Tick-Tock-Tech....

This morning:

Alvis - "Dad, they changed the time everything is coming on TV."

me - "Really? Everything?"

Alvis - "Yes! I can't find anything on when it was supposed to be!"

me - "Hmmmm."

me - (suddenly remembering the time change thing...) "Oh! I know"

Alvis - (suddenly remembering the time change thing...) "You really need to set the clocks, Dad."

me - "I know....sorry about that."

Alvis then proceeded to disappear into her room and come back a second later..."I've fixed mine with just one button press!" Her bedside clock-radio has that feature, as does Lavie's matching one.

Me? I'm left patrolling the house, TV and VCR, cell-phones, pager, cars, etc. and running the manual updates.

Scott Hanselman in his "timely" post Daylight Savings Time and Windows reminds us that some DST changes are coming in 2007 thanks to our meddling lawmakers. Windows IT staff may take a hit on this. Microsoft has information and a patch coming for XP SP2 and Server 2003. Other folks, using XP SP1 and 2000 will not get the DST change patch. Great....you may have to add that to your list of clocks to update manually. (Sigh)

Google Blog covers the proper form of using the word "Google". Good luck with that...

Paul Stamatiou gets on a timely rant regarding bloggers and failures to fact-check before posting: Words for the Wise. He makes some good points in his "5 Ways to Retain Your Blog’s Integrity and Reputation." Good work there Paul!

Q-TARO blogger posts pictures and commentary of his "PC History". Fun!

Sunbelt Software announced a new service called "Sunbelt CWSandbox". It's a malware analysis tool. You upload a piece of malware and will get back a response as to what it is doing. Really cool and free for public use.

Speaking of malware uploads for analysis: Two good sites to upload suspected virus/trojan files are www.virusscan.jotti.org or www.virustotal.com . Send up your file and let them be tested against a battery of scan engines.

SANS-ISC posts a great narrative of a disaster at data-center due to a series of unfortunate events. Good learning lesson for all you IT folk: Are you sure you're as prepared as you think you are?

Time to run!
--Claus

Model Behavior....

Want to test your browser/feed reader's ability to render images?

Try feeding up pages from Dannychoo.com.

He's been on a tear lately posting photos from rounds of the latest model/figurine shows in Japan and my browsers and feed reader have been choking on the image overload.

Awesomeness!

I have a few anime figurines that Lavie has bought me as gifts. They are relatively hard to find, and buying on-line requires a lot of research to ensure you don't get burned.

Good thing I don't live in Japan....I'd be in big trouble!

Plamo Radicon - anime figures, traditional models (cars, battleships, jets, etc.), Gundams, Tachikomas....all highly detailed.

Model Vehicles - planes and ships. Stunningly detailed.

Airgun - Japan has some pretty strict gun-possession laws on the books. Really strict. However, it appears that possession of frighteningly realistic air-powered guns is legal. Wow. Great detail on some of these things. Any of these would get you shot in a second if US law enforcement saw you on the street holding one of these....

Figure Event - More anime figurines from the Pamodel Radiocon 2006 show. Mmmmmm. I really like the shots of Yomiko Readman, Motoko, and this one from what I think is the ANA Uniform Figure Collection.

Speaking of models (the plastic vehicle kind) last weekend we brought one of Alvis's younger cousins home with us so they could play PS2 together. It was after a full day of celebrating his sister's birthday and dude looked like he needed some special attention as well.

On the way home we swung by the local craft/hobby shop and I let Alvis and Cousin each pick out a metal model car to put together. These things are great. They contain detailed parts, are pre-painted, and generally just require assembly with screws. Thirty or forty minutes later they had them assembled. He was so proud of his car. It was really nice.

It never fails to amaze me how something so simple like building a model can entertain and captivate a child....

--Claus

Things to see...

First you haven't been able to see my posts up to now.

The Blogger gremlins have been hard at work today....uploading of posts is working, but posting isn't. (Sighs)

Blogger did move it's Blogger Status page to it's Blogger-Beta service, which seems to be remarkably stable. Nice to have this one to check on now. I do sincerely appreciate them and their service. Really.

Anyway. Here is some fun stuff to see. I'm going to try not to over-describe these offering. Just trust me and check them out.

Girls' Love Stories (2006) - updated drama using a 1953 "romance" DC comic page. Funny. via Google Blogoscoped.

The "Perfect Desktop" - via Watashi to Tokyo. It is 100% Zen-like. The ultimate wallpaper. I should have thought of this...

My current wallpapers: Desktop - I have this sketch of Kimiko by Fred Gallagher (MegaTokyo) on a Fall-brown colored background. Puts me in the mood wonderfully for fall. Laptop desktop wallpaper: Nature Captured vector image by Silveryn. Another nice version: Change of Seasons. I really am growing to love vector artwork on desktop wallpapers. It renders so sharp and clean.

More wallpapers via The Apple Collection.

Speaking of Vector art...Check out the awesomeness in illustration that is Mark Gervais. Wow!

New WICKED-AWESOME movie coming out: 300

Man this looks good! I'm a sucker for good old classical stories.

This movie re-tells the story of the ancient battle of Thermopylae in which King Leonidas and 300 Spartans (and some others as well) battled King Xerxes and his Persian army until, holding them back against insurmountable odds...heroically faced their inevitable and eventual destruction.

The trailer really looks awesome and gives me chills. The actors was filmed almost entirely against blue-screens with computer animation filling it all in....just like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow".

I can't wait for this thing to hit the theaters...maybe March 2007?

Battle on!
--Claus

RSS Feed Cleanup and Cross-Pollination.

Someone (Steve Rubel or Kent Newsome..I think) recently posted about cleaning up their RSS feeds.

I have about seventy-odd feeds I subscribe to at home, about fifty-odd at work. That's after going in and removing about 10 subscriptions from each set.

The content of those was still good, but I was finding not as directly relevant to my daily needs. While subscribed, I felt obligated to look over them anyway. So I just bit-the-bullet and axed them. It felt kinda nice.

I have two (actually three) sets of RSS feeds. One is on the home pc's and one is on my work PC.

There are multiple reasons why I have this set up this way. Some of my home feed items I don't want to tempt me at work. Some of the work ones I don't want to distract me at home.

However, every now and then I want to cross-pollinate and it can be a hassle.

Paul Stamatiou posted about Google's web-based RSS aggregator, Reader, and got me interested in how this could serve my purposes.

Then I hit on this post over at Lifehacker: Geek to Live: From Bloglines to Google Reader.

Inspired by what I saw, I decided to take the time to try it out.

It's got a lot of things working for it. It imports/exports OPML feeds which is a great time-saver (it handled my OPML import from Sage flawlessly), and the views are pretty easy to get a quick rundown on what's going on.

Google Reader Blog

Flash-based "How to Use Google Reader" by Andy Wibbels.

I'm not prepared to use it as my primary feed-reader, Sage still keeps me happy there. However, having both sets of my feeds centralized on Google Reader makes managing and cross-pollination of them very easy. And, it's a great and easy way to share with friends and family when I'm on the road.

If you have a Gmail account already, you might want to look into Google's reader.

Related RSS linkage:

Pimp Every Room in Your House with RSS - via Micro Persuasion

Find "feeds that matter" - via Lifehacker

--Claus

Excuses for...

So sorry about the non-existent blogging lately.

I plead a few excuses:

1) More "real-world" time spent with family and friends.

2) More "real-world" work sapping all my energy like Kryptonite.

3) Home desktop system failure -- left me feeling like Darth Vader watching his beloved DeathStar go up in flames. Bummer.

4) Stupid episode 26 of Eureka Seven anime last week got me all melancholy and stuff.

Excuses one and two you could all probably care less to hear about.

Excuse three, well, this IS interesting...but I'm going to save it for a later post...depending on how repairs work out. Shuttle small form factor pc owners will probably want to take note of what I've found....evil things may be lurking inside your case.....

Excuse four...deserves a post of its own.

Unfortunately, I can't blame it on Blogger's crappy service lately.

Nothing bites than spending time with extended family, talking tech-shop and pointing them to your blog. Then when you try the Blogspot page fails to render. That was really embarrassing. REALLY embarrassing. Luckily for Google's cache and some l33t Google searching tricks, I was able to pull some pages of my blog I was wanting to refer him to up anyway. It was ugly.

Bear with me, dear friends. I'm not blogging from my usual system, so my posts may be reflective of that fact....

Instead of my usual loooonnnnnngggg posts, I'm going to try to shotgun a few shorter ones today.

--Claus

The Trojan Chronicles...

Slashdot brought to my attention this morning news Trojan Installs Anti-Virus, Removes Other Malware.

From the original article at eweek:

At start-up, the Trojan requests and loads a DLL from the author's command-and-control server.

This then downloads a pirated copy of Kaspersky AntiVirus for WinGate into a concealed directory on the infected system.

It patches the license signature check in-memory in the Kaspersky DLL to avoid having Kaspersky refuse to run due to an invalid or expired license, Stewart said.

Ten minutes after the download of the DLL, it begins to scan the system for malware, skipping files which it detects are part of its own installation.

"Any other malware found on the system is then set up to be deleted by Windows at the next reboot," [veteran malware researcher Joe Stewart] added.

While vigilante malware is not a new concept anymore, this one was pretty original for use of a hacked anti-virus product.

And the purpose of this attention? Making the world and your pc a safer and cleaner place?

Nope. See it works out of concealed directory so you wouldn't know it is there.

It seems that it's motive is to remove any competing products that might bog down the system's resources and/or bandwidth. Then it is able to unleash it's payload: setup and delivery of a spam server. Clever!

Back in the heady-days when one malware application would attempt to uninstall another, malware writers were getting more clever, requiring users to key in some random key-string during an uninstall wizard run. This was done to ensure human-intervention was the cause of the removal, not another malware's automated attempt at a sniper hit. I was surprised the first time I encountered such a thing.

I recall all this because last week I spent close to four hours in a remote-connection session attempting to remove a rather sticky malware infection from a customer's workstation.

I have a general protocol I use to "sanitize" a pc, but it works better in person than in a remote connection. After two hours my policy is to just recover critical data, then wipe and reload the workstation's image fresh. Unfortunately, travel time would have meant the user would have waited many more additional hours for us to get a team-member out there. And we don't image workstations "over the wire".

So I battled on and battle on until I got it clean and running great, all except for one final malware program. It just wouldn't let me pull it off using any of the tools and trick I keep in my bag. No matter what I did, what processes I killed, what files I locked down "no access" it just kept coming to life.

Grrrr!

Finally, in a final "Doh!" moment after an hour or more spent on trying to remove just this final program, I went and checked for it in the "Add/Remove Programs" list.

There it was. I ran the uninstaller, entered one of those "type the following key into the field" to validate the uninstall.

It was gone. All because I had skipped a first-step of "cleanly" uninstalling any "forigen" software application installation found on our systems first.

I guess sometimes you just have to say "Please" before you whip out the brass knuckles.

--Claus

AVG 7.5 (Free) Anti-Virus Released

AVG 7.5 (free) has just been released. Build version is 7.5.408

The interface is familiar, but the icons and GUI has been polished up quite a lot. I was very surprised when the system rebooted and I got a chance to take a look at it.

It looks grown up!

It does not appear to be offered to current users of AVG 7.1 (free) via the update process. I checked and it only did a DAT update, not the full update release above. Maybe they are delaying it on a different auto-update schedule....I don't know. I couldn't find an official change log for this version, but here is the public information release for the commercial product.

Just to make sure you're covered....

Go download the current version.

Run the installer.

Select "Repair Installation" option from the setup-type window to install on top of your current AVG version

Once done, restart your pc. Then do a "check for updates" as I had one waiting to go one. Then play around and look at all the prettiness. It's not perfect. But it doesn't look like a Windows9x interface any longer! Very XP'ish finally!

Spotted via CyberNet Technology News

This one might get overlooked in the rush for everyone interested snagging the now available Internet Explorer 7 final release version.

--Claus