In the last two weeks I’ve had two separate infections of Fake XP Security software on machines at the offices. The first was an installation of XP Security Centre telling the user it had detected 3500 viruses on his machine. I got rid of it with Ad-Aware 2008 and all seemed well until it reappeared about four days later by which time I was dealing with the second infection on another PC which this time had XP Security Centre and Antivirus XP 2008 causing mayhem with regular BSOD’s and other crashes. The first infected PC was now showing both of these pieces of Malware as well.
Ad-Aware would find the XP Security Centre and tell me it had removed it but after a reboot it came back. Spybot would install but wouldn’t run and neither would Hijack This nor a third program I tried. I assume the spyware was looking for and blocking their executables.
I tried a couple of recommended spyware removal tools including Spyware Doctor but they wanted payment before removing the spyware and since Ad-Aware could find it but not permanently remove it, I wasn’t about to keep paying out for packages without any guarantee of performance.
Finally I came across MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware which is a very lightweight download at only 1.8Mb and got rid of both infections on both PCs with no fuss whatsoever. Congratulations to MalwareBytes who now have some of the money I would probably have wasted on the other programs.
The source of the infections is believed to be fake UPS tracking emails which are out in abundance at the moment. Since we have an account with UPS for all of our courier transactions it was inevitable that at least one person would be caught out before it was locked down.
I’m considering upgrading my point and shoot digital camera, a Canon Ixus 50, to a Digital SLR since being on holiday in North Cornwall recently really showed the limits of the point and shoot. I’d like to get more into photography and a DSLR is a must. I’m now trying to justify to myself whether I should lay out the cash on something like a Canon 450D or a 40D with a couple of lenses or whether it will end up gathering dust because I can’t find the time to get out and use it and then do the post-production with Photoshop.
I borrowed the Canon 350D from the office to do some comparison shots and on image quality the Ixus stands up to the 350D extremely well, but the 350D just feels better to use and the control it gives can’t be matched by a point and shoot.
If I upgrade I think it’s going to be to a 450D. The 40D is not that much more expensive but it’s main benefits are the semi-pro handling and build quality which I think is a bit of overkill for a newbie amateur like me! I’ve looked at the Nikons as well but the Canon seems a more rounded package.
Now, back to that question of whether I REALLY need it ……..
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had continuing long periods of ADSL outage where I get no ADSL connection at all and the modem reports a ‘physical line error’. I’ve had a hard time convincing my ISP, Plusnet that it is nothing to do with my equipment or wiring as I’ve changed modems, cables, ADSL splitters and even changed my master socket (yes I know you’re not supposed to but BT haven’t called to check it so I thought I’d change it so at least I can be fully confident about my equipment). The connection simply disappears for over 24 hours, the longest period being nearly 4 days!
One of the problems I’ve had is that when I report the fault, it can take 24 hours for BT to run their tests and by then the connection has come back up and they say there’s no problem, it must be at my end. Finally during the 4 day outage, they found a fault at the exchange and supposedly fixed it last Monday morning. Everything worked fine until Monday afternoon this week when the connection dropped again. I reported it to Plusnet who have managed to test the line again while I have no connection and tell me that although ’some work has been carried out at the exchange’, the fault is still there. The connection was back on when I woke this morning.
Call me a cynic but I swear someone at BT is using the Sky Digital method of tech support: switch it off and if it works when you switch it back on, the fault must be fixed. Someone is arriving at the exchange with a fault report, rebooting some equipment and leaving again. Then the clearly faulty equipment is failing again a few days later.
If it isn’t fixed permanently this time, it looks like I’ll have to try and get it escalated as I’ve been without ADSL for over 8 days this month.
Update 06/08/2008: Having arranged for a visit from BT to investigate the fault last Friday morning between 8:00am and 1:00pm they decided not to show so I wasted most of the day at home for nothing. Apparently there “was a problem with the engineer and they couldn’t get to me today”. Got a call from Plusnet late afternoon on Friday to say that BT had received other complaints from the area and discovered that I was connected to a faulty line card at the exchange. One had been ordered and would be fitted ASAP. My internet came back on again on Sunday Morning and has stayed on so far. What a pathetic saga lasting over 5 weeks just to prove that BT had a faulty line card. I was offline for days at a time and they couldn’t diagnose a faulty line card as the cause?
I’ve made a couple of changes to the commenting facilities on the blog. You no longer need to be a registered user to post a comment. However, to help combat the inevitable increase in spam from that move, I’ve instigated a captcha routine on the comments form. Every comment will now require you to enter the code you see in the image presented to you. Comments are also still moderated.
These changes should make it easier if readers just want to post a quick comment in response to an item.
Are your Office 2007 applications slowing right down when you try to open or insert a file and you’re getting the progress window shown below as soon as you try and navigate in the file open dialog box?
The cause of the problem is a mapped drive not connected correctly. If you open Windows Explorer and check through your mapped network drives, you will probably find one that cannot connect to it’s specified source. If you disconnect it, your Office 2007 applications should start behaving again.
If you use AVG anti-virus from Grisoft, you may be aware of some rather heated debate in the IT community regarding it’s new LinkScanner feature included with version 8.0 of the software. The Register has discussed it several times for example.
Basically, what AVG LinkScanner does is to forward scan every result returned by your internet searches to check if the websites are malware of virus loaded. In theory, I’m sure that this was a great idea, but in practice it has its problems. Firstly, it’s using more bandwidth because it is fetching and scanning websites which you may have no intention of visiting and bandwidth at some point has to be paid for. Secondly, the web logs of every website returned by your search will show you as a visitor even though you’ve never been there. This makes a mockery of any form of traffic analysis based on those logs. This is worsened further by AVGs attempts to make the scan look as much like a normal visit as possible making it almost impossible to filter out the dummy traffic.
Most commentators have asked why AVG cannot simply scan a link when it is actually clicked on and Grisoft’s response is that they do that as well. I fail to see how scanning a link twice is more likely to find a virus or malware than scanning it once. It’s just unnecessary overhead.
I have disabled LinkScanner in AVG 8.0 and would urge other users to do the same until Grisoft get themselves sorted out.
(The AVG control centre icon now shows a permanent exclamation mark since part of it is disabled and unlike Windows XP’s Security Centre, there seems to be now way to tell AVG that I want it to ignore that module completely.)
Update: I found the setting to get rid of the annoying exclamation mark on the system tray icon. Open the AVG Control Panel, Click Tools >> Advanced Settings >> Ignore Faulty Conditions and click LinkScanner. I’m sure this wasn’t there when I first went looking but when I just went looking again, there it was! Maybe someone can confirm if this option was added as a result of an update?
I wanted to widen the screen area of the blog since anyone with any interest in IT is going to be running in at least 1024×768 and since I’m running a K2-based theme it was just case of tweaking the CSS of my style to change the width. Note that you make these changes in the CSS file for your style and not the core K2 css file. Any changes made to your style overide the defaults in the core file.
Anyway, after finding several sources simply telling me to either change the #page entry or to add a Layout Widths entry, the truth turned out to be completely different. Neither of these had any effect whatsoever and after studying the core CSS file I found I needed to add an entry:
columns-two #page { width: 950px; }
and then add
width: 650px;
to the #primary entry.
At about 11:00am on Tuesday, my ADSL connection disappeared. I was at work so I couldn’t investigate until early evening when I discovered that the modem was reporting a “physical line error”. Having done the usual checks such as connecting the modem to the master telephone socket with nothing else connected and swapping out the ADSL micro-filter, I had to assume a line fault, although the phones were still working.
My broadband provide is Plusnet and I’ve always had a really reliable service from them so have never had to call them before. They ran their tests which failed and escalated the problem to BT and I waited for an update. The next morning at about the same time 11:00am, my ADSL came back on. Within 30 minutes there was an update on my support ticket from BT telling me that no fault could be found!
My guess? A dozy BT engineer disconnected ADSL on the wrong line on Tuesday and it was corrected the next day with no questions asked. Rather than take the blame, they just shifted it back to the customer who would normally just assume that it had been a problem at their end all along. Unfortunately for BT, some of us know better!
Having reinstalled Wordpress and the K2 theme after last week’s outage, I wanted to tweak the list of pages which are presented as tabs at the top of the page since there is at least one page who’s long title I didn’t want cluttering up the header.
I knew that the function call I was looking for was wp_list_pages but the only place I could initially find it to change was in the K2 themes sidebar.php which made no difference to the tabs at all. After a little searching I found the file which needed changing. What’s needed is to modify the function call to exclude the specific pages you don’t want listed.
In the K2 theme directory, modify app/includes/display.php and change
wp_list_pages( apply_filters(’k2_menu_list_pages’, ’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’) );
to
wp_list_pages( apply_filters(’k2_menu_list_pages’, ’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=&exclude=36′));
where the parameters of the exclude is a comma-delimited list of page IDs to exclude from the page list.
I almost always use the BBC News website for my news source. Sky news has always put me off by the number of popup flash adverts they insist on pushing in users faces. I noticed at the weekend that they have a new web site in beta stage. You can take a look at it here. I have also taken a snapshot of it below:
My first impression isn’t good. There’s too many blocks of content, none of which seem to blend together. This is a snapshot from this morning and when I looked yesterday there was a lot more black and red on the page so maybe they’ve toned it down a little based on feedback from the site but I think there’s too many visual distractions which hide the content. As soon as you open the site, a video starts running of the latest story and there are pictures and panels everywhere. It’s hard to see the news and that’s not good for a news site!
If that’s the best they can do, the BBC have nothing to worry about. What do you guys think?
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