XP Antivirus 2008 and Antivirus 2009 - Round 2

June 29, 2008

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Removing Antivirus 2009

OK, so it was a bit premature to declare victory over the XP Antivirus 2008 / Antivirus 2009 issues that my dad was facing. Here is the email I got this morning:

I ran the full scan over night which produced one more critical item and over a hundred cookies which were removed.  At first it seemed like there were no problems.  I switched to the non-admin account and started getting the same screens we had viewed last night.  Still in the this partition, I cranked up the full scan and after running a while the interference got worse by displaying two or three new screens predicting even more dire consequences. And, periodically going into what appears to be a  rebooting of the system following which the scan proceeded as normal.

I did a little more research using some of the keywords from last night’s screen shots and ran across this xp antivirus 2008 post in the Windows Live OneCare Anti-Virus forum. Looks like people started running across variations of the virus/spyware back in February. Since then there have been over 42,000 views and over 80 replies with varying degrees of success. Most people referred to a post by ’shecut’ on page 2 as having been successful. I decided that was what we were going to try.

We got on the phone and connected via Copilot again. Again, it was immediately apparent that there was something going on with his computer. Check out these screen shots:

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 15 Comments 

XP Antivirus 2008 and Antivirus 2009 are evil!

June 29, 2008

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Removing Antivirus 2009

Wow! I just spent two hours on the phone and CoPilot with my dad to get one of his computers cleaned up. I’ve dealt with a couple of spyware infections in the past, but nothing as insidious as this. Fortunately my dad was suspicious enough to reach out for assistance before he really got took. Here is the re-cap:

I got this email from my dad earlier today:

Matt my desktop computer has been infected with Antivirus 2009.  Do you have a recommendation for software to remove it?  Spyware Hunter has been recommended but, at this point, I don’t trust anything.  Dad

I’m glad that he was suspicious. After a little Googling on the key words from his message, I was suspicious. Here was my reply:

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 42 Comments 

SpeedStream 5260 ADSL Ethernet Modem

June 28, 2008

Knock on wood. I probably shouldn’t be writing about this but I will anyway.

Since the family is out of town, I’m taking the opportunity to clean up my little corner of the computer/guest room and get rid of a few things. I found a box from the SBC DSL Fulfillment Center. Inside was the original box that my SpeedStream 5260 ADSL Ethernet Modem came in.

I agree. Who cares? The only reason I’m posting about it is because this thing is pretty old in terms of Internet years. The packing slip that came with the box is dated May 8th, 2000. Do the math. The modem is over eights years old now. I’ve been through a bunch of computers, monitors, routers, etc. in the past eight years. Good to see something last.

Is there an equivalent calculation for internet-to-human years like there is for dog-to-human years?

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New CSS eBay auctions

June 23, 2008

It has been a really long time (3 years!) since I posted my articles Using CSS to markup eBay auctions and More CSS on eBay and it has been at least that long since I actually listed anything on eBay. I suspect that there are probably more than a few people who have visited those articles and called BS on the sample templates that I posted. Fair enough. The original auction listings have long since been archived and I never did bother to take a  screen shot of one of the live auctions.

So now I’m back. Technically, I never went anywhere, but just quit keeping up with the site for a while. Mainly because I had some theme that I had butchered and lost my motivation. However, a couple months ago, I shelled out a few bucks for the Silver Essence theme by iThemes for this site. I’ve been working slowly (really slowly) to get all the different pieces of the site filled out.

In the interim to getting the site completed, I had some motivation to list some items on eBay this weekend. So, I spent some a couple of hours to get my new theme wired up to work on eBay. Take a look at the results:

For those that stumble on this page after those links don’t work, here is a screenshot on Flickr.

Perfect match to this site! Of course, much to my chagrin, I found out today that they weren’t displaying correctly in IE. Everything was way left justified. That is what I get for only using FF during the development. You’d think I would know better than to make that mistake. Of course, the only reason I found the issue is because I  pulled the listings up at work today in IE (because we aren’t allowed to use FF - don’t ask).

I was obviously familiar with the issue: standard IE centering issue. Unfortunately, the standard fix wasn’t working. I had to fall back to the !important IE bug to save me. But what was really nice about the whole things is that because I was using an external stylesheet hosted outside of the actual auction, I just uploaded a fixed version to my site and now the auctions render just fine (in FF3 and IE7).

Now let the bidding begin!

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under CSS, eBay | Leave a Comment 

Performing code reviews via internal forums

June 9, 2008

I am in the process of standing up an installation of Community Server (CS) Express at my day job. Despite all of the other things that come with an installation of CS, I am really just looking at it for the forum functionality. If I had my way, we’d be installing phpBB or vBulletin since they are single-purposed, free, no limitations in the free version, more polished/tighter UI and they don’t have all of the bloat of CS. However, we are a Microsoft shop and my installation of MediaWiki three years ago was pain enough to convince me to not try another WAMP/WIMP stack there. Not that it was difficult, but nobody wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Regardless, despite my preference for the other forums, I don’t mind working with CS at all. The folks at Telligent have put a lot of effort into making Community Server a first-class, .Net-based, online community platform. The installation is really smooth, configuration is a breeze, it is very flexible and has a ton of features. In addition, I have worked with CS off and on since it used to be .Text and the original ASP.Net forums so I am fairly familiar with how it works.

Anyway, I want an internal forum at my day job to:

  • Help document and build up a knowledge base of all the little complexities/oddities/nuances/features required to support all of our applications. While we generally do a pretty good job at documentation, a fair amount gets lost in all of our enterprises content management options (Documentum, SharePoint, wiki, network file locations, emails, hallway conversations, etc.)
  • Help publicize some of our coding standards through public peer reviews. While we have an internal copy of Design Guidelines for Developing Class Libraries (aka Framework Design Guidelines) on our wiki that we customize per our needs, with the constant flux of developers, we still have a lot of crappy code being generated and put into production.

The first bullet is the typical reason for implementing an internal community or forum. But why would I want to conduct peer reviews via an online forum and not in a meeting or at least provide comments directly in source code?

  • Meetings are nice, but they are a PITA to schedule (room, resources, people, etc.) and don’t provide any value to the people who weren’t in attendance (sick, vacation, conflicts, future employees, etc.). In addition, it can provide a little bit of anonymity for the reviewee by just posting a method or class without revealing the source location or developer that wrote it. They would know who they are, but they don’t necessarily need everyone else to know.
  • As far as making the comments in code, I don’t feel that it provides a large enough audience (only the developer making the changes would ever see them). In addition, after all of the changes were made per the comments, you would (hopefully) be left with a clean method or class that doesn’t give any indication of the struggles it took to get there. Sure it is in the version control system, but who is ever really going to look in there to see the trials and tribulations that it took?

With a forum-based peer review you overcome the obstacles and limitations of meetings and comments in code.

  • The reviewer can conduct the code review on their own time.
  • The reviewee can digest they comments on their schedule (and they don’t have to frantically scribble notes in a meeting).
  • In addition, since it can often be hard to get multiple senior people in a room at the same time, the forum allows others to contribute when and where they see fit.
  • In addition, capturing the back and forth between the interested parties is very values.
  • Not too mention the benefit of referring new employees to the forum during their first couple of days to get a feel for how things are done in your shop.
  • Code changes made as part of a review can have a note on check-in referring back to the thread to help document how that particular piece of code got to where it is.
  • And we can’t forget about links. If your standards documentation is fairly granular, you can link to the specific standard that is in question.

In the thirteen years and five companies that I have developed for, I haven’t run across forums being used as a code review platform/tool, but I definitely want to give it a shot. We’ve all seen the "Why doesn’t this work?" or "How does my code look?" posts on various public forums but I hope to put something a little better in place internally. As Jeff Atwood says, "Code Reviews: Just Do It." If this doesn’t work out, I’ll have to check out Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide. If you have any comments or suggestions based on experience, please let me know below.

Of course, in order to facilitate the process, I needed to make some minor changes to CS to support syntax highlighting. This post originally started out to document those tweaks but it got hi-jacked. Maybe on my next post!

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 1 Comment 

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