Let The Finger-Pointing Commence!

Or, well, it would if they paid any sort of attention to me...  But here we go.  Technical content ahead.

That's right.  However, I do not have a set of graphs and stacks of data.  I only have observations collected over several ... well, twenty or so years of technical experience.

So in the interests of full disclosure, yes, my primary home computer is still running on Windows ... uh, well, when I type "VER" on the command line, I get 6.1.7601.  I'm sure that causes more than a few of you to cringe, scream at the walls, and otherwise point a few fingers at me.  That's right.  But before you get all hacked off, I have a few layers of protection which ARE updated, including some self-rolled improvements, such as a wee little trick I learned long ago which literally prevents my computer from reaching out to certain web sites which I find ... well, I'd rather not see traffic from them.

It's the olde Hosts file hack.  Yes, my friends, technical content.

You see, back when DOS met the internet, some folks decided they'd put some real improvements into the operating system to make sure things worked right.  And other reasons.  But deep down inside the operating system, there's a table of web sites.  Most often, it gets updated when you type in an address (you do remember you can type addresses into the browser bar, right, not just follow existing links?) and your computer goes there.  Before your computer goes anywhere, it needs a road map on how to get there, and it gets that by asking the internet.  Um, Duh, I know.  But it goes out to the internet and says "Hey, I'm looking for [some website or whatever-dot-domain], and your browser sends out a query to your internet service provider, or ISP.  They take that query and send it off to ... well, first they check to see if they've been there before, had others go there before, or know how to get there.  If not, then they ask the great big internet servers who keep track of those things.  Because, ya know, sometimes things move.

And that's the genius of the internet.  You and I think of things by words.  Names.  Pictures that mean a thousand or million words or more, or whatever.  But we think of things one way.  And computers are really good with numbers.  Which is how the internet was built.  Numbers.  So when you type in a name, there are bits and bobs about which connect that name to a string of numbers, which helps your request get there.  

What's all that got to do with the price of beans in Bulgaria?  Well, there's a file on your computer called "Hosts" - and you can trick your computer into ignoring certain web sites by sending them there.

Huh?  Oh, all right.  Let's take a few steps back behind the curtain, and I'll try to make some sense.  

Please, do not do this until you've considered the implications - which might mean having to reinstall your operating system, if you do this wrong.  So don't blame me.  You did it, you either need to follow the directions, or don't.  

So down inside your operating system, in a folder called \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC you will find a little file called Hosts - it's so special it doesn't even have an extension.  But inside that file, you can hide some maps.  

I get a lot of spam, and so over the years I've taken the time to hover my cursor over some of the links in those emails.  When I find the same server being used for some of that sort of crap, I get irritated and do the following.  

I'll find the name of the server, and block it.  And it's actually pretty simple.

That file usually has some instructions in it, which makes it easy, but what I do is I will open the file up with Notepad, because it's simple and doesn't tend to insert additional crap I don't need.  I'll go to the bottom of the file, tab over once (keeps things clean), and then type 127.0.0.1 and then hit tab one more time, then type the server name.  Like "get.browse-safe.com" - without the quotes, obviously.  Then I'll tab over once more, and then hit the # key, and insert a comment.

What did I just do, you're asking?  Well, here's where we need to have a little more fun.

I just got done telling you computers do an awful lot with numbers, right?  So if you can get to a command prompt, type in the words PING LOCALHOST and hit enter.  

Your computer is part of a network, if you're reading this.  So when you type in the word Ping, you're asking your computer to basically knock on the door of another computer.  As long as it's not excessive, you're not being rude.  It's not like a ding-dong-ditch, or anything like that.  It's pretty much the computer equivalent of saying "hey, how you doin?"  The other computer responds. You send a little message saying "hey, what's up?"  The remote computer says "yeah, I'm here."  This is usually returned as a "Reply".  

When you typed "LOCALHOST" you were actually telling your computer to knock on the door of your computer.  Computers are like that.  It's really just a way for you to confirm yes, it's awake, that part is working, we're alive.  But when you typed in Localhost, you probably got a response that looked like Reply from ::1: time<1ms - which, in other words, is a pretty fast reaction.  That's because your knock on the door never left your computer.  It actually never even went out on a wire.  

But there's another trick we can do.  Try "PING 127.0.0.1"  

That will probably return something like Reply from 127.0.0.1: Bytes=32 Time<1ms TTL=128 - which is telling you it got a 32-byte message saying "hey", it took less than a millisecond between when it sent it's message and when it got the reply, and that message was going to live for 128 - that is in seconds.  Fairly standard, because sometimes this sort of message can go around the world.

But anyway, what I have done is added a few domains that I don't want to have to wait for garbage to download, I just send any request to those servers off on a ... well, down a dead end road.  Because that's what this trick does.  If your computer wants to request data from a remote server that ends up in the hosts file, it's not going to get any request out to that server.  

So yeah, I used to be a lot more rabid about it, but I don't tend to wander where I don't need to go any longer, so it's not quite as big a file as it used to be.  But it works for me.

To return to my core point, however, I have noticed over the past twenty or so years that Facebook is getting worse.

And by "worse" I mean a much less well-behaved browser companion.

Huh?  Well, let me go on at some length.

I am not much of a fan of all of the duff and trash that Facebook wishes to bring along when it comes to my computer.  Years ago, I kept Facebook in one window, Twitter in another, I kept a few windows open to job sites, news sites, and monitored things that I felt I needed to have at my fingertips.  Back in 2002, after I was first laid off in the post-September 11 recession, I kept a window open on CNN, another window open on a local news site, Twitter, Facebook, Monster, some other job sites, and I was trying hard to keep up with any possible job opening that might have me.  And the computer ran fine.  Mind you, this was a computer with about two Gigs of RAM, a fairly small (by today's standards) hard drive at 500mb, and a tightly managed operating system with minimal garbage.

Then I learned about ad blockers, spam blockers, and all sorts of other tools.

I did away with my email manager, because I learned that leaving the email on the server made it easier to get to from anywhere.  And I also learned that having a filter that allowed me to limit the amount of garbage and raw ad noise that kept coming in helped me focus and move forward.  But each and every one of those tools adds weight on top of other tools.

So I regularly end up killing and restarting my browser.  Yes, my Firefox is a bit out of date, because, my friends, I frankly do not buy the "newest version is greatest!" BS that tends to follow along.  Some years ago when someone at Mozilla decided "OMG we're so far behind, numbers-wise, we gotta catch up" - that was pretty much the end of anything approaching realistic software versioning.  We used to use the number to indicate "well, it went up by X, so that means Y."  When I worked in software development, I had some folks who had been doing it much longer than I had that a number two steps behind the decimal was a bug fix.  A number that was just behind the decimal was an improvement you probably wanted.  A change to the number in front of the decimal was "the screens are going to be noticeably different, so is everything else."  Dunno if that was a standard or not, but once I realized we were looking at version 68.3316, well that was just noise.  It meant nothing.

So I get to a point where the various bits that have to work together can continue to work together, and I hang out there.  What I have observed are things like each time Facebook throws another visual change at you, such as "hey, the screen doesn't look like it did yesterday" I lose at least a day on my browser.  

And by that I mean I have to kill and restart my browser sooner.

That's right.  I don't reboot my computer a lot.  I keep a lot of documents open, a lot of things in progress, I do save them regularly, and increment file names so if I do lose something it's a small amount of loss, rather than a lot, but I had been getting right around a week between Browser session kills.

What's that?  Oh, it's easy.  I start by keeping a copy of task manager running in the background all the time.  You know, when you do the three-finger salute, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and get the menu, instead of rebooting, I select Task Manager.  I pull it up and switch to the Process tab, find the "Firefox" list, where I typically see six sessions going (yes, I keep mine limited somewhat because I try to do multiple things with this computer), and look for the session with the shortest command line. 

Oh, for crying out loud, yes.  You can modify the columns which are displayed in the process tab.  I have mine set to display the Image name - usually this is the program or service that's running, the PID (Process ID), the username (either the name I use to log in to this computer or "SYSTEM" - anything else is red-alert time).  I then have it show the CPU percent, the CPU time, the "Peak Working Set (Memory)", the "Memory (private working set)", and Page Faults.  The CPU Percent is usually changing, but it is how I can see what is currently using the processing time on the computer.  The CPU Time display shows me the amount of time it thinks it's used since the process was last started.  Such as right now, in my current session where I restarted the browser about a half hour ago and started typing this, Firefox is telling me it has used 25, 24, 1:42, 4:08, 9, and 14 seconds in the six active processes.  So not too much.  I don't know how exactly accurate those numbers are, because it's also telling me the computer has been idle for 1478:58:35, and it's continuing to count up, because other than typing in this window, not much else is going on.

But those other numbers are a bit more useful over time.  The Peak Working Set number is the maximum amount of memory the process has used since it last started.  Right now, Firefox is telling me that with the windows that I have open in the browser right now, I have maxed out at 328,368K, 217,744K, 725,020K, 407,676K, 250,608K, and 322,736K - or a max total of 2,252,152 K of RAM - around 2.5 Gigs.  On a machine with 4 gigs.  The Memory (private) number is what it is actually using right now.  You'll see that number change regularly.  But when  I go load up Facebook, and start scrolling along, I'll see the memory used in some of those processes go over a million.  Which means the process is actively using over a gig.

And when I close out of Facebook, the browser sessions often do not release that memory all that quickly - which is why I have to kill the process and start it all over again.  Which I did.  And do.  

So yeah, it's something that bugs me, and it's something I do so I don't need to wait for the computer.  

Which is also why I won't connect my cell phone to that thing.  I have a tablet that I can use to get onto Facebook, but I don't tend to use it often.  

Because I'm a cranky old bastard who doesn't like modern technology, my kids tell me.  Which is ironic, but we'll just leave that there for now.  Time for me to go scrounge some dinner.