Category: Technology

I have to take a work break to whine about two things.

First, the drivers for Linksys‘s WMP11 802.11b PCI wireless cards suck. I was banging my head against the desk at a client’s house for upward of half an hour with this card. I went to the client’s main computer and checked the web for solutions. I stumbled across a discussion forum thread at www.dslreports.com with the solution. The WMP11’s drivers added a registry key that loaded the card’s main .SYS driver from a CD! This means that unless you had the installation CD in the drive at reboot, the card was not going to work. Hacking the registry fixed this problem. Whew! I was afraid the client’s Windows XP install was corrupted!

Second, Microsoft‘s Web Folders technology is way too fragile, and when it breaks it is nearly impossible to get it working again.

In Windows XP, Web Folders is what you get when you go to My Network Places on the Start Menu. Any time you open a web site over HTTP in FrontPage, the opening action “passes through” Web Folders. If Web Folders gets corrupted, FrontPage can’t open web sites!

My XP’s Web Folders feature was so corrupted that even a Microsoft-endorsed 3rd party hack, Jimco Open Web, couldn’t open this web site!

So last night I reinstalled Windows XP, installed Office 2003 and its Service Pack 1, and installed Windows XP Service Pack 2. Argh, after all this work I still had the same problem! Even though this was a true reinstall, not simple a Windows “refresh,” the same problem still happens! I wonder if not deleting the Program Files tree is the problem?

Tonight I am going to disconnect my primary drive, make my slave drive my primary, and install Windows XP on the slave drive. That may make sense anyway since the slave drive is only about 2 months old. The primary drive is about 3 years old. Plus the slave drive has no Windows, Program Files, or any other traces of a Windows install. It just has backup files.

Back to making UML class diagrams for a project at work.

I downloaded and ran Symantec’s Netsky removal tool and found that Netsky had left droppings all over my system. After about 30 minutes, it found and deleted a few hundred files, almost all of which were creatively named EXE files waiting to re-infect my system should I accidentally click on them. (Well, technically, the McAfee on-access scanner deleted the file just as the removal tool “touched” them. McAfee’s tool found hundreds of droppings, but it missed three .tmp files that Symantec’s tool actually deleted.)

Now my computer is returned to its normally demented state: .

I have regularly worked with Windows computers since 1990 when my family was given an IBM PC Model 5150. I had never gotten a virus, ever, until last night.

I got this email with a ZIP file. I knew it was a virus, but I opened the ZIP file anyway. (Simply opening the ZIP file typically will not give you a virus; you have to open a file in the ZIP to get it.) Inside the ZIP was one file that appeared to be named something.txt. Before I double-clicked on it I should have immediately noticed all the space after the .txt in the filename. It turns out that the file was named something.txt___________________________.pif (where _ is a space). There were so many spaces that you can’t see the .pif on the end unless you went to Details view.

By doing that I got the W32/Netsky.p@MM and W32/Netsky.ad@MM virus.

I didn’t realize I had a virus until my wife checked her email. She got a message from a friend with a virus payload. Knowing how those viruses work, I immediately checked the headers and did a nslookup on the originating IP (as reported by our ISP’s SMTP server). It was a SWBell.net DSL IP address! I logged in my router and found that it’s my DSL address!

My Windows XP box is fully patched with all latest Windows Updates and Office Updates. The one thing I was lacking was the virus software. I had to redo my computer due to a hardware failure about two weeks ago, and I neglected to reinstall my virus scanner. It’s on now, and it caught the virus very quickly.

I hate the way virus scanners slow down your system, but now I definitely see why they are a necessary evil.

Introductory programming courses usually start with an example program called “$g(Hello World).” Hello World uses variables named “foo” and “bar.”

Innocent syllables? Not.

Foo and bar come from $d(FUBAR), an old military term meaning F—– Up Beyond All Repair.

So nearly every intro computer science textbook hurls an expletive at new students.

And now you know the rest of the story.

I have a Compaq iPAQ 3970 PDA. It was given to me about a year and a half ago by SMU because we were going to write a PDA-based ticket writing software for the SMU police department. I wasn’t going to write the software, but as a web geek I was supposed to provide support and knowledge.

The project never got off the ground.

Now I use the PDA to be my Outlook calendar, contacts, and task list when I am not at the office. It’s incredibly useful for this.

My favorite use is a gym workout tracker. The PDA comes with a scaled down version of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program called Pocket Excel. After I use each exercise machine at the gym I jot down the weights I used and how many repetitions I managed into my spreadsheet. (Click on the spreadsheet to see how wimpy I really am.) Over time I will graph my workout results to see if I am improving.