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May 3rd, 2010. - Spybot improvements should be made. Spybot search and destroy is one of my favorite malware removers. It installs quickly, it scans a lot of items, its detection rate is really high up there, and it's very straight-forward. I have a few things on my wishlist that I wish it could do. 1. It scans too slowly. It's definitely reasonable considering the hundreds of thousands of items it looks for, but I wish that it would search for instances of "Virtumundo" and "Fake Anti-malware" instaces like it FIRST. These are the majority of things found on computers these days, and they're the most important... which is why they should be looked for first rather than Hotbar and Zedo, etc.. Find them first so I can kill them and cancel the long scan! 2. The removal process doesn't work very smoothly. If you need to restart your computer to remove an issue (you almost always need to), you have to run an entire scan a second time upon restart!! This is terrible. With every other program I've ever seen, it simply removes the files it flagged in the past. Why is there a need to run the scan a second time? Between finishing the first scan and restarting, it's not going to find something new. -------------------------------------------------------- May 3rd, 2010. - Viruses (malware) are getting smarter. I have been noticing that very recently the viruses found on computers is getting smarter. They're getting increasingly more difficult to remove because of the steps taken by their programmers to ensure they aren't found, removed, blocked, etc.. Some huge problems I thought I would highlight. 1. Viruses (mostly Vundo, Virtumundo, etc) detect the use of Anti-malware such as MalwareBytes, Spybot, etc.. They will disable the installer, delete the installed files, etc. To get around this, always rename the installer, and after installing the program to to its start up directory and rename the main executable file. For example with MalwareBytes, go to the folder in Program Files and rename "mbam.exe" to something entirely different. This will often let you run the program without a hitch (but not always!) 2. I have noticed in the "Antivirus 2010" and similar malware that they open each program through their own process. That means that if you open any program on your computer, it first executes the virus (which will give you some warning about not being protected). The process it runs it through is usually A.EXE or AV.EXE. If you do a little research into where the A.EXE or AV.EXE files are, you will find them in the Application Data folder of the current user. Unfortunately when you go to that folder, THE FILE IS NOT THERE. They have hidden it so that you cannot edit it. Choosing to show hidden files does not make it visible either. 3. Malware will "darken" or "shade" the screen of your computer leaving only their window in sight. This one's easy to get around... simply hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and you can get to the background programs. Some of these screens seem to be even easier to bypass by actually adding a "close" button. Either way, they're annoying. So those are the 3 main issues I've seen recently that surprised me. For all of the security computers have installed these days, it seems viruses are gaining more access to the computer's functions than ever before. -------------------------------------------------------- January 4th, 2010. - USB Drive Letter, drive not found I keep forgetting to add this little fix to my site. This is a rather common issue when plugging in a USB drive to a computer that has a lot of mapped network drives taking up the earlier drive letters (F:, G:, H:, etc..) What happens is that improper implementation of the network drives, such as putting a network drive mapped to F: or G: or another early drive letter, leads to the USB device automatically assigning itself to the incorrect drive letter. If you have a network drive assigned to F:, for example and you plug in a USB stick, there's a good chance it will also assign itself to F:. This makes it so that you cannot open that drive. The only solutions are either to change what letter the network drive is mapped to, or go to Disk Management and change what drive letter is assigned to the USB device. Changing the mapping of the network drive is obviously the better solution in the long run. -------------------------------------------------------- December 24th, 2009. - Worst case of do-it-yourself problems ever. I really don't mind if when someone fixes issues on their computer themselves. If they do it correctly, that's absolutely wonderful. If they do it incorrectly, I don't get the blame for it. The only problem is that people seem to do it incorrectly more often than correctly. I have a case here where the person genuinely thought they were doing the computer good by installing any and every software they could find online made to "fix registry problems", or "clean computer", or the general "speed up computer". Now I know very well how dangerous those registry problems are. If someone starts deleting left and right in the registry, that's very very bad. Sometimes these programs practically do just that. I'm not sure what was deleted or where, but you could no longer do the following on the computer: In the end, I had to do a system restore by using the Windows CD... After the system was up and running again, Internet Explorer stopped working. I was FINALLY able to install and run antivirus software, and it picked up HUNDREDS of infected files, malware, spyware, you name it. In other words, for all of those programs that he had installed and ran, not a single one of them did anything to his benefit. In fact, they're probably the result of his computer's failure. Let that be a lesson to everyone out there. Only use TRUSTED anti-virus and malware removal software. -------------------------------------------------------- August 13th, 2009. - System Volume Information Virus I've only seen this happen with AVG anti-virus installed, but from time to time it might tell you that you have a virus in System Volume Information restore. The problem is that when you try to remove that virus, you won't be able to becuase the viruses are read only. The message will continue to pop up, telling you that you have the same virus. You won't be able to get rid of it that way. The easiest way to get rid of it is to do the following: 1. Right-click on my computer-> Properties... or go to Control Panel-> System. 2. Click on the "System Restore" tab. 3. Check "Turn off System Restore on all drives" When you click Apply or OK, it will take a few moments as it clears the store. When it's finished, Un-check the same thing you just checked to turn it back on again. Tada! Virus gone... Recommended you do a full scan (or at the very least a quick scan) at this time to be sure there aren't any other viruses sitting around. -------------------------------------------------------- July 31st, 2009. - An error that went away on its own... There are two things I really hate about working on computers: 1. You get an error that you try to solve and NOTHING seems to work. 2. The error miraculously fixes itself without you solving anything. Now I experienced this the other day when I got a printer error. Let me lay down the story for you... I installed a network printer for a user in our office. I installed that network printer the same way I install it for all users. I gave her username access, and I connected to the printer. It then asks for drivers and life is good. 0x000003eb I looked up the error and it gave several solutions online. The best ones I could find were: - Add a new printer, say "local" instead of network, and create a new LocalPort for it. For the port name, use the printer's address \\computer\printername - Delete any printer monitors in the registry that are not supposed to be there (HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors) - Turn on internet printing - Stop and start print spooler After trying all of those fixes, I realized that when I typed in the network name \\computer, it would not show any of the shared folders. I tried accessing one of the shared \\computer\public, and it worked just fine! I went back to \\computer and it had a full list of shared folders. However, if I then closed this window and went back to \\computer, the shared folders were gone again. I tried removing and adding the printers probably 20 times... and believe it or not, the 20th time actually WORKED. I don't know why it worked! Like I said, I really hate it when a problem fixes itself. My only guess is that when I was uninstalling the printers it wasn't fully uninstalling and for some reason uninstalling the printer that 20th time refreshed the system enough to actually fix it. Hmm... -------------------------------------------------------- April 13th, 2009. - FTP doesn't work with Windows Firewall enabled So it seems that a recent update (or something) seems to have blocked any kind of FTP traffic. This includes WS_ftp, Filezilla, CuteFTP, and the built-in FTP that windows comes with. None of them were connecting. It would say that the "connection closed by remote host" or a similar connection error. I did a bit of research and decided to try turning the Windows Firewall off for the heck of it. I knew that the connection worked, because I could connect to the FTP on another computer, through the online interface, and at home... just not on this computer at the office. Turning Windows Firewall off did the trick! I connected instantly. Well now that tells me that ports have to be opened. Through more research I discovered I should add the following to the Windows Firewall exceptions list: * C:\Windows\System32\alg.exe (used for active FTP connections) After you have added those to the exceptions, I needed to restart the computer in order for it to work. For some reason, simply adding them to exceptions didn't work and only worked after the computer was restarted. So: Make sure alg.exe, the program, and the ports are all added as exceptions, restart.... should be good to go again! -------------------------------------------------------- April 8th, 2009. - System Protector removal ... what a crap job! Ok so this person came to my office the other day, who shall remain nameless, and told me that he had a virus on his computer and that I needed to take a look at it. I started it up, and for the third time in my memory, this individual had a very nasty rogue anti-spyware. First he had Virtumundo (which is not a rogue, but installed one for him), and then he had Antivirus2009, which everyone should know is a rogue bit of malware by now... Anyway, the one he had is called "System Protector", and it was causing popups, error messages, and fake alerts. Basically it tells you that you have viruses when the only virus is in fact the program itself. Lame! So the first thing I do is hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE to get to the Task Manager. A message pops up saying that the task manager was disabled! Ok well luckily he had a few anti-spyware programs already installed on his computer (why isn't he using them?), but when I tried to run them, they disappeared. This virus was setup at 1-second intervals and was DELETING any anti-spyware that was loaded on the computer. So this is one of the tricky parts... I've had to do this more than once fighting Virtumundo, so I knew where to start. Now I can get to the task manager... took about 30 minutes to get to this point because it wouldn't let me run Malwarebytes, and that was the first one I tried. Luckily Spybot worked with the fix above. I opened Task Manager and closed each and every program I didn't know... If I wasn't sure, I would google the name and some random page would tell me what the process does. HiJack This really helped in this situation. Tada!! The main system protector icon in the corner of the screen disappeared! We're getting somewhere now! I looked at some removal instructions on the internet and they said to remove: I manually deleted all of the files, then followed steps online to remove registry values. The steps online were WRONG and wanted me to delete a registry key called Shellex..... this was NOT a System Protector only key, so it's a good thing I didn't follow those instructions exactly. Ok so I've deleted install.exe, lsascs.exe... it's not popping up anymore, no more error messages... life is good right? Nope! I opened Internet Explorer and sure enough, a yellow bar appears at the top:
Ok... that can't be good... but I deleted all of System Protector. Malwarebytes is working now and comes out clean. I need to run more scans! I ran the following anti-malware programs: What's surprising is that the one that came in handy the most was one called "Browser Hijack Retaliator". Now this program did NOT do what it was designed to (prevent and solve browser hijack obviously), but it did do one little thing different than the others. It had a process list like Task Manager and some of the other av programs. The difference is that this time, it listed an entry I hadn't seen before. What was weird about this entry is that it had no "application name". Looks like I had found that missing windll32.exe file, but it had been renamed or something simple like that.. and that's all it took to throw off all of the anti-vir programs I ran. So I wasn't about to stop there! I had to see what was inside of this virus and how that one little file was able to do so much... Let's open it in Resource Hacker... So I tried to open it in Resource Hacker and failed miserably. It says there's some kind of compression being used... typical virus I suppose. Let's find out what that is using PEiD. PEiD, we're looking for the EP Section.. Ok, so we see that the compression used is UPX1.. The details are above with the author's names. Now PEiD does have a plugin for decompressing UPX files, but it doesn't work very well.. here's something better: PE Explorer. Like Resource Hacker, but cuts through the UPX compression! Nothing very interesting here though. Luckily, PE Explorer has a disassembler that we can use to see more information. PE Explorer Disassembler AHA! We have something! We have a list of URLs that google would redirect to, the code for the annoying yellow bar, etc, etc, etc.. lots to play with! Let's see how this thing was able to work now. OLE32.dll - Object Linking and Embedding From what I can tell, this program made use of several DLLs running on the computer (an exploit?) KERNEL32.dll, user32.dll, oleaut32.dll, and a few others. OLE caught my eye because the purpose of OLE is to allow objects created in one application to be embedded in documents/objects created by a different applications... so essentially this loaded a bunch of crap and embedded it right into Internet Explorer. No amount of uninstalling and reinstalling of IE could have fixed it! So if you see a file called sIULTcd.exe, delete it as soon as possible! It was located in: %UserProfile%\Application Data\Microsoft\
I hope this was interesting (or even helpful) to someone. Maybe you have that yellow bar right now and none of those other Google searches are helping (they sure didn't help me). Good luck! -------------------------------------------------------- February 20th, 2009. - Malthea.com redirect? Well... bought a "dedicated IP" address for the domain names registered to me, and as a result it completely broke the malthea.com DNS settings! What that basically means is that every other domain I host works perfectly fine, but Malthea.com was being redirected to malthea.chadallard.com. This isn't exactly the best thing in the world.... in fact, it broke the blog's URL making it impossible to access it. I talked to the server admins and one guy said it would be a couple hours for the domain to "un-assign" itself. Instead, it took a few minutes, but then froze when I tried to assign it. I talked to a second guy, and he told me he had to repush the DNS settings and that it will be back up in 1-4 hours. Currently, chadallard.com is the primary domain... I want to see if I can have it switched so that malthea.com is the primary domain instead. -------------------------------------------------------- February 10th, 2009. - XHTML Validation.. What? Why does that matter? Now although I have been programming for some time now, and although I would consider myself fairly competent in hacking up some HTML, I never really took validation into consideration until last week. For the heck of it I ran a tool on my web browser meant to "Validate HTML". I ran this on my project site and to my horror saw that there were 53 errors! Now why? What did I do wrong? Why hasn't this affected me? What's the problem with the way it is now? The fact that was more painful was that after it counts one instance of an error, it doesn't count all the others the page had... which put the error count well above 100. Now to answer my blabbering questions of grief: Why validate? But most huge websites don't validate! Why should I? Well because some bigger sites have a huge draw because of the product name, they might not need to impress people with nice websites. You, on the other hand, want to validate as much as possible to make your guests feel welcome! The most common cause I could think of for sites not validating (this was the reason mine wasn't), is because over time you build a snippet library of different code that does different things... you might write things differently without realizing it, or you might be living in the past with an older HTML standard. For example, I looked up how to link a CSS document and simply copy/pasted that from the forum I found it on. The problem is that the person in that random forum didn't write it to XHTML 1.0 standards! I'm also used to writing older style HTML such as <br> rather than <br /> and <img> tags without an alt="" included. In short, there are all kinds of reasons why you might not validate correctly.. so go out and do it! Save yourself the headache of having your page look terrible to some and great to others. My only helpful hint is to use CSS all of the time, rather than relying on older HTML tags to do styles and effects. -------------------------------------------------------- February 10th, 2009. - Can ping, but can't browse internet. Ok another weird one for you. This seems to occur with IE6 browsers only, and has nothing to do with hardware changes in the office network (to my knowledge), but for some reason these instances seem to be fairly recent. An update maybe? In any case this is what happens: A user will be browsing as normal, perhaps they run into an AJAX-happy website, and suddenly their internet just doesn't work anymore. They aren't disconnected, and in fact if you try to do a ping test to say, google.com, it works fine! First instinct: Release and Renew IP address... this DOES NOT WORK. Second instinct: Disable and then Enable the network interface... DOES NOT WORK. Third instinct: Give it a static IP address... now this works, but with a hitch. Let me explain what I mean. If you set it to the same IP address that it had via DHCP, this will not work.. however if you change the IP address this works perfectly! In fact, I wrote a script for various users that makes use of "netsh" command. This script sets the IP address of the computer to a very weird IP address, then sets it back to what it was before. Changing the IP address seems to work like a charm to fix the problem. Another more simple solution I found was to simply upgrade the computer from IE6 to either IE7 or IE8... problem solved. This leads me to believe that it definitely has to do with IE6 hanging on the complex Javascript of the page being viewed, but it escapes me how disabling the connection entirely does not fix the problem... or why there is a problem beyond IE at all for that matter..... -------------------------------------------------------- January 29th, 2009. - Avoiding Bluetooth mouse from now on. Now when it came to getting a mouse, I went with the obvious choice. Since my laptop supported bluetooth, and I saw a bluetooth mouse on sale at the store, I decided to give it a try.... What a mistake! First of all, if you don't have built in bluetooth, the dongle that you get for it is about 1 and 1/2 inches long. It sticks way out the side of the computer and considering there are mouse USB adapters that are barely visible, it doesn't make sense to spend the extra $20 getting it unless you want to do something with another bluetooth device. In any case, this is what happens time and time again: If you stop using the mouse for a moment, say to write an article like this, then the terrible bluetooth goes into some kind of a sleep mode. This is either bluetooth aspect of the mouse, or of bluetooth devices in general. The problem is that when you then go to use the mouse, it takes several seconds for it to come back. The third problem is that every now and then the mouse just randomly (and I mean VERY randomly) decides to disassociate itself with the computer. No amount of clicking and dragging makes that mouse move. You have to go back to the bluetooth manager and re-add it. Sometimes it still shows the mouse in there as working perfectly, so all you need to do is double-click it to smack the bluetooth into remembering it has a mouse attached. Avoid the tempting bluetooth mouse... not worth the trouble. -------------------------------------------------------- January 27th, 2009. - Internet Explorer RC1 review.. well.. a bit of a review.. I decided to download Internet Explorer RC1 web browser yesterday thanks to reading an article about it in PC World. The person writing the review in that article thought it was a fairly good browser that had finally caught it up to FireFox, but that it wouldn't grab any new users (or steal some back from FireFox). What that basically means in a nutshell is that if you're already using IE, then it's going to be a great upgrade for you.. if you're like the rest of us and are using Firefox, then it probably won't sway you. When I had originally downloaded IE8 beta, I was disappointed to see many of the sites I went to just simply didn't work. Nothing displayed correctly, and it looked like IE8 had some serious issues displaying CSS to standards that Firefox, Chrome, and Safari hold. I was pleased to see that after installing IE8 RC1, the web project I'm currently working on displayed perfectly without having to do any strange IE fixes to the CSS code! Another thing I noticed in IE8 RC1 is that the speed has improved quite a bit from older versions. It's still not up to the speed of firefox (no pipelining yet!!!), but it certainly loaded my project site quickly. So quickly, that I don't think I even saw a single image load... and it's not on account of my internet speed because lately my internet connection has sucked! Now there are still some compatibility issues with older ActiveX controls written for older IE versions (zuh??), but to the common user, that really shouldn't make a difference if the people developing the websites you go to are half decent in what they do. One thing that REALLY annoyed me (more than it annoyed me in IE7) was the install process. It's now much much quicker, but only because it installs as an upgrade to IE7 rather than an entirely new program. That's cheating, Microsoft! When you install IE8 RC1 for the first time, it goes by pretty quick, but when you run it, it not only asks you which search page you want to load, but also asks if you want to send information to Microsoft, if you want to send surveys to Microsoft, if you want to send pages to Microsoft to enhance your experience, if you want to send browsing history to Microsoft.... in other words, Microsoft is begging to spy on you which really annoyed me to no end. It wasn't because they asked (even Google Chrome asks for information because it IS a beta program after all), but the fact that they asked 3 or 4 times in different words. I had to jump through screens just to keep my information private. On top of that, they also throw several "accelerator" and "security" plugins your way which, rather than speed up your performance, actually slow you down... again it asks for information to make these plugins run better... lame! The program itself looks better than older versions, and things seem to be a little more streamlined. I like programs that don't go overboard with visuals (IE7 and those lame 3D styled gradient buttons.. just like Office 2007.. ick), so I was pleased that they've cut back on the terrible layout and made it a little cleaner. Maybe they took a page from Adobe CS4? Nah... it's not THAT good, but it's better than what it was. Now the big question everyone's asking is: "should I switch back to IE now that it's improved?" Well.. my answer, like so many other people reviewing this software have said, is that although it IS improved from what it was, it's still not quite up to par with Firefox. It may edge out Google Chrome (can't believe I just admitted that), but it has a long way to go before it starts edging out a clean cut program like Firefox. If you're already using something different, chances are you'll want to continue using something different! Oops.. guess this WAS a large review after all. -------------------------------------------------------- January 20th, 2009. I just witnessed history take place. That's something I could technically say at any given time, and I've seen presidents and prime ministers sworn into office before, but none will be remembered like this. In 50 years from now when the face of Barak Obama appears on the currency of the United States of America, people will look back and be humbled by the great feeling they felt today. They will remember how the most stereotypically bias and cruel nation in the world set aside its hatred to elect into office a man with the ability to save the United States against all odds. This shows change, intelligence, pride, and for the first time in my life as a Canadian I can truly be proud to live in a world such as this. For the first time in my life I can look at our neighboring nation the United States with a higher regard. Regardless of your political views, this was an amazing moment for billions around the world. I just witnessed history take place. If history continues like this, I think we just might be alright. -------------------------------------------------------- January 9th, 2009. - Windows free space shows wrong amount Someone brought me their computer the other day and showed me a very strange problem. They have a harddrive of 107GB (approximately) and it showed that there was only 14GB of free space left. The problem was that when you looked at what files were taking up space on the C: drive, it only showed that 38GB were used! 107 - 38 = 69 free... not 14! There was about 55GB of space that just... didn't exist! What's up with that? 2. Check the paging file. After reinstalling windows without formatting, often an old page file will be left... if the user has reinstalled windows several times there might be a fairly big page file somewhere that isn't even being used! 3. System restore takes up a lot of space to hold those restore points. You can adjust the size in the System Properties, and even delete the system restore if you're not using it. 4. File system might be corrupted. This isn't the one you want to hear. Run a chkdsk on the computer and see if it finds anything. Quite often it will fix problems with the sizes reporting wrong amounts. 5. Hibernation file (hiberfil.sys) will be as large as your memory.. so if you have lots of memory (say 4GB in a laptop) and you use hibernation, that would account for 4GB of space taken. 6. Disc quotas could also affect what amount of free space you currently show available if used in some instances. -------------------------------------------------------- January 7th, 2009. - Using MySQL with ODBC driver to link with Access Ok... what?? I was setting up a MySQL database for a client of mine yesterday and thought about how they were going to be entering data. They would first have to login to my account, browse to the database, enter the information online.... what a hassle! I then learned that Microsoft Access (which would be much easier to use for them) has a feature that can connect to a remote database via ODBC. I really didn't pay much attention to this UNTIL.... I discovered that MySQL had created a program that ties MySQL in with ODBC! What does this all mean in English? Well it means that my client can now edit their database information from the comfort of Microsoft Access without having to go online and without having to learn an entirely new system. It's now as easy as editing an Excel spreadsheet. I've tested it out and it does real-time editing. If you change a field in Access, it changes it directly in the database right away! No need to save, no need to hit "publish" or anything like that... just change the field in Access and you're done. -------------------------------------------------------- January 1, 2009. - Printer error 0x00000643..... WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?! This one really made me scratch my head as a caller in for support read off the error code. I did a simple Google search and couldn't come up with any good answers apart from one forum post suggesting "hitting it very hard with a hammer". Well that wasn't helpful! I finally suggested the proper solution, so here it is: NOTES: Operation could not be completed (error 0x00000643). 1. Delete the port: This is the tricky part.. what you want to do is "Add a printer", and add any Generic printer driver, making sure to use the WSD printer port as the port of choice. Once the generic printer has been added, go and delete that printer. This will automatically clear out the WSD port. Tada! 2. Uninstall printer Make sure that the printer you are trying to install has been entirely removed from the computer. If you still see it in the printers list, then you must right-click and delete that printer. 3. Reinstall printer Now that everything has been cleared out, we can once again try to install the printer. This time if all goes well, it should create a new WSD port and install properly. So essentially the fix is as simple as "uninstall and reinstall", but who knew? -------------------------------------------------------- December 02, 2008. - CS4, Fallout 3, and a big brother for us all So the recently released Adobe product creative suite (CS4) gets my offical seal of approval as I have installed several of the products that come with "Adobe CS4 Master Collection". The software I have tried (to name a few) are: Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, inDesign, Flash, and SoundBooth. Each one has similar styling (apart from soundbooth which is entirely different for some reason) and streamlines the entire feel of their suite. Previous to this, it literally looked like Adobe just grabbed Macromedia's products and smashed them together with their own. Now they're all clearly part of the same wonderous family! Just got my hands on a copy of Fallout 3 because people everywhere have been drooling over it. I never played previous Fallout games, but this one looked interesting enough to try (I saw the whole sneak peek thing at E3 this year). As soon as I realized it was from Bethesda Softworks (makers of Oblivion), I knew I was in for a treat. Sure enough after the first main chapter you are shoved into a world seemingly as massive as Oblivion was.. I played for maybe 6 hours straight and find myself barely done ANY of the game at all. This is going to take me a while! Move over Dead Space, I have a new toy! I was watching TV the other day about security and monitoring, and the guy talked about a program called "IamBigBrother" which I suppose is a relation to both "IM" software and of course the movie "1984". Yes it raises a morality issue, but I've had first hand experience witnessing internet crimes take place and seeing internet predators at work.. it's a VERY dangerous world out there with all the many forums and chats so easily accessible to the young ones, so you have to protect them to a point. When can they finally have their privacy back? eh... maybe after the age of 18.. -------------------------------------------------------- October 31, 2008. - Games, games, and more games.. Halloween at last, and here I am stuck in the middle of playing video games rather than going out to fix myself up with a costume like I did last year. Last year's costume was awesome, and this year I had a few good ideas but I just never found the time to get to the store in order to pick up the items I need. So what have I been doing? Playing video games.. yep.. For my N64 I'm playing Kirby 64, The Crystal Shards Between those 3, Dead Space is probably the best of them all, but I can definitely see myself spending the most time playing GH:wt. -------------------------------------------------------- September 22nd, 2008. - Palin "hackings". Ok the title of this entry should explain what I'm about to rant about, but if you didn't know already.. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (yeah, the one running for vice president) had her Yahoo email account "hacked" several days ago. What I want to rant about is the usage of the term "hacked", "hacker", "hack", etc.. This person who did it turned out to be a 20 year old kid who frequents an online hate site. He did not hack her email... instead, he broke in by resetting her password using personal information that she stupidly put in that was readily available online. Now people are saying that Yahoo mail (and similar sites) are insecure. This is not the case. Yahoo asks you for a SECURITY QUESTION / ANSWER. You're supposed to use a combination that only YOU know. If you're stupid enough to put something that people can find through a simple Google search, then who is to blame? Hacked her account? He didn't.. he opened the door that was unlocked for him. In fact, the door had a sign on it reading "come right in." The only thing that really brings be joy is that the same group of people who broke into her account were the losers who were trying to break into my site several months ago. The FBI is taking them down here and there and this is absolutely great. I mean the internet is all about freedom and free speech, but quite often free speech has its limitations (in cases where it causes harm to others usually), and the site that did this attack is definitely set out to cause harm. Is your child safe looking at their little kiddy sites online? Not at all with 4chan running around posting obscene images and derogatory comments left and right. They even attacked an epilepsy information site by putting flashing images on it inducing headaches and seizures in some people. Who is this funny to? If someone thinks it's incredibly funny, then they really need their heads checked because they're obviously sick minded. People are allowed freedoms.. true.. but doesn't that mean that I should also be free to view websites (and build websites) without having to watch every little thing I say and do? Where children aren't safe looking at anything, where people who are sick aren't safe... it really saddens me that the world is in this state of affairs. The group that did the break-in of Palin, who run around causing internet harassment, who cause problems for myself and many many others online are known as Anonymous. I find this ironic considering how easy the FBI was able to track down the person who broke into Palin's account. Let that be a lesson to those in Anonymous... you're never truly "Anonymous". All the media this has been getting has finally brought the mainstream attention to this group of trouble-makers. Maybe their horrible site will finally meet its doom as a result of this. That would be a dream come true. -------------------------------------------------------- September 3rd, 2008. - Google Chrome Review. Ok, after reading reviews on Google's new Chrome browser for about an hour tonight, I decided to give my own review. From what I have been reading, it seems that people all seem to think that Chrome is lacking "something", but aren't sure what. I have a few ideas in mind, and so I will give a small Pro and Con of what I think of this Beta release. Pros: Cons: All-in-all, Google Chrome is a fairly decent browser. I was able to BETA test Internet Explorer 8 the other day which had HUGE issues displaying even the most basic table content and ActiveX Controls... In Chrome there doesn't seem to be any issues yet. I've heard horror stories about crashes, but haven't experienced any myself. The lack of HTTP Pipelining is upsetting and is the only real downside that I see to this browser. I'm going to keep using it for now to continue building my opinion. Can't wait to see the full release! -------------------------------------------------------- August 21, 2008 - Top 20 Games of All Time Today I present you with a list of my top 20 games of all time. This is a personal list based on personal tastes ranked upon the level of fun I had as an individual or with friends, the level of replay value for me, and based on how many hours I spent playing these games and loving these games and.. well.. you get the point. On with the list! 20. Grand Theft Auto 3 (Original) 19. Prince of Persia: Warror Within 18. StarTropics 2 17. Super Mario Bros. (NES) 16. Call of Duty 2 15. ElderScrolls III: Morrowind 14. Mortal Kombat 2 13. Guitar Hero 2 12. Battletoads in Battlemaniacs 11. Super Mario World (SNES) 10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Arcade Game 9. Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past 8. Super Mario 64 7. Diablo 2 6. Final Fantasy 7 5. StarCraft 4. Half-Life 3. Doom (95) 2. Pokemon Red / Blue 1. Wolfenstein 3D:
So there you have it. There are LOTS of games that could have made the list, and I even wanted to do an "honorable mentions" list, but thought that would get rather long. -------------------------------------------------------- August 12, 2008. - Busy, busy, busy. I'm surprised I even have time update this right now. After queuing up some holiday time, I decided that it would be in the best interest of everyone at the office if I took Monday's off for a month, rather than an entire week off. Now this made sense to me and everyone I told the plan to, but unfortunately I didn't tell enough people about it. As a result, when I come into the office Tuesday, my phone is ringing off the hook, my emails are flooding in, and I don't get 10 minutes to sit down at my desk. This makes for a very quick work day. As far as personal projects go, my site project is coming along smoothly. I have commissioned a few artists to do some work for us, and things look promising. I think there are some new prospects on the horizon as well. I haven't decided whether or not I want to take on these prospects as it might be a lot of extra work for me to do, but if I find that it's well within my capability, why not do some work in the evening to fill the gap? Keeps me hopping. -------------------------------------------------------- July 29th, 2008. - Various troubles. I have a pretty bad habit right now. No, it has everything to do with the way I make websites, so don't go getting all up-in-arms about it. The problem is that I tend to build an entire website and leave the administrative features for last. Now while this makes sense in my mind... you can't make an admin tool without something to administrate... at the same time, it gets very difficult to edit site content as you go. This blog for example: I have to physically pull the file off the server, edit it, then physically push it back onto the server for every change. That's not very user-friendly! Funny that I worked on a news posting system way back in the day. Another problem is that this server that I'm on right now is new. Why is that a problem? It's a problem because the old server crashed twice in two days and was so unstable that after pestering the tech support got me a new server. Crossing my fingers that this one is more stable. -------------------------------------------------------- July 6th, 2008. - Rtrn plz? - Hardly anyone who sees this will understand. So I was writing (or rather re-writing) some code the other day, and the thing I was writing was a simple return statement. Then another. Then yet another. I remembered back to my days at the U of M when my Comp Science prof. would tell everyone in the class: "Never ever have more than one return statement in your function!" And this bothered me quite a bit. To this day, I see many articles saying both good and bad about it, but one thing that I just can't stop thinking about is that it is A FEATURE SUPPORTED BY THE LANGUAGE! Take a look at the following two scripts which are supposed to do the same thing: function(){ And then look at the other way.. as supported by my prof. I don't understand why a professor at a university, whose job it is to provide us with the best programming knowledge, would say that you have to have "only one return statement". That's ridiculous. If your code can support multiple exits, why not let it do that? If you can exit the function early, all that's doing is saving processing time. Why WOULDN'T we want that? Thus ends my geeky rant for the evening. -------------------------------------------------------- June 3rd, 2008. - Aw crap.. Yesterday (and today) I had to deal with a computer like no other. It was different in that there were so many viruses and so much spyware that the computer was basically not usable at all. It's so hard to clean, I'm not sure how it will ever be the same again. Needless to say, I'm running the Windows Recovery right now. It was bad in that: Basically this thing would go behind me, and for every fix I made, it would break something else. The list goes on. -------------------------------------------------------- May 28th, 2008. - A call to support. I had the pleasure of talking with HP Canada's customer support today regarding a problem on a fairly new laptop. I was actually surprised to get service almost instantly, regardless of who I was and what service plan I had, and was delighted to have someone on the other line who could speak my language. Did we resolve the issue? No.. but he was able to confirm my thoughts and was very kind in helping me do that. I've been on the phone with technical support reps hundreds of times, and I don't think I've ever had a quality of service like that before. I know it sounds like a huge endorsement for that company, but I had to write about it because of my shock and amazement over the service I got. It was great. In the future, I would definitely consider getting my hands on HP products just knowing that if I ever needed support on one, I could get it without a hassle. I can sympathize with technical support reps and I know that it can be stressful and that accounts for a lot of the hassle you do normally get with support calls, but I always make an effort to sound supportive on the phone to those I'm helping, and I expect the same from the people I call. Today I got that same level of service. -------------------------------------------------------- May 13th, 2008. - Some interesting pictures? I was walking around the server room with nothing much to do the other day so I snapped off a few pictures with my PocketPC.. you'll now get to see the hardware I work on at the office.
-------------------------------------------------------- May 5th, 2008. - When will they learn? I was working on the Malthea.com project today and as I was writing up the registration page for new users, I ran into a problem I always face. This is a problem faced by web developers all over the world each and every day...... Instead of the various browsers out there worrying about adding in new search features, new methods for making favorite links, etc.. why not put their time into making sure their browsers actually view the internet the way it was supposed to be viewed? -------------------------------------------------------- April 29rd, 2008. - It's all about trust. I was thinking about XSS today. For those of you (most of you?) who don't already know, XSS stands for Cross-Site Scripting. Why isn't it called CSS in that case? Well.. CSS stands for something entirely different and I suppose they didn't want to confuse people more than they already have. What is XSS? XSS is a means of tricking a page (by use of malicious code) into displaying content that is not at all what the viewer was supposed to see. This is how most hackers come in and deface websites. The thing is... security measures have to be taken in order to prevent this kind of thing. The sad fact of the matter is that most people programming websites in this day and age don't protect themselves against it nearly enough. I was checking out the server access log on a website I host, and I was amazed to see that someone had attempted XSS on the page dozens of times (by an automated script most likely), and I was very very lucky that I had taken the necessary precautions beforehand. I read an article in the Globe and Mail that an approximate 500,000 websites were exploited in this fashion recently on account of a Microsoft problem. Microsoft said that it wasn't their fault (obviously), and that it was up to the site's creator to introduce security measures to protect it. I agree and disagree. In a perfect world, the server software would help protect you against those things right out of the box without any additional work. Of course this isn't plausible, but it would be nice... in a perfect world. Of course in an absolutely perfect world you wouldn't need to put any kind of security measures against it, because nobody would be attacking you with it. Unfortunately, building security for a website is all about trust. The bottom line is that you can't trust anybody. -------------------------------------------------------- April 23rd, 2008. - AJAX web development techniques. I was reading an article the other day from 2005 on a technology website specializing in various tech-related articles.. I don't remember the exact site actually.. but the article I was reading was about "the downfalls of AJAX". Now while I know for a fact that AJAX might not be the best solution in most situations, to anyone who knows anything about web development, AJAX can be a very very powerful tool to use. The article went on to say that it was bandwidth intensive (if poorly written), that it had security flaws (if poorly written), that it was difficult to understand (to who?), and that it would never be as powerful as Adobe Flash applications. My answer to this: Don't write it poorly. That seems obvious enough and can be said about ANY technique in web development. Write something poorly and expect poor results. Who would have imagined? It's actually hard to believe that only about 6 months ago I REFUSED to learn AJAX. I knew that eventually I might have to, but I hated Javascript coding and I didn't want to teach myself any new tricks when it came to programming websites. PHP was about as far as I would go as far as making a page dynamic is concerned. I learned the basics of AJAX in about a day, and was amazed at how simple it was to use. I was blown away at how easy it was to create dynamically loading applications without having to learn anything I didn't already know. The author of the article in 2005 never thought AJAX would catch on... well here it is 2008 and AJAX is just about all you hear about wherever you go online. To the author of that article, I say "stuff it."
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