WEP/WPA nonsense.

I realised that my internet security is horrible as my wireless network is unsecured.

My job: Secure it NOW you idiot...

... as quoted by my dad.

It turned out harder than I thought it would be. 15 minutes turned to 2 hours as I racked my brains for all possible options and googled my way through 100's of pages.

In the end, I found a page on howtodothings.com that told me how to secure my network, with instructions specified for my modem.

It still wasn't enough. The instructions were quite a bit off from what I was seeing, and the picture of the modem was different. I'm assuming they are talking about the American version of my modem.

So I had to decipher the instructions and enter the settings so that my network would work.

And after all USB transfers to copy my settings to the laptop, it still DID NOT WORK.

By now, I was starting to question my understanding of my skill with computers. I thought for about another 30 minutes while repeating the H2DT instructions about 6 times.

Then it came to me. My laptop was incapable of connecting to WPA encrypted networks, which was absurd considering it was released after WPA encryption was standard through the industry.

So I changed the settings and network keys on my laptop, router and desktop to that of WEP encryption and it WORKED. Finally.

The moral of this? Persistence pays off.

How Bad Internet Explorer is.

Some people have asked me how bad IE is on the Acid3 test I talked about a few posts back (in relation to Firefox and Opera - Click Here for related post)

Well I've got more screen shots to show you.
First, I'll show you IE7, which is probably what most people in the world are using at the moment.



I don't know about you, but that to me looks a lot different from what it should be looking like:



The new version of IE, IE 8.0 however does better, but still not well enough.



Internet Explorer fails.

World's Fastest Internet

A 75 year old Swedish lady has the world's fastest internet. "How fast?" you may ask.

And I would answer "40 gigabits per second".

That's 5GB/s. That connection is fast enough to download a Full HD DVD in, wait for it, 2 seconds. Its also fast enough to stream 1500 HD channels simultaneously.

NZ however, is stuck with a theoretical max limit of 24 megabits per second, which is 3 Megabytes per second.. (MB/s). Only fast enough to download one song in one second.

One song = 3MB

Full HD movie = ~10GB

Sigbritt, who had never had a computer until now, is no ordinary 75 year old. She is the mother of Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg who, along with Karlstad Stadsnät, the local council's network arm, has arranged the connection.

"This is more than just a demonstration," said network boss Hafsteinn Jonsson.

"As a network owner we're trying to persuade internet operators to invest in faster connections. And Peter Löthberg wanted to show how you can build a low price, high capacity line over long distances," he told

Public internet fails.

For more information, read: http://www.thelocal.se/7869/20070712/

Opera 10 Beta and Firefox 3.5 Beta 4

The new beta versions of Opera and Firefox have been released in the past week. And I'm very excited about them.

Firefox 3.5 claims to be 2x faster than 3.0 and 10x faster than 2.0. Those are huge claims considering 3.0 and 2.0 are already zipping along at a lightning pace.

Meanwhile, Opera 10 Beta using Webkit's Sun Spider tests, works out to be 16.2% faster than the current 9.62 stable release. Opera 10 Beta also includes a "Opera Turbo" feature which automatically detects slow networks and optimises your browsing speed by around 3x - 4x. This is done by Opera's own proprietary technology. This comes at a cost of low-res images at times though.

I decided to do some Acid3 standard tests* on both browsers and these were my results.

These were the results I got from the Opera 10 Beta. This is a perfect test and is the only browser to have a perfect score so far apart from the Safari Beta 4. (which was released around a month ago)

These are the results that I got from the Firefox 3.5 Beta. This is a good result but not perfect and does not comply to all the Acid3 standards.

In my opinion, its worth waiting for the stable release before judging/labelling each of these browsers and the Safari and Chrome releases are worth waiting for as well. However, the Firefox 3.5 version looks promising and as support for its add-ons grow, so does the popularity.

Opera are still trying to get their widgets to function effectively though as they are not allowed full control of the browser, which somewhat limits their capabilities.

I, for one, know I will be waiting anxiously for the next stable release of all the browsers mentioned above before making my mind on which to use as my default.

*Note: For a full list of what the Acid3 standards are, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3#Standards_tested