Ever wondered what the network connection details actually mean?

Physical Address: Also called the Media Access Control address, is a serial number that can uniquely identify your ethernet card or wireless adapter.

IP Address: An Internet Protocol address is assigned by your LAN provider(say, a modem at homes) to each of the systems connected to a network through the provider.

Subnet Mask: When there are multiple systems connected to a network, the network is divided into subnetworks to avoid interference (traffic), and routers manage the overall traffic. In a manner of speaking, the subnets can be differentiated by the subnet masks.

Default Gateway: As the name suggests, this is the (IP) address of the node that allows access to a different network. Say your modem connects to the Internet, and your PC connects to the modem. The modem acts as the gateway for your PC to the Internet.

DHCP Server: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol can be used by systems to obtain configuration information to connect to a network without any manual intervention. e.g. You usually don’t configure any network information on your home PC. You say “Obtain an IP address automatically” and leave it at that, and this allows multiple systems to connect to the same network without each system being designated a set of hard-written network configuration details. The DHCP Server handles this.

DNS Server: A Domain Name System server stores all the domain names and corresponding IP addresses. When you type a URL in your browser address bar, the DNS Server translates the domain name into an understandable format (IP) before the requested details can be fetched from the website you wish.

WINS Server: You may look at Windows Internet Name Service as Microsoft’s version of DNS. There are differences, but the final result to the end user is more or less the same. And either of DNS and WINS servers suffice.

Newbies, you mostly know the tiny network icons in your system tray. Click on the icon that represents the network through which you are connected to the Internet. Go to the “Support” tab, click on “Details” and you will see the “Network Connection Details” I have mentioned above.

One of the greatest advantages of using Cygwin is the vast array of softwares at your disposal. There is a lot of choice, perhaps too much of choice. And we will have to get used to that.

Take text editors for instance. A text editor is a very basic software and there has been such evolution in them. Line editors, text editors, GUI editors,… and with various advanced features.

ed is the GNU line editor. cat used to concatenate files can be seen as an editor as well.

Joe, Pico and Nano are screen editors with more features than the plain line editors. They allow one to jump to specified line and column numbers, search and replace strings, and allow quick, dirty editing.

Vim (Vi Improved) and Emacs are two legendary editors, the followers of each of which inadvertently take part in the Editor War sometimes without even the knowledge that they are part of a rivalry larger than themselves. While diehard fans of Vim and Emacs claim that their editors are the most advanced and convenient, they are both capable of keeping new users at bay thanks to their apparent complexity which is supposed to contribute to their simplicity. Both of them are screen editors which are used by programmers to write programs in a number of languages. Gvim and Xemacs are the GUI counterparts of the editors. One thing I have noticed is that users of either software need a cheat sheet that has various key combinations that can be used in their daily usage. Let this not daunt you from using these, because they really are worth the struggle. You can get started with Vim and Emacs using tutorials and they are plenty of them.

NEdit, short for Nice Editor, is a GUI text editor.

In case you already use a text editor that you are comfortable with, you can continue to use it from command line in Cygwin itself. Add your text editor with a custom alias in your .profile:

alias editor=”/c/\”Program Files/Editors & Viewers\”/Notepad++/notepad++.exe”

I am a Notepad++ fan and find it very resourceful. I have a feeling that it is inspired from Vim while keeping user-friendliness in mind.

For a greater choice than above, check out this comparison of text editors.

A friend told me that he plans to teach his parents how to use computers during this vacation. A worthy gift. I taught a few laypersons how to use computers over the last couple of years and it was tougher than expected. While I’m proud that my mom is my best pupil — she can use the word processor, browse the Internet, and is about to start her own blog — the complexity of the new gadgets and technologies coupled with my own impatience and inexperience with teaching made her teary-eyed more than once.

So here are my thoughts about “teaching computers” .

Know What They Want
They may not want to write programs, tweak with the internals to improve PC performance, or even try out new applications. They might not even be interested in what the operating system and the hardware parts are capable of and they don’t need to know more than their names about them. My guess is that they would want to play media, browse the web, and connect with you through mail or chat as a start. It is good to ask and find out exactly what it is that they want.

Windows Games
The input devices are what one needs to learn well to move any further. The older generations are usually more adept in using the keyboard; they know typewriters better than you. But the mouse is an entirely novel idea unless they played arcade games in their childhood. I think the Windows Games like Solitaire or Minesweeper will come in handy in mastering the clicks. See if they might like one of these games and let them play awhile. Forget the middle-click and concentrate on the double-click because it can be especially troublesome and is essential.

Basic Operations
How to start and shutdown a computer; how to maximize, minimize, resize and close windows; how to create a new document or folder; how to open documents or media files or applications; how to navigate through the Windows Start and open various applications. Let your pupil perform these repetitively in various sequences. It helps if you can organize your program files beforehand to avoid any unintended uninstallations and use a separate folder for all the exercises while learning the copy, cut, paste, move, save operations. Discourage using cut and delete operations for the time being.

Explore One Application
Pick one application of their choice: word processor, paint brush, or media player, e.g. Help them explore all the features in it while making use of the tool tips more than your direct assistance. The basic menu structure and menu items within them largely overalp among most applications and this familiarity will make them more prepared when they ever encounter another application. Try moving to a second application to see how quickly they can correlate between the two.

Getting Help
Get them into the habit of trying various options in the Help menu, trying F1, browsing through the contents, index and searching for a string. That will help them with the next big thing as well.

The Internet
The first thing you might want them to learn about the Internet is Google, through which most of what they want can be gotten to. After learning to open the browser, that is. It is also a good idea to have shortcuts to various frequently visited websites, in case bookmarks seem tedious and the address bar is definitely more complicated. Create any account that they might need for the time being and show them how to use them: how to sign in, check mail, compose and send mail, sign out. Beginners might find it easier to sign into a chat client and open mail through the notifications. Let them search their own beginner websites through Google (or any other search engine) apart from using it for general browsing purposes.

Make sure you have a good anti-virus and firewall in place. And back up all your important files. Just in case.

Despite all your initial assurances, they are going to panic after every tiny mistake, afraid that accidentally dragging and dropping an icon into another might have caused something irrevocably faulty. Oftentimes, this clams them up bringing the course to a screeching halt or even a retrograde. I can’t advise you how, but you must make sure they understand that Windows is already goofy enough and no goof-up is big enough to screw it any further. They don’t know “format c:” yet, do they?

Have you taught anybody before? What have I missed? What would you do?

Installing Cygwin is straightforward, but those who haven’t installed any UNIX-based OSs before may be lost at the last step. So here are the steps:

1. Download the Cygwin setup file, if you haven’t already.

2. Choose the installation type: Install from Internet or Install from Local Directory or Download without Installing. When installing Cygwin for the first time, you’ll have to choose either the first or the last option unless you already have the packages through some other means. I tend to choose the last for two reasons. One, network issues while downloading are preferrable to network issues while installing. Two, a reinstall for whatever reason is faster and smoother from a local directory. However, this will consume a few hundred MB to just download. Disk space these days isn’t an issue anyway.

3. Choose the root directory. I’ll talk about this structure later. Default options usually suffice, but if you have to choose, choose a new empty folder in a drive with several hundred MB disk space, say, E:\cygwin.

4. Even if you’re installing from the Internet directly, a few logs with setup-related information are created during installation. These logs are important for the setup file to recognize the existing states of various packages. Specify where you want these logs to reside in.

5. Choose a mirror that is closest to your location, or just pick any.

6. This is the major step, of choosing the packages. You could simply skip this step, whereby the default base packages will be installed. To experiment more, it will be worth your time to browse through these packages and select a few additional ones. Dependencies like underlying packages and libraries are selected automatically when you choose a package.

There are five modes of View: Category/Full/Partial/Up To Date/Not Installed. Choose the “Category” mode. Every package has a line of info written about it to the right. That should give an idea. I’ll mention the packages being used in the future posts where and when required.

The next step will end the process. If you’re first downloading the packages from the Internet, then you will have to rerun the Cygwin setup file, this time with the “Install from Local Directory” option and let all those packages downloaded be installed.

We’ll use Cygwin, starting with customizing the terminal from next week.

Image Source: Cygwin screenshot from my PC.

Hello everybody. I am Sravan, the new guy on That Damn PC. I love computers and make a living with them. I’ve learnt a lot about them over the last several years, especially about PCs, and I would like to share them here with you.

As someone with more hands-on experience with software than hardware, you may find me concentrating more on software, security, and general troubleshooting. That, however, doesn’t mean I won’t cover hardware at all.

I encourage you all to post any doubts you might have and I will try my best to get you an answer. I am not an expert in any of these, but there is a good chance I might know them. Even if I don’t, I have the interest and patience to dig deeper for an answer. We will see what can be done.

The regular readers may have gotten used to Kiven’s and later Jesse’s style. It will take a while for you all to get used to my style, and for me to get a grasp of their content in the archives. While I promise to try my best, you might find some posts overlapping with the older ones. Pardon such slips, but please point them out to me.

Lastly, remembering Studs Terkel, let us take it easy, but take it.

This should be a very short post as I have a fun contest starting on Monday here so we’ll keep it light and easy for now…

Below are a few simple ways to make sure your computer stays safe and secure for that much longer (they all eventually get messed up, even you Mac):

• Run a software firewall (Windows XP comes with one built in, not too sure on the Mac OS front but I would imagine they have something).
• Keep anti-virus software installed and up-to-date (AVG is free for the PC and ClamXav is free for the Mac).
• Install a router. Make sure you are running a decent home router (at home) and a good commercial router (for businesses). They are insanely cheap today, so there’s no excuse not to run one. Belkin, Linksys and Netgear all make decent home routers.
• If you run wireless, secure it. Today, almost all wireless routers support WPA or WPA2, so use it. In fact, it’s easier to remember your WPA key than it is to remember WEP. I think that “my Awesomely Secure Pa55word” is much simpler to remember than “FF5C0B374FA81D2959C2578F65″.

These are only a few ways to help protect your PC and information. Losing your data is a pain. Identity theft is an even bigger problem. Don’t get caught in either one.

P.S. - Keep an eye out for the fun contest (which should be starting on Monday, right here at That Damn PC).

Image via WikipediaIt’s a fact of life that information overload is not easy to escape. Whether you enjoy playing the license plate game or reading the New York Times on your way to work (Do they sill print a paper?), there is a lot to read, take in and retain out there in this cruel world. Luckily, with the help of many great Web 2.0 tools out there, it’s becoming a bit simpler. I’d like to point you in the direction of a few that I have used to simplify my life.

Google Reader (or any other web feed reader) -
GR is an excellent tool to help process the everyday information that shows up on most of your favorite sites. This can be used to find both the latest nuddy magazine photos and the greatest updates on the Apple/i phone information saga. Convenient? I think so.

PageOnce -
PageOnce has been a big help for me and now that it’s out of strict beta (closed to some), it’s even better. I use it to pull in bank account balances, bill due dates and the latest in my Facebook statuses. You can use it to do the same and keep your life organized on just a few pages.

Mint.com -
Mint has been a lifesaver or me (no pun intended) when it comes to keeping track of my finances. I am able to pull in all my financial services — stock portfolios (like I trade, hah), bank accounts (already know they’re near zero) and credit cards (those just keep rising) — and then get information about each of my accounts. It’s secure, easy and fun to use. In addition to getting account info, Mint also gives suggestions on ways to save money or cut down on debt — always a helpful feature.

Whether you’re an information whore or a drive-by reader, services like these can help you stay organized. Being organized can not only save you time but introduce you to new information. How do you think I found out about LOLcatz? Oh yeah, my feed reader!

I recently came across Adocu.com - blogging gone nano through a good friend and while the product that they are proposing, Twitter with only one word, sounds strange, the underlying concept makes a lot of sense. Why do we bog ourselves down with so many words? Technical support could take a lesson from these guys.

Many of the responses that nonits (non-IT folk) receive from IT start with a, “Have you checked the amount of free RAM on your computer?” or, “What processes were running when this occurred?” My guess is that if you knew the answers to these questions, you wouldn’t be calling technical support. The big, bad IT guy has to take a step back and realize that he’s paid to do his job because that’s what he knows how to do. I’m sure that he wouldn’t like it if accounting asked why the debits and credits did not foot properly (and yes, that is a real term in accounting as my girlfriend just informed me).

Remember, not everyone is an IT genius. Some need a guiding hand, one who will understand that RAM, BIOS and PCI are just letters to others, not technical pieces of a computer system.

So this post will take a little bit different angle than the last few. See this one is about information. Not the kind like where the latest and greatest porn site is or where Miley Cyrus has shown her booty today… This is the kind of information that can help you in your everyday life. Sites like ReadBurner, Alltop and Technorati are trying their hardest to help you find this information and they’re doing a damn good job at it so far.

Read more

Let’s do a quick recap of some helpful windows shortcuts to increase our productivity:

• Shift+Del permanently deletes files
• ALT+Print Screen grabs a screenshot of the active window and sends it to the clipboard
• Windows Key + M hides all windows and returns you to the desktop
• Shit+TAB go back forms, TAB makes you go forward in forms
• and CTRL-ESC brings up the Windows Start menu