Microsoft Security Essentials Correlation

So Microsoft Security Essentials failed to gain a certification on a recent, well-known  AV test.

That's unfortunate, since it's free, without subscription, and provided by those that make Windows.

Meanwhile, I saw this article, basically saying that the people behind the program AppRemover saw that on 150,000 or so computers, most of them were running Microsoft Security Essentials.

According to the CNET article, AppRemover is using it's data to claim that Microsoft Security Essentials is a “global leader in security suite market share.” 

There's a weird correlation, though. AppRemover is a program that, among other things, uninstalls security software. Presumably, the people using AppRemover have a reason for doing so, such as uninstalling antivirus software that they didn't want. If AppRemover is reporting that a majority of computers that had AppRemover used on them already had Microsoft Security Essentials installed, and the user is running a program that removes antivirus software, it would seem to correlate that the majority of people who use AppRemover on a computer with antivirus software already installed (as reported in the article) are using it to remove Microsoft Security Essentials more than the other antivirus suites?

Either that, or the computers measured have more than one antivirus program installed.

Ubuntu Tales - Custom Printing

When my fiancée asked what to do about wedding invitations, I told her (foolishly, perhaps) that I'd take care of them, instead of having them custom-printed. Fast forward a few months, and I'm deep into getting all the items printed. The problem I've been battling is custom page sizes in Ubuntu.

The documents I'm printing are PDFs sized specifically to the different paper sizes of the invites (5x7inch, 5x3.5inch,etc). I was able to print the actual invite cards without much hassle. The thing that made this so painless is Adobe Reader (and evince) have access to a custom print size called “5x7 photo borderless.” This allowed the document to print with images right up to the edge of the pages (if the printer loaded the paper properly).

The headaches came when I had to print inserts and RSVP cards that were 5x3.5. There's no option for borderless printing at this size. I was able to make a custom size manually and was able to print the pages pretty easily, but there's a few millimeters of border around the images. It's not a deal breaker, but I thought I could do better. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I could not get my HP 2512 inkjet to print without any kind of margin. I messed with custom page options, and I also messed with the HP device manager, to little avail. If the page size doesn't already exist and have a borderless option, I can't do it.

So I gave up and booted into Windows 7.

Interestingly, I had even less luck in Windows with this printer. I had to go through a big rigmarole to make a custom page size (I had to configure the “print server” with a new “form type”, none of which is intuitive). But even when I did that successfully, Adobe Reader would completely ignore the new page size I created. It would try to print to a 3.5x5, but because of the way the paper loads, I needed it to be a 5x3.5, and it would absolutely refuse my new custom page.

My fiancee's computer (running Windows XP) has a Dell inkjet that I tried out. This printer not only let me print to a 5x3.5, but I was able to do so without any border at all, just by selecting one checkbox, and it did a better job of feeding the cards in, so I didn't have to rotate it. Alas, even when selecting the highest print quality available, the image was not as dark as the invitations I had previously printed.

So the good news is that my headaches printing the custom page sizes weren't necessarily caused by Ubuntu but had more to do with the software and hardware of the printer itself. The bad news is I'm still going to be wrestling with printing the invitations a while longer.

Google Voice vs LG Cosmos

We use Google Voice at work for our on-call nurses. We used to use a third-party call center with live people to handle this. We would tell them each day what nurse was on call, and what message to say. They, more often than not, got it wrong, and we continued to pay for it (the bill to the third-party, and the lost revenue from a patient referral). When I learned about Google Voice, I suggested we give it a go and test it. They were so pleased with it that we canned the call center after only a week. I instructed the clerks how to change numbers and specify which numbers to forward to. And I haven't heard anything out of them for about a year or more.

Until today. We recently hired a new nurse and they were trying to enter her phone number into the list of available numbers to forward to. When you add a number to Google Voice, GV will call the phone number entered and ask you to dial on that phone two digits that are displayed on the computer screen, to avoid abuse of their system. I've never had any issue with this, but this new nurse's phone, an LG Cosmos, would not pass verification.

I suspect the problem was that GV could not properly hear the DTMF ("touch tone") tones. I adjusted the DTMF settings on her phone so that the tones would play longer. No go. I tried using her phone in speakerphone mode. I even tried using a website to play back the DTMF tones into the phone's microphone. Still nothing.

I then tried having GV verify my own personal cell phone. Worked the first time. Both the LG and my phone are both on Verizon. What's the deal? I started doing what I always do when I have no more ideas, Googling for answers, and found more similar complaints than actual answers. Then I ran across a post from someone who had an iPhone 4GS that couldn't get GV to verify the phone, but this person also had a fix - turn up the ringer volume. This seemed strange to me - why should the ringer volume affect the loudness of the DTMF tones? I tried turning up the ringer on the LG and it still failed. But now that I was in the land of trying-things-that-didn't-make-sense, I wondered what would change if the phone thought a headset was attached?

The LG has a standard headphone jack, so I just plugged in my earbuds and tried to verify again. Success! I'm not sure if this a failure of the phone, or Google Voice not being sensitive enough. I don't like the fact that there are no other ways to verify a number, and that I had to resort to a weird hack like this. Still, their service is free, and for a small business like ours, it works better than what we *were* using.