A Canadian in Ireland

You would have been impressed if you're into that sort of thing...

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Just barely enough time to post little tidbit of geeky-ness.

In less than 30 minutes it's going to be 1234567890 in Unix Time.

While it probably means more to your computer than to you there are some celebrations going on.

If I was in Vancouver I'd probably head for the Irish Heather, as I'm not I'll just raise a quiet glass on my own.

If you want to watch the count down, or count up, you can click here.

UPDATE:

The brother sent me a screen shot of the big moment.

Is the question of the moment around the OC...

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Nothing says I love you like...



Anti-Spyware software

Happy Valentine's day and I hope you got something more romantic.

Completely my fault this time.

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So I imagine you're all interested to hear how I got on up in Dublin.

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In my last few posts I've been giving out about My Opera for the problems it's been having the last while. But now I have to say my eyes have been opened.

A friend asked me to help her get started using a My Space account. I'd heard of it, of course, but I wasn't that familiar with how it worked. Still, I had a quick look and figured

How hard can it be?

Well, today we sat down and actually tried to do some work.

Went from to to and finally

What a shambolic piece of confusion. Navigation was non-existant, cutomization was rudimentary, and there seemed to be many broken and missing links. The help section was a joke.

I really should have put her on My Opera and saved us both a lot of grief, but that would have meant showing her my blog, and I wasn't quite ready to do that.

So, despite its (occasional) faults My Opera could be a lot worse. And a lot noisier - Walky preserve us from music on profile pages.

And anyone else who might be interested.

How to add an image to a post when it's not already in an My Opera album.

1. Start a new post as normal.

2. In the bottom right corner of the New blog post window is the Add images/files area. Click on the Upload new link.

3. You will now be asked to select a file on your own computer to upload to My Opera. Either type the path into the box, or click Choose... to bring up the standard MS Open window.

4. Once you have your file selected (the box will now be filled in), click on UPLOAD FILE. Uploading may take a while depending on the size of the image and the speed of your connection.

5. When the image is uploaded to Opera, you will see a selection of "code snippets" that you can choose from to place the image in your post. Highlight the one you want, copy, and paste it into the Message box where you want the image to appear in the text of your post.

Make sure you copy the full line of code, including the square brackets [ and ]. I've had problems with missing the beginning or end if the line extends past the edge of the Add image/files box.

6. If everything works you should get something like this.

[IMGCENTER=/Mickeyjoe_irl/homes/blog/Label.jpg]

Which will give you this.



Hope this is helpful. If you have any questions, please ask.

This is what happens when you don't update your security software. Mom's landlord asked me to have a look at his Pc as it was "running slow and probably has a virus" So up I go on Saturday afternoon with my bag of tricks.

While they did have Norton, Spybot S&D, and Ad-Aware installed, it was all well out of date. I tried to uninstall Norton so I could put on AVG but I kept getting an error about removing a registry key. Thinking this might be virus related I went to install Ewido only to find I didn't have the latest version and the updates I downloaded wouldn't install. So I started a scan with McAfee's Stinger while I went back home to get the latest version of Ewido.

The Stinger picked up one virus. I got Ewido installed and started a scan.

Ewido found several references to the CoolWebSearch hijack so I stopped the scan I was running after about 100 infections and ran CWShredder a few times to clean that up. Then another scan with Ewido. This time I let it run all the way through and it found 1275 infected objects

Cleaned all that up and then went to work on removing Norton. Seems the uninstaller was having trouble removing the toolbar from IE. First I tried disabling the toolbar, no go. Then I tracked down the key in the registry and tried to delete it manually. Here I got a message telling me I was denied permission.

So you can set permissions on registry items like on files. Very interesting. And when I checked there it was set to deny any changes to BHOs. It took me a bit of fiddling to get the permissions set right, but as soon as I fixed that Norton uninstalled without a hitch.

So Norton off, AVG free on, and another virus zapped. Then Ad-Aware - another 100 or so nasties.
By the time I got to Spybot S&D it was nearly 9pm and for some reason the scan was going slower than a wet week. Usually Spybot is one of the quicker scans, so I decided to call it a night and just left it running.

The next day when I got back I found the reason for the slow response. 1100 problems, including 1001 CWS infected DLLs. Spybot fixed everything except for one stubborn file that refused to delete even running a scan on startup. So I used the file delete tool in HijackThis.

One final scan with the latest updates of Ewido revealed that I hadn't completely fixed the registry problems from the previous day. CWS had left three BHO entries in the registry that refused to be cleaned. Back into the registry, more changing of permissions back to what they should be, and I was finally done.

For good measure I installed SP2, and cleaned up and defragged the hard disk.

Not a bad (2)days work if I do say so myself.

PS When I feel up to it I'll link to all the tools I used. in the meantime there's always Google.

I have My Opera setup transferred to the new computer so I won't be using that "other browser" on here again.

I had an interesting problem during the last week that I'm quite proud of solving, if I do say so myself. A woman asked me to have a look at her computer as she couldn't get any web pages. That was simply a matter of setting IE to dial her default connection. But she was also getting this text file that opened every time she started her computer. I tried all the usual suspects – a file in her startup folder, a entry in win.ini or system.ini – but nothing. I then ran HijackThis, a handy tool for removing stubborn spyware.

Even that didn't show anything at first glance, I had to dig through the features until I found a tool called StartupList. It's included in the Misc Tools section of HijackThis. Only then did I find that somehow this file had been set to run at every log-on in the Task Scheduler. Weird.

What else is new

Well, I went out and bought myself a new keyboard. I know it looks a bit gimicky, but I have problems with my wrists if I type too much and I know it's because I have a poor typing position. I've tried using a wrist rest, and it does help some, but not enough. So I bit the bullet and went for a full ergonomic keyboard. It's different, but not as hard as I thought to it would be to use. After a bit of practice I'm sure I'll be grand. Until then I can blame any typos on getting used to the new layout.

I tried to get it from the same company where I got my “new” computer because they had the best price. Unfortunately they didn't have it in stock, and ordering it would take too long. The plan was for me to pick up when I was in Dublin on the past Friday, since getting it delivered would negate any saving I made on price.

I was trying to kill as many birds with the fewest stones on this Dublin trip so I offered to pick up a few things at Lush for Mam. I also wanted to get some jeans at Marks & Spencer. Then there was my cousin Niall who lives in Lusk and is having trouble with his computer. He offered me a bed for the night so I stayed over and came back on Saturday.

Niall's computer has been giving him grief for ages. I had a look at it over Xmas, but I couldn't get it to repeat the problem he was having. Namely, the computer just shuts down without warning and then keeps shutting itself down every few minutes unless you leave it off for several hours. It sounded like a hardware problem so I found out how to boot it into the diagnostics and ran a few tests. Of course it went through everything with flying colours.

The next morning though, the machine decided to cut out while I was checking my email. A read through the manual revealed that the power button flashing amber meant there was an internal power problem, and suggested reeseating the CPU power connector on the motherboard. I cracked open the case and tried it, but no joy. At least now we know what the problem is so he can get back on to Dell and get it sorted.

So now I have to get to work on a piece for the writers' group. Our first meeting for '06 is on Tuesday. I've been mulling over an idea but haven't anything on paper yet.