Bikeeast.com

I spent several evenings after work this week trying to get rid of a nasty little piece of spyware on my pc. It is known as SP.HTML or CWS.Search.X. It did not seem to do any damage, except for changing the home page in IE. CWS Shredder would find it and remove the crap, but a short time later it would be back. It would find the sp.html file and some randomly named .dll but it had to be coming from somewhere. I discovered this page, which finally led me to the solution. There was a second .dll that was spawning the first. It is set to run in the registry under App_init dlls, but it is invisible to the widows registry editor. Using the alternate registry editor suggested in the article (reglite) I was able to find the secondary .dll, and delete it, since then my machine has been working fine.

These people that are producing spy/adware need to be beaten with rubber hoses till their skin falls off.

Posted by slider at 03:14 PM | Permalink

I have noticed a trend in the spam e-mail I have been receiving lately. There is a bunch with just random words in the subject line, which is an obvious ploy to defeat spam filters.

Here is a sample:
brochure nowadays jacket brother acquaint arcturus valve diluent davenport commemorate catalpa siderite

It looks like they are using some sort of spam engine that uses a wordlist to fill in the subject line.

In all reality, why would anyone ever buy anything from a spam e-mail? I guess a sucker is born every minute. I believe it takes less than a 1% response rate for spam advertising to be cost effective, but that is still an awful lot of people that are responding to crap.

Posted by slider at 02:03 AM | Permalink

This week has been a rough on for me and tech gadgets. I had a monitor burn out on me at work, it made all kinds of buzzing, hissing and popping noises before it died in a puff of smoke.
I was alone in the basement workshop where I work and was a little freaked out by the whole thing. At first I could not figure out what was going on, but I caught on real quick when I saw the smoke and the monitor went black.

Then last night I decide to take one of the hard drives out of my home PC, it happens to be the one that has Red Hat installed on it. I restart the computer and get a grub bootloader error, and the machine just stops dead. OK, I can fix this i think. I just pop in my trusty win98 boot disk, reset the machine, and after it boots, I run fdisk /mbr to rewrite the master boot record on the hard drive and get rid of the grub bootloader. This works, but it also changes the drive letter assignments on all the other partitions on the drive. Kiss Win2K and XP goodbye. I could boot, and get to a login screen, but when I try to log in, it gives me an error and I go back to the login screen again.
I crank up one of my other machines, and lo and behold, I can still access all of the shares on the 2K/XP machine, I just can't login.
I use remote management to try and change the drive letters, but you cannot change the drive letter of a boot or system drive in disk management. After a little searching through the MS knowledge base, I find a remote registry hack that will let me change the drive letters back to what they should be.
It is actually a quick and easy fix if you have access from another computer on the network, but I would have been royally screwed if I only had a stand alone machine.

I think this week I would have been better off working with an abacus or slide-rule than working around computers.

Posted by slider at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Do you hate giving out your E-mail address to sign up for a download or a website? here is a site that takes care of that.
http://www.mailinator.com/mailinator/Welcome.do You just sign up for something with whatever you want for the first part of the e-mail address. example: somebody@mailinator.com
Then go to this website and type "somebody" into the check inbox field, and whammo, you check the e-mail sent to that address. If the address doesn't exist, it gets dynamically created when mail is recieved for it. The messages stick around for a couple of hours so you don't have to constantly check to see if you got the message you were looking for. No more spam from companies trying to sell you software and other things that you just wanted to look at once or try the demo of and find out if it is crap.
out.

Posted by slider at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

ARRG, I am at work trying to get a piece of demo software to work properly. This software is a document management system, and as far as I can see its only purpose is to make accessing the files you want to use more complicated. The install has so many steps, I don't even remember if I have all the necessary components installed, or if there is a misconfiguration somewhere. I don't know how much this software is worth, but I think the money would be better spent on giving the users a tiny bit of training about where to save documents rather than spent on this software that half of them will never even make an attempt to try and use.

Posted by slider at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

All right, I just did an update to a bunch of things on the website. I was having trouble with FP hover buttons displaying properly in firebird on some computers, stupid Sun java runtime environment, or it might be Stupid microsoft not implimenting java correctly. Anywho, I made up a bunch of gif buttons in PSP, they actually look better than the FP hover buttons anyway. Doing this also let me get rid of duplicate non java pages I had. Now the only possible glitch is the counter not displaying properly, but that is way less important than actually being able to navigate the site.
Check out the new stuff here: www.bikeeast.com/welcome.htm

Posted by slider at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Woo Hoo, I found the problem, I was thinking that for some reason some of the .cgi scripts were not working properly, but it was my own silly error, in the mt.cfg file I had specified the url for the site as bikeeast.com.COM. I guess I have dot comitis. everything seems to work just peachy now.
Now off into the never never land of raw html editing to figure out how to make this blog look like the rest of my site.

Posted by slider at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)