Call-In Help

Do you have a problem with your computer? Do you have a local network problem?
Call in during the show, and we will do what we can to shed
light on the issue. Who knows? We might even be able to solve
your problem on air. The Geeks focus on your computer problem and try to help.

It is always nice to have a show dedicated to calls. In this show we were able to answer questions via email as well. Lots of input from listeners and interesting news subjects from the Geeks. Dedi and John covered Apples’s new Music Player iTunes Version 4. Miles brought up some backwards compatability issues with the soon-to-be-released Windows 2003 Server. Along with more news we touched on a lawsuit brought against some Anti-SPAM individuals. Tom C. emailed the Geeks a follow up with a quote from SPAMHAUS: “The attorney for EMarketersAmerica.org, Mark E. Felstein, is also the sole propietor of EMarketersAmerica.org which is registered to ‘Mark Felstein’. By no coincidence, Mark E. Felstein is also the personal lawyer of America’s top spammer Eddy Marin who by no coincidence is also based in Boca Raton. Spamhaus is 99.9% certain that EMarketersAmerica.org is simply a front for Marin’s spam gang." Jewl Santa Cruz Jewl called in with a sugestion for a good anti-SPAM package called Qurb, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook, wich creates a “white list” for approve senders. The concept of a “White List” is the opposite of a “Black List”. A “White List,” in this case, is a list of email senders that you accept. Mail that comes from someone not on your “White List” get’s put in a separate “Quarantine” folder for your approval or disapproval. Bill Santa Cruz In the “From” line, of a series of SPAM email, is “Some Bozo”, but when looking at the the headers it isn’t there. There might be a MIME encoding block that has the Subject line in a different character set. If this is the case it might not allow Eudora to do filtering off of it. We suggested that Bill redirect one of these SPAM messages to Lyle for his dissection. Purehart Watsonville Red Hat Linx 6.2 printing from Pine using LPR causes an error about IRQ with a note of “Prox Systems”.

Search for information on Pine. It sounds like a Pine problem.
We weren’t able to help much on this – it’s kind of an odd issue.
Pine is made by the University of Washington.

Michael Carmel Valley When using the NTSF file system is it a good idea to have “Indexing” on or off? It depends on what you are doing. Indexing in NTFS creates a lookup table for use in searching the drive. If you do a lot of searching and navigating the filesystem it might be a good idea to have indexing on. But Indexing makes updates to the filesystem slower. Off is probably a better solution for most users. Dedi suggested to also turn off System Restore to make a Windows XP system faster. Robin Templeton, San Luis Obispo County Is there an Anti-SPAM system that sends the mail back to the sender? Bouncing messages is a standard SMTP Mail Transfer Protocal specification. But it might not help reduce SPAM. Most SPAM senders don’t really care if the message is recived or not. Also SPAM causes a lot of network traffic and bouncing SPAM causes more traffic. Most Anti-SPAM systems do support bouncing the messages, and even some mail clients support this feature. David R. emailed the Geeks with this thought: "Another problem with bouncing spam is that sometimes spam isn’t spam, but the filter doesn’t realize it, so you might miss messages you’re interested in." Russel Aptos What server-side scripting should I use for a web site I am about to create; PHP, ASP or JSP? And what database should I use? Miles: “There are people that use PHP and love it, I don’t hang out with those people.” PHP has a poorly designed structure. It works fine, but its syntax is kind of a mess. Since the host of the web site is a Windows server going with ASP makes sense, but write the ASP docs in JavaScript instead of VB Script. Scott Aptos I am upgrading from NT 4.0 – what version of Windows should I go too? Your choices are Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional and Windows 2000. We sugested Windows XP Pro or Windows 2000. Win 98 and ME are not NT like. XP Home does not support multi-processors. A while ago, listening to Geek Speak, Scott heard about AVG AntiVirus and has been using this free Anti-Virus software and loving it ever sense. Count one for the good guys! Yoin Santa Cruz What palm device do I want that will allow me to print normal pages on a normal printer. The two ways to print from a palm device are via an IR Port or Using BlueTooth. Neither of these technologies are common in printers. Additionaly a Palm is not a stable way of holding your data. A Palm is designed to work with a computer which holds a “master” copy of your palm data. Without using a computer you might loose your data on your palm device.