zemo.co.uk

Well I have recently gone through my server logs and found this IP to access this website 1,920 times. This hostname seems to be a Russian search engine, but I think they have their bot setup a bit wrong!! Nearly 2,000 page views in my view is totally un-acceptable in the space of 3 months for any bot. The bot can only access plain text on my site, but it is still a lot of bandwidth data being used in that amount of connections. I have banned the IP for data mining and inconsiderate bandwidth usage of hosting services.

IP: 87.250.255.242
Hostname: spider08.yandex.ru
Location: Russian Federation

Well I have become a qualified Android Developer, so am currently looking for new app ideas to create. I am currently working on two applications at the moment but will be creating as many as possible over the next year or so. I plan to create usable apps, if you have any ideas please feel free to contact me. I am looking for all app ideas which have not yet made it to the app market.

Well I find this really funny actually that Apple has tried to bring out a new iPhone to be in competition with the Android phones that have been far more superior and better in hardware for over a year now. What I find even funnier is the people who bought the new iPhone yet ignore the facts about the differences between the iPhone and the Android.

External Source

Makes for good reading, I think Apple have tried to hard to try to be the best when clearly they are not. The main things I look for now when buying a phone are: 1) Pricing 2) Development Ability 3) Hardware. While the iPhone is quite similar now to Android phones it is still 3x the price.

Well I have been thinking about this for about a year now, I always check headers of scam emails and 98% of the emails come from China, is this because of bot nets or just because the people running the scams are actually from China? It’s sad to say that today I have blocked the whole country from emailing any of my email accounts. I receive on average 10 World Of Warcraft phishing scam emails every day on 1 of my email accounts. Until something is done with the security and laws on phishing scams I will continue to block whole countries if I have to. I will be logging all the IP’s which these emails come from from now on and will be placing a page on this site listing them all. The other country which seems to be sending out a lot of scam emails is Canada – the land of Jesse Willms & Co – a scam artist that has and continues to scam millions of people every year. I seriously can’t understand why the Canadian police have not put him inside yet with his cohorts. He has been taken to court by Microsoft for selling of pirated software along with loads of other out of court settlements, the public will be taking matters into their own hands pretty soon, mark my word on it.

There should be a lot more laws on internet crime, people are getting away with ripping people off of millions and what do the police do while they do it? Protect ‘them‘.

Hey well, as most people know Windows 7 was release about two weeks ago now, I had the disk for it laying around the day after release so thought that it was about time that I installed it and checked it out! I have used Windows 7 before a bit so knew that it was good. I finally got around to installing it 2 days ago, I have the version ‘Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit’, I am finding it a lot more stable and a lot better than Vista. I have been using Vista Ultimate basically since release and I have had a few problems with it.

For Windows 7 there are a lot of tweaks that you can do on it, I know most people don’t bother with them but being a Computer nut since the age of 13 I have always loved to tweak windows. There are a number of optional security tweaks and service tweaks, the main tweaks that I like to use are:

1 Don't show Balloontips anymore (for me balloon tips are pointless and annoying!!)
2 Enable fast shutdown (self explanatory)
3 Clear pagefile at shutdown
4 Deactivate scripting host (this is a important tweak for me as a lot of malware and viruses use scripts which without this option can run)
5 Don't show last logged-on user name (this is a good tweak as on the logon screen nothing is shown, no users)
6 Don't autostart CD's (another thing that I personally hate is when CD's automatically play when your in the middle of doing something)
7 Do not generate Lan Manager Hashes (Lan Manager stores password hashes for backwards comparability with Windows 95/98, so if you don't have any Windows 95/98 computers in your Network it is advised to turn this off!)
8 Increase MaxConnectionsperServer to 10 (well this is another pretty major tweak)
9 Do Not autosuggest webforms and passwords anymore (this tweak is pretty good for security espcially if other people use your computer every so often, it also annoys me when webforms are autosuggested)
10 Disable ActiveX Controls (well as a developer I have to have ActiveX controls on for some of the things that I develop, but basically ActiveX is used by a lot of virus writers online, although you have to agree before ActiveX runs through Internet Explorer it can do anything; ActiveX is as powerful as a Computer Application and can do anything on your computer if allowed, that's why I see having ActiveX enabled as being a very bad security flaw - especially with new users).
12 Disable error-report service (pretty self explanatory)
13 Disable task-scheduler service (well as I don't have any scheduled events within Windows I disable to service for a bit of extra memory)
14 Disable ctfmon.exe (if you only plan to use one language setting then having ctfmon.exe running is pretty pointless!)
15 Disable UAC (UAC was added in Windows Vista - basically it's that annoying system box that comes up every time you try to do something - I find it extremely annoying - but it has it's good points if you have new users using your system)

Well I have just started working on QuakeLive Utilities, which is a follow on of the software that I created for both Quake 3 and Quake 4. QuakeLive Utilities will have full functionality for item timing within QuakeLive which will be a fully legal and non-cheat application. Currently I have designed the layout of the app, the application is being programmed in C#.net in Visual Studio 2008, more user friendly for Vista users and will be made for a basis to run on Vista 64 ONLY! Due to specific reasoning by myself and DirectX 10 capabilities. The software will be running in the background and all functionality will be down to the user and not the software. Minimal memory usage is a key factor of this application for me. More news on this software soon and maybe some screenshots.

Ok well after a few days on QuakeLive I hooked up with some old players who I played in clans with many years ago. P0rn was the clan leader of the GenerationX which I was a member of way back in 2002 or somewhere around that period, we were Division 1 for CPMA and Rocket Arena 3. We spoke about old times etc and he had the clan tag for generation x, after the first match I changed my clan tag the same and have been playing with the tag pretty much since then.

Over the weekend I managed to get my old Quake 3 config on the game (after some searching!) I didn’t realise that you can actually place the Quake 3 config in a baseq3 directory which is supposed to be hidden so people don’t edit stuff, I also found out that you can use bright skins like in CPM. So after much editing (due to being on Vista now) I finally got my config sorted and the graphics sorted! I seem to like the game a lot more now and I managed to get the resolution up to 1280×1024. Although that will undoubtedly change pretty soon when I get my new 24″ screen. Anyway a lot of rumors going around that GenX are coming back for QuakeLive, I guess we’ll have to see. Thought I’d add a screenshot (click to view full image) and a link to my profile.

Ok well I joined the QuakeLive site a long while back now, I didn’t actually find out about it until quite late on (March 2009) due to not actually playing any FPS games since the RA3 days. My brother told me about it first and I thought it sounded pretty crap but then a real life friend started a conversation about it who I got into Quake 3 years ago when I was playing in leagues. Anyway I joined when he said about it and didn’t bother with it as it said it was going to take 2 hours to download and install.

Anyway I have been playing it quite a bit now that I have it all setup and everything, the graphics seems a lot different now I think because of the 64bit graphics drivers as I now run Windows Vista Ultimate and used to always play Quake 3 on Windows XP (shows how long I haven’t played the game!

Well I thought it was about time that I wrote some up to date tech pages. I have just added a page called Windows Security which is basically a guide on how to make Windows Vista and XP secure from a fresh install. There are links to the software which I use and a lot of useful information on keeping your Windows installs secure.

Windows Security

Well I have finally got around to updating the Linux page on the site. You can find information on distributions which I have tried out and my views on them. There are also links to download the distributions which I have reviewed on the page. Go check it out if you are interested in Linux or are planning on changing over to Linux from Windows!

Linux Page