I wrote a quick article a couple days ago about the Avast meltdown, which caused me no small amount of stress, not only from thinking my kids had gotten one of the computers on my network infected, but also from having to go back and clean up after the mess it caused.  Essentially it started tagging everything as infected.  Initially I was deleting infected items, but then moved to quarantining them when it seemed something was amiss.

As I promised, not because I have an ax to grind with Avast – anyone can make a mistake, and it’s hard to complain about a problem with free software – I moved to Avira.  I don’t have a lot to say about it, other than it installed easily, kept up with it’s updates, and didn’t seem to be overly heavy on resources.  It’s hard to really test out an AV program without an infected machine to test it on.  Maybe the next one that comes to my front door will be a good test of Avira’s skills.  Usually I’ll use my tool of choice to clean up all it can find, and then toss another vendor at it to see if anything was missed.  (BTW, I learned this from Norton AV.  It used to be somewhat of a commonplace thing to have someone bring me an infected PC that had an up-to-date copy of Norton installed and running.  Norton would proclaim the PC clean, and a quick pass with AVG would catch the remaining infections).

Anyway, I didn’t stick with Avira long, mainly because I’ve been wanting to test out Microsoft’s Security Essentials.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no big fan of Microsoft.  If it weren’t for specific software and games my kids and wife uses, I’d be a Linux-only shop.  BUT, and this is a BIG BUT, my theory is that who is better prepared to protect and clean the Windows OS than Microsoft?  After all, it IS their code!

So, it’s MSE on my 2 Windows XP machines now.  So far so good.  It seems to be happy doing it’s thing, which is leaving me alone while I’m trying to work.

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Last evening the kids came to me to let me know their computer was complaining of a Trojan Horse virus.  I didn’t have time to deal with it, so I told them to click Delete and let me know if anything else went wrong.

Late last night, the computer was freed up, so I make sure Avast was updated and started a full scan of the hard drive.  Surprisingly, every once in awhile it popped up to identify another file infected with a Trojan Horse.  At first I didn’t think that much of it; after all, my kids like to download all the 1-hour demo games and it’s not uncommon to have to do some cleanup work every so often to strip off some CoolWebSearch toolbar.

But, as the scan went on, it started getting into programs that concerned me.  These were programs that have been installed on the computer for ages.  I decided to take a closer look, and the files that were supposedly infected hadn’t had their timestamps altered.  Suspicious now, I did a quick Google on the virus name.  The first entry had me cursing.  Apparently Avast had a problem and they were mistakenly identifying files as infected.

As I understand it from various postings today, the situation didn’t last long.  Avast fixed the problem and the new update was released.  But, that doesn’t solve MY problem, which is that I was wrongly deleting and/or quarantining files that were NOT infected.  I didn’t have time to deal with it last night, but I have a bad feeling I’ve got legitimate apps that will not run now because some of their important files are gone.

At least we’re leading up to a weekend when I’ll have time to spend on it.  It could probably use a refresh of XP to clean all the kids’ garbage off of it.  I’ve been pretty happy with Avast, and would have probably kept using it, but this will also give me an excuse to try another AV.  I’m thinking about trying one I hadn’t heard of before, called Avira.  Maybe I’ll do a review after awhile to let you know how it goes.

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A friend recently bought a Chumby.  If you haven’t heard of them, a Chumby is basically a network-aware clock.  Those who follow my blog may remember that I posted an article with this idea some time ago.  I’d like to think that I had the idea and the Chumby folks took it from me, but I don’t hold it against them.  I should have gotten off my butt and developed the product myself instead of sitting around waiting for someone else to do it so I could complain.

At any rate, it’s given me plenty of entertainment value.  The guy who bought it can’t help but mention it to everyone he sees, and I take every chance I get to call it his “Chubby” rather than Chumby.  It’s amazing how many different ways you can substitute Chubby for Chumby in normal conversation and have it end up funny.

He’s finally received his Chumby the night before Thanksgiving.  He’s promised to bring it to work on Monday, and we’re all supposed to be prepared to be amazed at it’s wonderfulness.  I’m not holding my breath.

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I’ve had a couple comments lately to my blog that I found interesting.  I don’t get a lot of traffic OR comments most of the time, so I tend to scrutinize those that I DO get.

Anyway, in both cases I had someone leave what appeared at first to be a legitimate comment.  Nothing long and complicated, but short, to the point, and actually related to my posting.  Both comments were accompanied by URL’s and emails addresses, and seemed to be from college-age girls.

So, always curious to know about my visitors, and also wanting to return the favor and maybe comment on their blogs, I visited their sites.  Neither was what I expected.  Nothing really pornographic, but definitely enticing pictures.  Both claimed to be new websites, and all the links on their main page went to an images.php file.  Again curious, I clicked on the links.  Instead of images, I was redirected to Fling, a singles site.

Now, I don’t have any complicated anti-spam methods on my blogs.  I use a simple captcha to weed out most automated stuff, and I moderate everything to keep it clean and on-topic.  And, both of these comments DID contain on-topic content.  So, I’ve got to assume that a real person is taking the time to sit and do this.  The question is, why?  Is Fling doing this themselves as a way to draw traffic?  Is Fling paying these people per click-through to run these sites and post comments on random sites?

Either way, it’s an interesting evolution in the marketplace.

As for the two comments that I’ve seen, I pull them up and strip out the URL’s and emails.  I don’t want to be a jump site to Fling.

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I’m gonna make this quick.  This thing rules.  I’m shocked that anyone was able to make something that so smoothly handles the obfuscation of the software/hardware interaction so as to make it possible to run WindowsXP within Ubuntu and vice versa.  Truly a remarkable thing.

However, I can’t use mine right now, because I upgraded my VirtualBox Ubuntu package.  Now I can launch XP, but it crashes when I try to log in.

I’ll let you know when I get it fixed.

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I know someone “in the business”, so to speak, that pretty much refuses to do PC work.  He’s sharp, he’s technical – there’s no doubt he could handle it if he put his mind to it – but he’d just rather not start.  I can understand why.  There have been so many different iterations of processor, socket type, memory, hard drive, drive controller, etc…. over the years that it can be a maze of information to sort through.  If you don’t keep up with the industry, you’re suddenly left way behind.

For example, I wanted to upgrade the video in my kid’s computer.  Games have gotten more complex, and the video was starting to lag.  I had to spend several hours just researching video cards to make sure that I was at least buying something faster than what I already had.  I wanted to boost the RAM in the PC as well, so I did a quick look at the motherboard specs – DDR SDRAM, 184-pin, blah….  Ordered a 1GB stick online, only to realize once it arrived that I had overlooked the “ECC” notation, that “ECC” ram would not work in my machine.  Grr.  I went back to the site where I bought the memory – half of the items didn’t mention ECC, which is probably how I overlooked it.

I guess it could be worse.  We could still be running proprietary systems where the only way I could upgrade the video would be to buy a several-thousand-$ graphics card.

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Specifically AIM24000-48 cards.  Will be installed into an IPD12000.  AIM29000 cards not wanted – they tend to overheat and come close to catching on fire.

Net-to-Net was purchased by Paradyne, then Paradyne by Zhone.  The AIM cards could be labeled as any of those 3.

Thanks!

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I have 3 new things I want to learn how to do:

Flash programming (or Air?)

Ajax programming

Fantasy Baseball application

I just can’t quite figure out how I’m going to share time between my job, my other blog, helping my wife with her business, and fishing.  Maybe when it gets colder and I cut back on fishing I’ll have more time.

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This time it’s just annoying, and I have a workaround.  But, annoying IS annoying.

Progress DB on the back end server.  PHP/Apache using ODBC with unixODBC and DataDirect drivers for Progress.

For whatever reason, I cannot odbc_execute this SQL: “select count(*) from table”.  It errors out with a 158 SQL State 9 every time.  I CAN, however, use isql to test the command and it works fine.  I can use PHP/Apache to run similar commands against MySQL tables.  There’s just something about that combination that isn’t allowing the count() to get through the unixODBC/DataDirect layers.  Not only that, but I’ve never been able to get the LC_MESSAGES worked out for these DataDirect ODBC drivers, so I can’t get the REAL message that goes with that 158 to tell me what’s wrong.

Very frustrating.  For now, until I have time to work on the issue more, I just read in the rows one at a time and increment a counter.  Not exactly the most efficient way of doing things, but it’s getting the job done for now.

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I’ve been on Facebook for several months now, giving it a try.  I skipped Myspace when it was all the rage, mainly because it was painful to look at and seemed to be full of teens.  But Facebook seemed to have more structure and less mess, making it at the very least readable.

I wasn’t on Facebook long before I started getting contacted by old classmates from high school.  My 20th reunion is coming up and they are using Facebook as a way to locate and keep in touch between now and then.  It’s actually working pretty well to keep a group of people in touch.  I’m doing the same thing with my family reunion, building a group of “friends” – in this case relatives – by looking for someone I can find and then using their friend list to find other people.

So now I’ve gathered a decent list of “friends”.  I log in once in awhile to check what they have to say.  I automatically pull my posts on my blog sites into Facebook via RSS so I’ve got a running list of entries for my Facebook friends to read.  But guess what?  No one, and I mean no one, comments on my articles.  Not one of my friends writes any type of article themselves or writes anything with any content.  Yes, there are a few things of interest – one girl is using the site as a way to keep all her friends up to date with her pregnancy.  But for the most part, my Wall is filled with STUFF.  “I’m eating X for breakfast”.  “I just took a shower”.  “Blah blah blah Mafia Wars”.  I’ve got to sift through so much junk to see if there’s anything important stuck in there that I missed.

I guess I expected more.  I expected actual conversations about things of importance.  There are significant things happening in our world today, and not one of my 33 Facebook friends has anything to say about them.  The one time one of their friends make an offhand political comment, I responded, and after a few volleys back and forth, they quit right when it was getting fun.

I’ll probably stick with it for awhile, but I’m very tempted to just email out my regular email addresses and abandon Facebook.  If it weren’t for the reunion stuff, I would have ditched it already.  It may be a useful tool for some, but for me it’s just another online persona that I have to keep up.

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