FMS-Blog : The Wildly Whimsical, Mostly Musical WebLog
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Compute This
I'm always amazed by how fast computer technology has advanced, even within my relatively short lifetime. Considering that just 20 years ago the most advanced computer we had in our household had a total memory capacity of 64Kb, it is awesome that just a couple of days ago I was chatting to my cousin live online across a physical distance of 12 hours flying time and through a multitude of extremely fast, efficient and supremely designed bits of kit. While he was sitting in Hong Kong airport waiting for a flight he effortlessly got out his laptop, linked up to the free wireless internet connection in the building and got chatting to me in real time while I sat at home at a different time of day. Mind boggling stuff and, despite the normality of modern life with thousands of these pieces of technological wizardry, I continue to find it difficult to get my head around.
And, yet, when it goes wrong it often really goes wrong! The slightest grain of sand that fell from the spanner that may have been sitting somewhere in the vicinity of the works is enough to bring all these amazing feats of technology to a total halt. Consider this: that when my cousin pressed the send button on his laptop he set off a huge chain of events that needed to go exactly as planned if, a couple of seconds later, the message was to appear on my screen here in Bradford. Firstly, of course, there's his laptop's function, including the network card, then the wi-fi kit in the airport, followed by a whole string of servers across the world each connected up with a multitude of simple wiring as well as via satellite links that would account for the majority of the message's journey to the UK, ending at my end with another whole load of gear from my email server, to my internet service provider to the wireless router and adaptors in my home. On loose wire anywhere in the middle and the whole system would be useless.
So, I come onto today's little quandary - I've been having difficulty printing from my laptop to the network printer I have in our study. I decided to check out some of the network settings to resolve this issue at about 3pm this afternoon. Just ten minutes ago I got the network up and running again and the internet back online!!! And this is a perfect demonstration case for what I was saying in the previous paragraph, albeit on a very small scale: for 7 hours I've struggled to get our computer system to do as I wish and, having trawled through multiple IT forums and having done many Google searches I finally realised that the one programme that is designed to protect my computer from malicious attack is also the bit of software that has caused all the problems: the firewall Zone Alarm! As soon as I shut that down and relied upon the Windows XP firewall instead all my network problems vanished. This was a hard pill to swallow after I'd spent hours pouring over options from upgrading my router firmware, to using system restore on my laptop, to totally reinstalling windows and starting again! Glad I didn't go for that option!!
And, yet, when it goes wrong it often really goes wrong! The slightest grain of sand that fell from the spanner that may have been sitting somewhere in the vicinity of the works is enough to bring all these amazing feats of technology to a total halt. Consider this: that when my cousin pressed the send button on his laptop he set off a huge chain of events that needed to go exactly as planned if, a couple of seconds later, the message was to appear on my screen here in Bradford. Firstly, of course, there's his laptop's function, including the network card, then the wi-fi kit in the airport, followed by a whole string of servers across the world each connected up with a multitude of simple wiring as well as via satellite links that would account for the majority of the message's journey to the UK, ending at my end with another whole load of gear from my email server, to my internet service provider to the wireless router and adaptors in my home. On loose wire anywhere in the middle and the whole system would be useless.
So, I come onto today's little quandary - I've been having difficulty printing from my laptop to the network printer I have in our study. I decided to check out some of the network settings to resolve this issue at about 3pm this afternoon. Just ten minutes ago I got the network up and running again and the internet back online!!! And this is a perfect demonstration case for what I was saying in the previous paragraph, albeit on a very small scale: for 7 hours I've struggled to get our computer system to do as I wish and, having trawled through multiple IT forums and having done many Google searches I finally realised that the one programme that is designed to protect my computer from malicious attack is also the bit of software that has caused all the problems: the firewall Zone Alarm! As soon as I shut that down and relied upon the Windows XP firewall instead all my network problems vanished. This was a hard pill to swallow after I'd spent hours pouring over options from upgrading my router firmware, to using system restore on my laptop, to totally reinstalling windows and starting again! Glad I didn't go for that option!!
