Riddled with viruses

Whilst updating my media server I did a virus scan and discovered it's riddled with trojans and various viruses! Oops.

I use AVG free version but it seems to have circumvented that. Even after a full virus scan various strange things still happening, including getting redirected to Windowsclick repeatedly whilst trying to fix the problem. Seems other people had the same problem.

Running Malwarebytes Anti-malware (free version) initially didn't work. You have to rename the mbam.exe to get it to work! The trojan is blocking it running. Clever. So after a rename, a quick clean and a reboot that seems to have gone. Wonder what else is left.

So, lesson learnt:

• Update Windows automatically. I had this turned off because I don't want the server resetting randomly.
• Run full virus scans regularly. I was just running quick scans occasionally.
• Viruses are getting more devious.
• If you can't follow this link then you have it too.
• I post stuff like this because I found what other people put really useful. Thanks!

Browser Review

I've been using Firefox 2 at home for sometime now, and Internet Explorer 7 at work. Internet Explorer 6 was very lacking in usability features, like tabbed browsing. IE 7 seems to add a lot of functionality and is surprisingly useful and responsive for something from the Microsoft stable. I suppose competition from Mozilla spurred them on. Hooray for choice and competition.

Firefox 2, out of the box has memory issues though when you leaving running or use it for a long time. It has great functionality, but eats RAM, and can become quite sluggish on a laptop. This can be relieved, but I thought I'd try another option, Opera.

My initial response was very enthusiastic. It's a small install and uses less memory than the other browsers. It's the browser that is used on the Wii console. However, after using it for some time, what I don't like is the plug-in support, called "widgets" in Opera. These don't seem to be dockable, like a lot of the Firefox plug-ins. Instead they can live on your desktop and you can access them when the browser in minimised. But why would you want to do this?

Plug-ins are important because they let you add extensions like del.icio.us toolbars, i.e. so you don't have to go via a web page to get to your links. There are lots of other useful integrated plug-ins as well which block adverts etc. The Opera widgets don't seem as integrated with the browser, which is disappointing.

I'm settling on Firefox 3, which is beta 2 at the moment. It seems a lot more responsive than Firefox 2 and they have supposedly fixed the memory leak issues. Not all sites work with beta 3 yet, e.g. Yahoo Mail, the new flashy version. And not all the add-ons have been ported from version 2, but it definitely looks like the most promising browser out there at the moment as IE 7 doesn't have anywhere near the community support that Firefox has.

On Blogging

Blogging is quite odd. It's quite therapeutic, but at the same time you wonder who is reading. Whatever you write is open to millions, probably billions of people. Not that that many people are likely to read it, but they have the option to.

To sway an audience, you must watch them as you speak. -- C. Kent Wright

Perhaps the style of writing is influenced by how many you intend to reach. Sensationalist tabloid newspapers subscribe to hyperbole and gossip to extend their readership.

I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side. I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts. -- Bethania McKenstry

But isn't blogging more of a personal thing?

I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud. -- Real Live Preacher, Real Live Preacher weblog

Like a diary? Except, things you'd to say someone you met in the street; or, more extreme because you'll never meet them? I suppose it's also nice, and sometimes we take for granted that not everyone can publish their thoughts and opinions.

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. -- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. (1900 - 1965), Speech in Detroit, 7 Oct. 1952

There does seem to be an awful lot of stream-of-consciousness babble in some blogs.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Well, it's an interesting medium. And without the help of filters and search engines it would all become overwhelmingly meaningless. Perhaps it's just a case of patience!

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together. -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)

Google Reader, yay!

I've been using Google Reader as a news aggregator recently. It's great! Not only is the presentation style good, the response time is good and its very well organised, thought out and easy to use. I was previously using Great News (on Windows); it's quite low on resources and hides in the system the tray. Previous to that I was using RSS Bandit (for the amusing name as much as anything), but uses a lot of resources, probably because its written in C# or something. Still shouldn't complain too much about free software, as it is, after all free effort by someone.

One of the other reasons that it's great is by virtual of it being a web application. I'm writing this on a newly installed version of Ubuntu that I'm trying out, so I don't need to worry about cross platform problems. As virtualisation becomes more and more prevalent we'll all be looking for cross platform, portable solutions.

Google are busy providing a whole framework for your online presence on the web. You can get a blog ( like this one), e-mail, news, etc and tag items to tie it all together. Quite impressive and even more impressive that it's all free, well apart from all the adverts.

You can see my shared news items. And also subscribe to a feed of them, in your reader!

I think I've ignored the whole "Google Applications"/Web 2.0 stuff until now as a lot of it is just unusable fluff. But, all of a sudden it's here (not in beta), working and pretty good. Try it out, you'll need a Google account and then you can get access to Google Mail which is equally good for doing your email and subscribing to mailing lists. For the while though I'm sticking with my Yahoo mail account because that is also excellent, free, and I haven't quite gotten over the concept of someone wanting to archive all your personal mail.