Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

No more virus alerts

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I got this e-mailed to me at work today:

Warning regarding new virus:
DO NOT OPEN “NEW PICTURES OF FAMILY”

Hi – This looks like a bad one that’s coming.
Forward this to others.
Please read and forward to everyone you know……

DO NOT OPEN “NEW PICTURES OF FAMILY” It is a virus that will erase your whole “C” drive. It will come to you in the form of an E-Mail from a familiar person. I repeat a friend sent it to me, but called & warned me before I opened it. He was not so lucky and now he can’t even start his computer!

Forward this to everyone in your address book. I would rather receive this 25 times than not at all.

Also: Intel announced that a new and very destructive virus was discovered recently. If you receive an email called “FAMILY PICTURES,” do not open it. Delete it right away! This virus removes all dynamic link libraries (.dll files) from your computer. Your computer will not be able to boot up.

Okay, let’s take a look at this, shall we?

Please read and forward to everyone you know…I would rather receive this 25 times than not at all.

Please do not blindly forward every ‘alert’, ‘warning’, or whatever else to “everyone you know.” I don’t know about you, but I would much rather not receive anything twenty-five times. There’s quite a few good reasons not to do this, most of which really shouldn’t need to be spelled out, but people persist in doing these things anyway. If everyone actually did pass something on to everyone they knew, then each of those people did the same, everyone would instantly be getting multiple copies of every alert out there in their e-mail box. Oh, wait…we already do get multiple copies of this junk, don’t we? Hmmm….

Check to see if the information is accurate. No, I don’t mean open a suspected virus to see if it crashes your system. This ‘alert’ describes a virus that comes as an e-mail with a certain subject line, and when opened, erases your entire C:/ drive. A second virus (with a very similar distribution method and subject line) is also detailed, only this one erases all .dll files on your hard drive.

The easiest way to check the validity of the claims is to go to Symantec‘s website. Symantec is the maker of the most popular anti-virus programs for both Windows and Macintosh computers, so it stands to reason that they would have a pretty good handle on any new virii (incidentally, as one of the more popular anti-virus programs is Norton’s Antivirus, the web address www.norton.com also points to Symantec’s site). Their site does currently show a high security alert for a new virus — W32.Nimda.A@mm — however, the listed symptoms and affects do not match either of the virii described in this e-mail. The closest listed virus to either of those in the e-mail is Trojan.ZeroBoot, which writes zeros over the boot sector of a drive — this will prevent a computer from booting, and to a novice computer user, could look like the entire C:/ drive has been wiped.

Intel announced that a new and very destructive virus was discovered recently.

Think about what the e-mail is telling you. Why would Intel — a chip-maker, most known for the 80×86 line of processors (from the 286 up to and including the P4) — be releasing information about a virus? A quick check of Intel’s press releases shows nothing detailing anything about a virus. In general, virus alerts are released by either very few people (like Symantec) that you can trust, or by every bleedin’ moron with a keyboard at his fingertips (like anybody with ‘l33t’, ‘haX0r’, ‘d00d’, ’69’, or ‘420’ in their e-mail address), which you should take with a grain of salt.

Buy and use one of the many Anti-Virus/Firewall/Security products from Symantec, or any other reputable software company. This will save a lot of problems and headaches in the long run — you won’t get hit with virii, and I won’t have to wade through mass e-mails about the virii that are loose.

If you think you’ve been hit with a virus: Contact Symantec and/or any decently savvy computer geek (i.e., someone who knows how to do more than click away at the World Wide Web) to see if there is information or a patch for your particular virus. Then go out, buy, and install one of the Anti-Virus/Firewall/Security products I mentioned above.

One last little thing: If you do ignore all the rest of my little diatribe…one little thing about my computers. I’m a Mac fan for many reasons. Like, for instance — no .dll files. No C:/ drive. And — while we’re not virus free — there are far, far fewer virii out there for us to contend with. Sending me your alerts does nothing but fill up my mailbox, waste bandwidth on the ‘net, and give me a minor annoyance to deal with, which I then relieve by ranting and raving on my website for the world to see.

Let’s avoid that next time.

Nano-nano!

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Just something that I find all sorts of nifty. According to an article in today’s Seattle P-I, Washington is going to house the hub of one of the centers for nanotechnology research. Nanotech has been one of the recent sci-fi concepts to really spark my imagination, especially after reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

Stephenson burst upon the sci-fi scene with his second book, Snow Crash, which I babbled about a couple weeks ago when I was re-reading it. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson does for nanotechnology what he did for the internet and virtual reality in Snow Crash — takes today’s best existing ideas and theories and extrapolates them forward into the future to explore where the technologies can take us. It’s a fascinating read, and with the current apparent stagnation of the space program and George Bush’s restrictions on genetic research, nanotech seems to be one of the few sci-fi concepts with near-future possibilities. Going to be a lot of fun to see where all this could lead in the next 10 to 20 years.

New talkback feature

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One last thing for today. I’m experimenting with more ‘toys’ to play with on my website, and have found a talkback system that seems to fit quite nicely between the limited interactivity of the polls I toss up occasionally and the full messageboard I have running. Whenever I turn it on (which I probably won’t do for every post), you should be able to click the ‘Comments’ link at the end of a post to spout off about my babble, should you wish. As with the other doo-dads I’ve got on here, I have no idea how much or how often they’ll actually get used…but hey, it’s fun to play with, and it’s my website, so I can do what I want. So there. Bleah. ;)

It works!

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Woohoo! Finally got it all figured out!

You’ll notice the new(est) look to the site — finally found a layout I liked, and was flexible enough to work sitewide. Spent most of the day in front of the computer working on it, and now the majority of the pages are converted over to the new design — all that’s left are the pages of the quotebook, and the various pages showing off my artwork.

In the process of mangling things today, I did manage to completely hose my old messageboard/guestbook, unfortunately. However, I decided as long as I had to change things around to find something else, so now I’ve got some new, much more full-featured software running that side of things. Not sure where (if anywhere) I’m going to take that in the future…we’ll see how things go, as always.

That’s been my day, however, so not much more to babble about. Was thinking about seeing AI again tonight, but then got caught up in pfutzing around here and completely lost track of what time it was, and now it’s too late. Ah, well.

Tomorrow should mark my moving day, if all goes well. This may mean I’m not online quite as often until I get things more set up in the new place — I’m currently a bit short on monitors, so may be leaving my ‘puter over here at Casey’s for a bit — but I’ll at least stop in to check e-mail and the like as often as I can. But hey, I’ll have my own place. Yay!

Headaches

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Argh — I’m really starting to wonder if this whole site redesign was a bad idea. Between the fact that I’m learning how to correctly code CSS-based layout as I write this, and the bugginess in the current version of Internet Explorer (Exploder?) for Mac OS X, I’m never sure if something isn’t working because I screwed up, or because IE decided to tweak out on me again.

I think that I’ve got things so that they should be visible at the moment — at the very least, the page displays correctly under Opera for Mac OS X — but with IE crapping out every time I make a change, I’m not entirely sure. Keeping my fingers crossed, that’s for damn sure….

But, I’ll keep playing with it…hopefully I haven’t completely broken my site for anyone out there.

Yet.

Site design: why CSS?

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As I’m currently with a fair amount of time without a whole lot of neccessary things to do, I’ve decided to explore one of the ideas I’ve had bouncing around in my head for a while. I’m redesigning the site (I know, I never got around to finishing the last redesign — but I found some tricks midway through) to comply with current Cascading Style Sheet standards. While I’d been using CSS for a while now to standardize and simplify the formatting across the site, this is my first foray into using CSS for the actual site layout.

Previously, I’d been using a table-based system to lay out the page. It works — and in some ways could be considered a de-facto standard across the web at the moment — but it’s kludgy, makes the code difficult to read, and is a royal pain when facing a site update. By switching to CSS-based layout (the basic framework was found at Glish), my code is much leaner, and once done, I’ll be able to make large, sweeping changes to the site when I decide to redesign in the future by editing a single .css file, instead of having to recode every page on the site. Much, much nicer.

There is one downside to this — certain browsers (either older browsers [Netscape 4.x or previous, or IE 4.x or previous] or browsers still in development [such as OmniWeb for Mac OS X] will not display my page correctly. If you’re using an older browser, visit the Web Standards Organization upgrade project to see what browsers are available to you. If you’re using a current browser that is not standards-compliant, write the company to request compatibility with the currently published standards.

Of course, what this means at the moment is that if you start bouncing through my site, there are currently three different ‘themes’ to the pages — the older blue/green layout, the grid-background I was recently working with, and this CSS-based layout. I’m hoping to get the entire site converted over to this new style fairly quickly, however — this main page was just the matter of a couple hours work, and now that I’ve got the tweaking finalized, the rest of the pages should fly by fairly quickly.

So that’s it for now — a bit of work in front of the ‘puter to give my skin a rest from the constant flirtation with sunburn that I’ve been playing with for the past couple weeks. Ta ta for now….

Slight page updates

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I just went through and made some slight adjustments to some of the pages on the site (mainly this one, my resume, and my DJ Wüdi propaganda) to reflect the fact that I’m not going to be in Anchorage for much longer. More later…it’s about lunchtime here at work.

Though I do have to wonder…should I worry that most of the people answering the poll went for the sex change option? Hmm…just what do people think of me, anyway?

Statistics

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I did a little work on my webserver last night, and was able to get the statistics page up and running again. Now, if you’re really bored, you can take a look at just how much (or, more accurately, how little) traffic my webserver actually gets. The page is generated automatically every day at midnight, so the numbers should always be up to date. Purdy nifty.

Heaven forbid that happen!

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Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name…without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art.

— Bill Gates, 1983 (New York Times, 25 Sep 1983, pg. F2)

More site work

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Work continues on the site redesign. I’ve completed the changeover of the Quotebook introduction and the first page of Amusing bits, and added some information over to the right hand side of this page. In addition to the link to the messageboard, there is now a section of random stuff about me — some biographical, and some small lists. You’ll find there whatever I’m currently reading or have just read, the last 5 CD’s I bought, and the last 5 DVD’s I’ve bought. Beneath that are links to other blog sites, and then links to some of the places I hit on the web on a regular basis.