Category Archives: Tech stuff

Trojan wars

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Every now and then, a nightmare scenario pops its head above the parapet.

For the last couple of days I have been suffering an army of them.

The first sign was probably a couple of weeks ago when a six week old laptop hung up on me.  I managed to revive it and thought no more about it.

Two days ago, the same laptop started crashing.  It would work for a while, then hang for a minute or two before descending onto the Blue Screen of Death.

Once again, I managed to revive it, but my suspicions were more than aroused.  I ran a multitude of diagnostics which all came up clean.  I then ran a deep anti-virus scan and that is where I found the cause – a deeply embedded Trojan.

You may ask why I didn’t do a scan at the start?  In fact, all my machines run the usual anti-virus, anti-Trojan, anti-spyware and firewall software, but this one had somehow slipped through.

About three weeks ago, I revived an old PC that hadn’t been used in about two years.  I needed it for a single function, for which it was ideal.  Naturally, its virus signatures were two years out of date, and I updated them immediately, but my theory is that the Trojan snuck in during the update period.  It then spread through the network, infecting my laptop and causing the resulting havoc.  I still don’t know how it breached the defences, which are normally very tight.

The obvious thing to do then is to run deep scans on all the machines on the network, which I did, and this resulted in another laptop failing completely.  Obviously the Trojan had infected a system file and the AV had then removed it, rendering the whole system unstable.

So, to date, I have had to reformat and reinstall on two machines.  This machine that I am currently using is now up to about 80% strength.  There are a load of packages yet to be installed, and I have then to customise the whole interface to my personal preferences.

The other laptop has a slightly dodgy CD drive which means constantly rebooting to get the drive to run properly.  I am currently trying to load the OS on that one, and will have to reload all the software if and when that is successful.

The other two machines seem to have survived the attack, and are now clean, having been thoroughly disinfected.

My problem now is that if I miss any element of the Trojan, the fucking thing is going to replicate, and I will be back to square one.

I can’t win.

Free money

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Not long after Head Rambles was launched, I signed up with Google Adsense.

It seemed like a fair way of covering expenses, and I had heard good [and bad] reports about them.

Before long, I discovered that the only way to make significant gains was to make the ads the primary function of the site, with the content running second.

I hate sites where I have to pick my way carefully around banners and Google links.  It’s irritating in the extreme and gives the strong impression that the site owner is more interested in making money than in imparting information.

After running Google Adsense for a couple of years, I have decided it just isn’t worth it.  Taking into account the irritation they cause to readers and the server overheads slowing down the site, and balancing that against the pittance that was being earned, I decided to strip them off the site as soon as the payment level was reached.

I reached that level a couple of weeks ago, and the cheque should be in the post shortly.  As soon as I hit the magic mark, I removed all traces of Google Adsense from the site.  Plugins were removed and all coding in the template was erased.  Good riddance.

What is very strange though is that I’m still earning.  Within the last two weeks or so, my earnings have continued to grow at their customary snails-pace.

I like that.

Good on ya, Google!

Essential software

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I have had the misfortune to have had some PC trouble lately.

In each case, it involved reformatting the hard disk and installing everything from scratch.

I find that it can greatly benefit a machine to reformat and reinstall about once a year anyway, to clear out all the crap that accumulates, like redundant DLLs and fonts, not to mention tidying the registry.

When it comes to a rebuild, I have a list of absolute essentials that have to be installed as soon as the machine is running.

First is the Anti Virus.  I use AVG, as I find it is well supported and consistently gets good write-ups.  I have never had any problems with it anyway.

Next comes Firefox and Thunderbird.  I refuse, on principle to use Internet Explorer or Outlook.  I hate them.

WinRAR is next, as a lot of software installations require decompressing, and I find WinRAR to be the most versatile.

Now that the essentials are in, what comes next?

WampServer is an essential tool of the trade.  The ability to run PHP and MySQL on a local machine is an absolute essential for me, and I just love that programme for its simplicity, though it can be a bit of a pain tweaking the configuration to suit my needs.

One of the worst bits of software ever invented has to be Notepad.  As a default text editor, it is utterly useless.  For years now, I have been using Textpad which is one of those programs that is as simple or as complex as you want it to be.  An amazing piece of work.

Another utility I like is DAEMON Tools Lite.  This is a neat little application that you can use to mount ISO files into a virtual CD ROM.  Storing ISO files is a hell of a lot easier than storing CDs or DVDs!

Once I have that lot up and running, I’m just about ready to install software.

So what do you consider to be essential?

Losing the picture

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Life has been busy.

I recently was asked to host an existing site.

Fine, says I.  I’ll do that.  I transferred everything across and everyone was happy.

“Now,” says the client, “seeing as you have full access to the site, could you do some minor changes to the wording?”

“No problem,” says I, and then I looked at the site.

Some bright spark had produced a lovely looking site.  It’s clean, with nice images and showcases the client’s business beautifully.

But it is all images.  There is no text anywhere.  All wording is embedded in images.

I rang the client and talked him through disabling images in his browser.  I then told him to look at his site.

“Where the fuck is it?” he cried. 

“Exactly!” says I.  I then explained to him that the search engines won’t be able to see it.  The visually impaired won’t be able to use text-to-speech software, and that the damned thing rtakes an age to download.

I have been commissioned to rewrite the site to make it work.  The only problem is that it has to look exactly as it did before.

It’s a nightmare.

Is it any wonder I want to get out of this game?

Feeding the 400

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Much as it is against my better nature and sense of taste, I had a look over at Head Rambles today.

I see Himself has finally broken through the 400 readers mark.

Actually, he’s a bit chuffed about it, but I soon burst his balloon by pointing out that tomorrow, he’ll probably be down to less than 300 again.

It is one thing I have noticed about his feed reader.  The figures seem to leap around like a budgie in a cat cage.

The first half of the graph is nice and smooth, but the second half looks like a seismograph.  Sometimes figures will rise or drop by as much as 100 (or even more) in a single day.

I tell him it’s down to the quality of the shit on the site.

There is a distinct co-relation between the graph and the level of his hangovers.