crash

A new exploit will either lock up your iPhone or iPod Touch or crash your Safari browser on your PC or Mac OS desktop if you simply visit a maliciously coded Web site. Unlike an earlier exploit that required users to click to become infected, the new code published by iPhoneWorld requires no user interaction.

So far, Apple has had no comment.

The code was first reported in January and exhausts the memory in Safari, which in turn will cause your iPhone or iPod Touch to freeze, or your desktop Safari to crash. "Given the nature of this issue,&… Read more

Like many of you, my copies of Windows XP crash with the now-classic "blue screen of death" (BSOD). When this happened a couple times recently to a new ThinkCentre A61 tower, I called Lenovo tech support. As the title of this posting suggests, it did not go well.

When Windows XP crashes, the default behavior is to create a minidump, a small file (only 88K) with a summary of, hopefully, the most important information about the failure. I wrote about minidumps back in November (see Dealing with software crashes, Part 2). If your copy of Windows has crashed (… Read more

A funny thing happened after I installed Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on my PC: Word 2007 started crashing whenever I closed it, and all but a handful of the application's settings became inaccessible.

I still haven't figured out how to keep Word from crashing on exit, but I regained access to the program's settings by disabling all add-ins. Unfortunately, it took me the better part of an afternoon to figure out this partial solution, and I'm no closer to finding the source of the crashes, though Vista SP1 is the prime suspect.

My first attempt … Read more

The first part of this posting on dealing with software crashes covered preventing the leakage of personal information, portable applications, and controlling the programs that run automatically when Windows starts up. Here we look at dumps, event logs, and disk checking, but first, we pick up on the topic of drivers.

Driver Verifier

In Windows, the term "driver" refers to software used by the operating system to control the hardware in the computer. Each piece of hardware (sound, video, printer) has an associated driver program.

The last topic in the previous posting was an airplane analogy to illustrate … Read more

Software crashes all too often, and since misery loves company, computer users often swap horror stories. Back on Halloween, Lee Gomes did so publicly in the Wall Street Journal. His problem was with the Adobe Premiere Pro, a video editing program and, while I found it interesting, the article didn't offer advice for avoiding or dealing with software crashes. That's what I hope to do here. First though, defending your privacy.

ERROR REPORTING

When applications crash, a window often pops up asking if you want to report the problem to Microsoft. Gomes writes that the Microsoft employees who … Read more

Our review of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last Thursday lauded its lovely interface innovations but withheld judgment about the operating system's speed until we could put it through its paces.

Tests returned from CNET Labs on Saturday show that Leopard didn't perform noticeably faster than Mac OS 10.4.6 Tiger. (See the chart in CNET's review of Tiger.). Because Leopard's improved speeds of between 1 percent and 3 percent fall within the 5 percent margin of error, it's fair to call Leopard and Tiger even.

Lab tests explored Leopard's boot time, … Read more

Something tells us that Ilya and Borish Kaganovich have more than a few scars on their knees. The two brothers are the inventors of the "iShoes," which are kind of a mashup of the Segway and motorized skateboards for your feet--and they look just as dorksome, if not worse.

Each pair has 4-inch wheels and weighs a total of 16 pounds but can still hit 15 miles per hour, according to Coolest-Gadgets. The shoes--which come in men's and women's sizes, if they get beyond the prototype phase--can reportedly go 5 to 7 miles without recharging the … Read more

We're constantly imitating nature.

Artificial intelligence researchers study the way babies learn to right themselves after falling down to help train robots to behave similarly.

We're still learning new things about flight dynamics and wing design from butterflies and other animals.

If you've ever carefully tiptoed across the floor to keep from disturbing someone, you're mimicking how a deer walks to avoid alerting predators to its presence.

Okay, that one's a stretch, but if you've ever watched a deer do this, it sure seems like one heck of a coincidence.

In any case, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It's also how modern science works - creating models for simple structures in order to approximate the real world. When we succeed, we learn; when we fail, we learn more. It's a painstaking process of trial and error called the scientific method.

Every year the biotechnology industry comes one step closer to learning how to cure our ills and extend the human lifespan. We have further to go than we've come, to be sure, but getting here was no easy trick. After all, biotech research is attempting nothing short of unveiling the secrets of life.

Why am I telling you all this? Because, this is the same thought process that changed my opinion about Second Life being over-hyped - an opinion many of you have recently expressed.… Read more

It may be a sad commentary on modern society, but we fully understand why people would want to install cameras in their cars specifically to document what exactly might happen in an accident. We just don't think the ideal solution is a model so big that it could obstruct a driver's view and possibly cause the very accident it's trying to monitor--no matter what Paris Hilton's parents have to say about it.

Clarion's "DriveEye" may be a good compromise, though Technabob says it's available only in Japan at present for about $412. … Read more