ) and Base ( database ). The great thing about OpenOffice is that it can read and save documents in the Microsoft Office formats i.e .doc, .xls, .ppt. It also comes with a built in PDF converter which means you can export any of your documents to .pdf which is fast becoming the standard of choice as far as reading documents goes. The only problem you may run into with OpenOffice is that sometimes it may not read a Microsoft Word or Excel document the same as it would in Microsoft Office. The reason for this is that Microsoft doesn’t like to play nice as far as Open Document Standards go because it’s more profitable for them to lock-in customers to a continuous upgrade cycle than to be compatible with other office applications, especially ones that are free.

PDF Creator: Now for those people still using Microsoft office, which doesn’t have a built in PDF Exporting tool, this is what you need to get. PDF Creator installs itself as a printer so when you want to create a .pdf file from an excel document for example all you need to do is go to File – Print – select the PDF Printer – click OK – and a dialog box pops where you can name you new .pdf file and where you would like to save it – click save – wait a second or two and voila you’ve just created a .pdf file from an Excel spreadsheet. The great thing about PDF Creator is that you can do this with just about any file you like.

Nvu: Nvu (pronounced N-view) is a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” website editor. If you can operate a word processor you can use Nvu, in fact I made this website with Nvu and I am certainly no Guru Web master. All it takes is a bit of time to get familiar with the interface and off you go. I took half an hour reading through the tutorial at thesitewizard and got started straight away, my idea was to keep it clean and simple. If you’re a small business not wanting to fork out big bucks to have a professional design your website, why not do it your self.

ClamWin Anti-Virus: As you guessed by the name, Clamwin is a free Anti-Virus scanner. The difference between Clamwin and other commercial Anti-Virus programs is that it is yet to incorporate a realtime scan engine, meaning you have to manually click on the scan button to do a scan or setup scanning schedules, either daily, weekly or monthly. However the developers of this software are busy writing the code for that as we speak so expect to see a realtime scan engine for ClamWin in the next few months. What I like about Clamwin is that it doesn’t hog resources like some of the more well known Anti-Virus packages out there, so you can load it on older machines without it slowing everything down to a crawl. The virus definition file sizes are lot smaller than more well know commercial programs. I know that Nortons’ virus update file is 10mb as opposed to 3mb for ClamWin which makes a big difference if you’re still on dial-up.

TurboCash: Looking for a free fully featured accounting package that compares to Pastel or Quickbooks? then look no further. TurboCash used to be a commercial package that was sold on the shelves of computer retail stores but the company that writes the software decided to OpenSource the code to increase their customer base and development resources. What that means is that you are free to download the program from their website and if you like you can pay a nominal fee for support or training. Their are quite a few TurboCash support consultants around the country, you can check the TurboCash website for a list of people in your area who I’m sure would be more than happy to help you get your books in order.

The Gimp: I know what you’re thinking…wasn’t that the leather clad dude stuck in a cellar on Pulp Fiction?…Yes but No…….GIMP stands for Graphic Image Manipulation Program. The Gimp is the OpenSource equivalent of Adobe Photoshop, it may not be as intuitive as Photoshop but it certainly isn’t lacking in power. If you’re willing to take a bit of time to learn how to use it properly and not willing to refinance your house to pay for a copy of Photoshop then the Gimp is definitely for you…..the program not the dude in the cellar!

These are just a few of the programs available to you for free courtesy of the OpenSource community. Enjoy

The Computer Guy