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How annoying is it to have the wordpress we use daily, hacked and messed up to a point that it is time to reinstall? This post by Otto makes for good reading, removing wordpress hacks , and is very informative , and give the main reasons why the upgrade does not necessarily get rid of the hack. It can be in the theme , or in the widgets ( a good reason not to use too many!), or in your php config file.

I myself have complained that everytime I get hacked, it must be something on my site that has triggered a particular person to keep hacking , but really I guess it is more likely that a hack was never overwritten in the upgrades, and the hacker has exploits this at their whim.

So great post by Otto if you have been hacked , check it out !   .

After being a long time user of free anti virus software , the evolution of these programs has become the very problem that annoyed me with the bought programs .

I always used Symantec, and i love their firewall , and in truth the antivirus was pretty good too . I made the mistake on believing that it was poor because alternate programs would find hundreds of viruses that were previously not detected by Norton. However this was hogwash , the viruses found were not viruses and some were programs I had written myself, albeit in hotkey!

the biggest problem with Norton is the uninstall! How many installs have I destroyed with this uninstall? Too many! There is a uninstall utility from Norton that you must use to uninstall , do not use the uninstall that is available in add remove programs , there is a 50/50 chance you are gonna get knackered!

Avast was good , but i hated the interface , that stupid cd player  got on my nerves! and it also found viruses that did not exist, but worse, did not find viruses that I know were present. Heuristic searches are a way for the anti virus to do a stop gap so that the programmers do not have to manually name and describe the virus that they may not know of yet. it is basically a guess, and as such it removes the programs or components from your use , sometimes disabling your apps. And then there is difficulty in bringing them back .One of the main problems is the Alexa toolbar for ie, it always marks it with a virus , and gives it a believable name , but of course is not a virus .

So you may thing your new anti virus program is great , because it found a lot more viruses that your old software missed but in fact it kinda just made it all up!

AVG was a great program , low resource , bit annoying with the false alerts (including Alexa toolbar!) , but now has evolved into a full bloatware , so I guess if bloatware with incorrect virus guessing is what you want go get it! If you want to stick with the earlier version and you have updated , then you have the many , many pop ups for there new version , practically every time you touch it.

Avira is also free , but is very annoying , and really slows the start up, and sometimes causes crashes, but is the worst for false detection!

I have found a low resource antivirus , that has no false detections and is easy to manage, and updates fast…and this is PCtools free antivirus software. It uses very low memory, and hard drive , scans fast and does not ever give a false detect. If you need a firewall then perhaps use a Norton install disk to install the Internet security part( when installing..choose custom) as the firewall is not part of the paid version and does not update and once installed runs forever without a squeak.

I Have uses the comodo and a couple of other Firewall softwares , and I really hate them , to have a program that interferes with your every move is annoying as hell!

So if you still use them slow computers and you want a basic antivirus (some of us still do) then Pctools is the one)!

Well , as you read previously, I had bought the via voice software , and gave up and then tried again and found it actually quite good. I wanted better and there is a lot of hype about Nat speaking so I bought Naturally speaking 8 standard.

I found the standard version was lacking in the voice recording option to play back mistakes or miswriting, and I found the microphone that it comes with absolutely useless , and even after the training was completely finished , the writing appeared to be much worse . A substantial improvement was gained with using the cheap microphone that came with via voice, but it seems that NS8 is quite fussy about the mic. The more I used it the better it got , but it was taking too long and I eventually went back to Via Voice as it had taken much less time to get great results.

As naturally speaking 8 uses the same algorithms as the preferred version , a quick search online netted an amount of information that was equal to Version 9 is 15% better than Version 8 and Version 10 is 30% better than version 9. So not wanting to quite give up on the idea of getting a great voice recognition software , that would improve my productivity immensely, I couldn’t just dismiss dragon pad, I mean what if I was giving up on the best dictation software ever!

So I bought the Naturally Speaking Version 10 preferred, which was not cheap at $80 from Amazon (see the right) , and used it to upgrade my version 8 , which by the way they said you should not do, you should start from scratch, but hell I did it any way. After the set up , I ran to test and to my surprise the software did work quite well. It is obvious that the software has a much better recognition algorithm than before and produced results much the same as via voice ( though that was still 1/6 of the price).

I bought a headset microphone fron hebaay for $2 just to see what would happen , and I found this cheap microphone was much better than the supplied Emkay product that came with.

After more research , and further tweaking I finally bought the N95 Andrea headset in dual cup. This gave me a great recognition, up to 1 word in 30 incorrect, which is well over 95%.

So in conclusion , Via voice 10 is better than Naturally speaking 8 (all versions) and Nat speaking 10 preferred is better than Via voice 10 , by far,

but

• costs more,
• is more fussy about the headset, and
• takes longer to tweak ,
• is a real resource hog and not for the slower pc

however it does

• let you dictate at tremendous speeds
• has superb accuracy

so Via voice is great if you have little money for the software and for the headset ,and even if you have a slow computer,

But Naturally speaking 10 preferred is the best if you want the best productivity.

Many times I get a new wordpress theme and it is not to my liking , there is always something wrong with it!

I found a really great theme , but the endless tweaking gets on my nerves such as the single post pages don’t have the title as a clickable link.This is so common and yet there are a number of reasons why you would want this .

So navigate to the single post page , you will see a line above the date section<?php if(get_option(’uwc_dates_posts’) == ‘on’) { echo ‘<div class=”date”>’; the_time(”l, F j, Y”); echo ‘</div>’; } ?<?php if(get_option(’uwc_authors_posts’) == ‘on’) { echo ‘By ‘; the_author(); } ?>)that says h1 or h2 tags and in between it will say something like <h1><?php the_title(); ?>”

Change to <h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”> <?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

and save ,this is now a clickable link to self ( href the url >the title of the page …in english!)

Via voice 10 was a program I had bought , installed it ,and found the recognition was terrible , even after 2 learning passages were done , and so gave up on it believing computer cant really be used to dictate to documents accurately.

A year later I tried it again ,after seeing a you tube video on someone using dragon pad from naturally speaking, and decided to give it (Via Voice) another ago before purchasing Naturally Speaking , as the video author was also making a lot of mistakes with the software, from Naturally speaking, accuracy.

Plus Naturally speaking was like $100!

Starting up the software I decided to go through all of the general training recognition passages to train the system , rather than just the 2 I had originally done. And lo and behold , the software actually recognised my voice and accurately wrote what I said to an accuracy of 1 error in 10 words , which I thought acceptable.

It does get better as you use it ,but you do have to keep adding words to train it for different words. Things like a and I get mixed up and you need to add them separately in the “train” option.

It does run very low resources and runs quite happily on my 700mhz tranmetta crusoe 385ram sony picture book , which has a long battery life and ultra portable for dictating anywhere.

Via voice is available quite cheaply for as little as $25 or £15 sterling , I got mine from Serif ( the web design software people)

It is now owned by Nuance (naturally speaking designers) who bought it from IBM. But is now a discontinued product and not supported.

Problems.

The long bar across the top of the screen messed up my icons , so change that to floating bar in options.Do not ever run it with firefox windows open it crashes and you have to reinstall . Other than that pretty good , so good I had to buy Dragon Naturally speaking 8.

Recap….

• accuracy was quite good after reading the prescribed 5 (only) passages to 1 error in 10
• gets better as you use it
• used low resources , great for battery power and low speed notebooks
• really cheap