I love Apple’s Get a Mac ads, but sometimes they can get a bit (well-deservedly, mind you) cocky and self-indulgent. It’s all good fun that never fails to garner a chuckle out of me, though…

Nonetheless, Microsoft’s new book Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House? surely takes the cake. It’s a nice colourful picture book for the kiddies with easy-to-read words and pastel-coloured pictures that explains why there’s a blinking monster machine in the house that buzzes loudly after Daddy visits The Pirate Bay. Kiddies will learn to love the machine and acknowledge that it’s part of a happy and loving family, and other kids without it are like… totally jealous. Oh, and did I mention it seems like a desperate, corporate marketing propaganda from Microsoft at its best? Yet another bullet for Apple to poke fun at.

Somehow, Daddy looks kinda naughty here…

Amusing and humourous (in a tongue-in-cheek kinda way). Read the book in its entirety online for free, or surf over to Amazon to buy yourself a copy for your kiddies NOW. You know you want to.

Tags: Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?, Microsoft, Server at Home, Server, Picture Book, Propaganda, Marketing

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%#^%*@%*!?! This morning in the midst of some heavy ‘working’ I got attacked by worm.win32.huhk.c! Crap. The worst part of it is that it infected my explorer.exe!

For the uninitiated, explorer.exe is the Windows Explorer executable file, i.e. the Graphical User Interface (GUI) you see in Windows and use to work with files. ZoneAlarm promptly renamed explorer.exe to explorer.exe.vzr in the Windows folder when it couldn’t remove the worm. In addition, it quarantined another explorer.exe in the Windows’ system32\dllcache folder. Crap. With these files gone, and I restart Windows, the GUI won’t load at boot up. I’d either have to use the old skool Command Line Interface (CLI), or restore my computer’s settings from a backup, which… I never do (’backup’? Is that some kind of pastry?). I’m doomed. No, the Village Idiot can’t help me this time. I’d have to resort to my old friend Google.

Unfortunately, this time Google wasn’t as much help. Besides not returning many results at the initial time of Googling (approx 6 results), all but one of the results were in foreign languages (foreign to me at least). Fortunately, the one result in English happened to be AnandTech, “one of the largest online computer hardware journals in the English-speaking world” (or says my other friend Wikipedia).

When I first ventured into the forum, there were initially 5 posts. A couple of hours and refreshes later, the forum grew to ten posts. Apparently I wasn’t the only victim. Other hapless innocents were suffering from this problem. The plot thickens… It’s suggested (or hoped, rather) on the Kapersky Lab’s forums that it could be a ‘false positive‘… The problem was I wasn’t using Kapersky, but ZoneAlarm! Then, a shimmer of hope as I found a fellow ZoneAlarm user. The so-called ‘worm’ wasn’t a worm at all says Joey on her blog, but a malware that gets you (through your antivirus app) to delete explorer.exe. The guys and girls at Microsoft might’ve added a little ‘bundle of joy’ in the latest explorer.exe code as part of the latest Windows update that antivirus apps weren’t happy about.

Posts on the Kapersky Lab’s forums spread like wildfire… and more people started giving the same advice: DO NOT DELETE explorer.exe! WTF!?! BUT I DID ALREADY!!! Things were definitely not getting any rosier. With explorer.exe gone, Windows XP itself started complaining:

I hurriedly tried to copy explorer.exe from an uninfected PC, hoping to elevate some of my panic attack, but unfortunately, no… ZoneAlarm removes it again. I ran the ZoneAlarm auto updater in case they’d release a latest virus signature but no cigar. That darned Get a Mac - Viruses ad keeps playing over and over in my head… Supa K and his Mac should be laughing his head off now.

 

Alright, that’s it. I’m gonna go with the false positive ‘theory’ (by this time it could be fact). It seems the only solution is to restore explorer.exe in any way possible.

The first thing I did was to assume that ZoneAlarm is falsely accusing explorer.exe as being infected. Therefore, I had to switch off the ‘ZoneAlarm Anti-virus’ system.

Next, I restored the ‘infected’ files back to their original locations.

I then switched back on the ‘ZoneAlarm Anti-virus’ system, and inserted my Windows XP SP2 CD into the disc drive. Windows copied and replaced the ‘infected’ files with the ones from the disc… Hopefully everything went OK. It sure seemed that way. Only one way to find out: by restarting the computer.

TADA! It booted up as normal! Woot! I’m saved! Then an interesting little update from Microsoft popped up:

More reading on this topic revealed “On a Microsoft Windows XP SP2-based computer, the Explorer.exe process crashes“, and specifically “Some antivirus applications and some print applications use notification balloons to display messages. These applications may cause a race condition. Therefore, the Explorer.exe process crashes.” Hmm… I wonder if this problem I’m having is related? It does seem that way.

Well, my computer is saved for today. Thanks to all the help from the good people of the Net! My whole day’s worth of productivity and fun all down the drain… Whoever’s responsible for worm.win32.huhk.c should be tied to a tree, and severely punished by banned from computers, technology and the Internet for good.

Tags: Worm, Computer, Virus, explorer.exe, Windows Explorer, Windows XP, SP2, worm.win32.huhk.c, ZoneAlarm, antivirus, Kapersky, security, Windows Update, KB938828, Google

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Driving thru Blackburn Rd, Mt Waverley this morning I came upon an interesting sight, not often seen around these parts.

A cable was running from the main phone lines to a tree.

Well, my guess is either:

• Someone wanted to conduct a mad experiment to fry this tree if with a freak electricity jolt, or
• This tree desperately needed to connect to the Net.

If it was the latter, hey- who could blame it? I couldn’t live without the Net myself. I wonder what speed it gets, though…

Tags: Phone Cable, Cable, Experiment, Internet connected, Tree, Blackburn Rd, Mt Waverley

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So just WHAT have you been up to on your computer? No NSFW or pr0n sites, lately? Oh, sure… I believe you.

For those of you nosy SysAdmins, curious Bosses, and suspecting spouses looking to peep at what your employees (or loved ones) have been up to on their computers, I have just the thing for you… RescueTime: ridiculously easy time management even the Village Idiot can do it!

RescueTime is a web-based time management tool that’s currently in Beta (that means they’re ironing out bugs that might crash your valuable hentai collection). It’s a FREE service that lets you see what and how long software and websites have been accessed on the computers you have the RescueTime app installed on.

I’ve been using RescueTime for more than a month now and I can say that it’s a useful and amusing tool to have. You can ‘tag’ (giving meaningful labels/descriptions/categories to) top used apps (or all if you want) and track their usages over months, weeks, days, hours, or minutes by app or tags.

To get started, you’ll need to sign up for a free account on their website. It’s simple and only takes a couple of minutes. Once you’ve logged into your Dashboard, you’ll need to download and install the RescueTime Data Collector on the computers you want to monitor. It’s available for both Windows and Mac, so you Apple Fanboys can rejoice (sorry, no Linux version yet). Once installed and configured, it’ll run quietly and effortless on your System Tray. If you have a firewall app like ZoneAlarm, you’ll need to make sure it’ll allow you to gather info from your computer and launch said info into Cyberspace.

You’ll need to wait a couple of hours ’til the website absorbs the latest app usage from your computer(s), then you can log into your Dashboard to see your usage; you can always burn a couple of hours reading some blogs BenDawos.com.

As I pointed out earlier, RescueTime is useful because you can track which apps you’ve been wasting spending time on, and it’ll help you (or your staff or loved one) organise and prioritise your/their time better- RescueTime is after all, a time management tool. It’s also amusing to see exactly how much time you’ve been spending on ‘certain’ sites.

It’s not to say it doesn’t have its share of problems, like relatively-high memory usage (avg. 32MB on my PC) and the occasional crashes. After all, it is currently in Beta, and I’m sure it’ll get fixed over time. A good app is only as good as the quality of service and support provided, and the guys (no girls there yet) at RescueTime don’t disappoint; besides having a Blog detailing their progress, they’ve got an Interactive Q&A/Forum set up at Satisfaction.com to satisfy all your inquisitive and troublesome needs. What more could you ask for? Microsoft Tech Support?

RescueTime is a great app, and I can’t wait for it to go gold. Those of you itching to find out what naughtiness you’ve (or someone’s) been getting on your/their computers, sign up for and install RescueTime Beta now!

Tags: RescueTime, Time Management, Computer, Application, Software, Sastifaction.com, Productivity, Tracking, Usage, Dashboard, Monitoring, Priotising, Priotizing, Tags, Tech Support

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