A bit of a funny story about Windows Vista, or Microsoft systems in general. My friend’s laptop would not boot up anymore, so I took it to another friend who knows more about fixing laptops (I don’t use one myself, so I don’t have much experience).
Since there was an indication of hard drive problems when running BIOS system checks, we removed the (SATA) hard drive from the laptop, and connected it to his Vista PC. When it recognized it, it showed up as “F:” under “My Computer.” Right-click → Tools, and we got an option to “check the volume for errors”.
We selected “Automatically fix file system errors” (but not “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”). After clicking the “Check Now” button we waited for a while.
Then this message popped up
Some problems were found and fixed.
Any files that were affected by these problems were moved to a folder named “Found”.
We spent quite some time looking for this folder named “Found”. (Since it was his PC I didn’t want to get too involved in the search). We never found it. Was it supposed to be on his PC, or on the laptop’s harddrive? Why wouldn’t the message say explicitly just were that folder is?
(With the harddrive placed back in the laptop, it booted again. So that was good.)
What is behind a door on which is written:
FLEVATOP
This morning Google’s search results don’t work.
Let’s say you search Google for water. Then:
Each result has a warning under its link “This site may harm your computer”:
Clicking on the link doesn’t take your browser to the page as usual, but brings up an error message.
Clicking on the “This site may harm your computer link” produces a help page with the title “Concerns About Web Search Results: Results labeled ‘This site may harm your computer’”:
So now I search Google for “Concerns About Web Search Results: Results labeled ‘This site may harm your computer‘”. The first result is a Google support page at
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=45449
But accessing that page leads to another error (no screen shot):
We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
What a mess!
Questions
- Should visiting any web page really “harm your computer”?
- On what basis would Google think that a web page is going to “harm your computer”? Does it take into account or even know what kind of computer you are using?
- If Google had reason to believe a web page were to “harm your computer”, should the page be really listed as a search result? (Less is more?)
- If a search result page is not marked with the warning, would you blame Google if you then visited the search result page and your computer came out “harmed”?
- Are these search result page getting too crowded altogether? craigslist has barely changed their listing format and they’re doing just fine.
Update
Of course, this was a temporary glitch. According to google’s blog, “the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m. [PST]“. (So I ran into this just towards the end, around 7:20). The problem’s root cause is given as:
“Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in [to a list of bad URL's] as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs”.
And it wasn’t StopBadWare.org’s list as Google had originally posted. (The two organizations work together on this list). Well, mistakes happen …
For the solution to the January 13 puzzle please visit
(In case of “broken link”, a copy is at the Internet Archive)
It was solved within a few hours by the rec.puzzle newsgroup crowd.
The whole family went to Hornby Island for the weekend, where we have a little house. The weather forecast had been “sun”, but instead it was foggy. Usually one thinks of fog as obscuring the view, but I found it actually makes it easier to see! That’s because so much is blended out.
But fog also produces real effects. Here is a photo of the trees next to our lot. I tried to reproduce Richard Cole’s dramatic paintings. (Richard is a professional painter and used to live on the next block on Adanac Street in Vancouver – his son and our daughters are friends).
Trees in the neighbour's lot
Then here is a photo of birds gathering on poles stuck in the water (a dock that didn’t last). I managed to catch one while in the air, which isn’t that easy with these modern digitial cameras, since they need quite a while from click to capture. The grass is green in the foreground – but everything else is black and grey.
Birds on poles
And finally, a series of photos showing the ferry approaching out of the dark:
No ferry yet
Ferry light grey
Ferry clearer
Didn't get much clearer
Here’s a very difficult puzzle; it might take a day or more to solve it, I would think.
What is this?
A A A B A D A E A G A H A I A L A M A N A R A S A T A W A X A Y B A B E B I B O B Y D E D O E D E F E H E L E M E N E R E S E T E X F A F E G O H A H E H I H M H O I D I F I N I S I T J O K A K I L A L I L O M A M E M I M M M O M U M Y N A N E N O N U O D O E O F O H O I O M O N O P O R O S O W O X O Y P A P E P I Q I R E S H S I S O T A T I T O U H U M U N U P U S U T W E W O X I X U Y A Y E Y O Z A
Answer: next week.
I am Stephan Wehner, a mathematician and software developer, live with my partner Tamara in Vancouver, Canada, and devote most of my free time to my two daughters Astrid and Isabella.
This blog is meant firstly, to consolidate my previous home page, which became quite scattered over the years. Then also, the WordPress blogging software makes it a lot easier to maintain a website. Some ordinary blog-articles may appear in the future, but probably not frequently or regularly.
Cheers,
Stephan