I found out about a quite cool little plugin for WordPress today called ShortStat. It was linked to from an article about plugins you should never be without I saw on Digg today. I’m not so sure if they were quite what I should never be without, but this one looks useful all the same. Just drop the .PHP file into your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it, and off it goes! Who says things have to be complicated?!
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Archive for June, 2006
Mmmm… Stats
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006Not a fan
Saturday, June 24th, 2006Sometimes when I turn my PC on, I’m greeted by a warning on screen that one of my fans is spinning too slowly. I found out the fan on the northbridge wasn’t spinning at all. Often, I’d just power off and back on, and it would kick the fan into running. I realised this obviously isn’t a good idea, longterm, so I’d better sort it.
I dug around online to find a suitable replacement. Coolermaster and Akasa do a few, but both seem totally obsessed with putting blue LEDs into their fans. Whilst I normally have nothing against blue LEDs, I see no point having them inside a closed PC.
Zalman have a few heatsink-only kits; passively cooled, they won’t dissipate the heat as well, but will be silent. Whilst I’m all for silent or quieter PCs, I wouldn’t want it at the expense of stability and performance. The northbridge is an important component of any PC, so it needs to be running as well as it can.
I had a toddle down to PC World today and found that they do a replacement kit, but alas, it won’t fit. The mountings don’t align with the holes in the motherboard. It does come with some thermal sticky pads, but I don’t like the idea of them because they don’t transfer heat so well, and you run the risk of the pad getting hot and falling off. I’d end up even worse off in that situation!
I ended up dismantling the current fan, which required removing most of the innards of my PC. Once-upon-a-time I would have revelled in doing such things, but now I know that it can result in mistakes and damage being made, no matter how careful you are. I don’t fancy messing up my PC, so I proceeded with caution. I cleaned up the fan, and gave it a squirt of WD40. The fan seems to run a little better, but it’ll be interesting to see how long it can go before it packs up again. If it does, I’ll just RMA the motherboard, but if Dabs won’t do an advance replacement, that means no PC until it comes back. I have my Mac Mini though, so all is not lost! I’d be stuck with a single monitor which would probably be the hardest thing now, seeing as how used to it I am.
Here’s hoping it can behave!
Potentially Unwanted?
Friday, June 16th, 2006I like new, shiny, wonderful things. The nice folks at Sophos released their latest version of their main antivirus software called, unsurprisingly, Sophos Antivirus!
Sophos Antivirus 6 forms part of a suite of applications now called Sophos Endpoint Security. It includes the Sophos Antivirus software (SAV), as well as a firewall and back-end management software called Enterprise Console, and an update mechanism called Enterprise Library.
SAV has always had excellent virus detection built in. Sophos have developed on this by now including spyware detection and removal, or what they call ‘Potentially Unwanted Applications’ (PUAs). The new moniker for such uninvited malware came due to some litigation by some companies who objected to their software being classed as Spyware. Sophos have played it safe by giving it a somewhat ambiguous name. A wise move perhaps, although it does dilute the meaning of the feature somewhat.
Even so, I recently upgraded an existing installation of Sophos to the newer versions. SAV 6 luckily will upgrade happily from existing SAV 5.5 installs, so it’s an evolutionary process, rather than revolutionary. Having just pushed around SAV 5.x I didn’t relish in having to do it all again for version 6.
I enabled the new PUA support, and did a full scan. I tried it on my PC at work first and found a couple of things; a registry editor tool (a 3rd party freeware tool, part of the BartPE disk), and SuperScan 4. Both are counted as being ‘potentially unwated’ as they can be used to perform malicious tasks. SAV 6 allows you to enter exceptions, so I could pull these apps back out of Quarantine and add them to the ‘allowed’ list, so SAV won’t catch them in future. A nice feature!
This evening I switched on my home PC, and it too upgraded. It found a virus hiding in the system restore folder – quite how they get in there I don’t know – and SuperScan 4. It carried on scanning and then said it found Hotbar! I was shocked and a little surprised, to say the least! On closer inspection, I found it had located it in an installer file for eMule! I was most impressed. Not only can it find running, and installed malware, but also locate it hiding in files ready to be installed! I had experienced a similar response from another installer whilst trying to purposely infect a PC with spyware.
So far, I’m quite impressed. Hopefully it’ll carry on impressing me. Only time will tell, but first impressions are good.
Mmmmmmmmm
Wednesday, June 14th, 2006Everybody has probably heard the song Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm by Crash Test Dummies. If you haven’t, you’re either too young, or you just missed it.
Anyway, I was watching Dumb and Dumber at the weekend; such a great, silly film. The song Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm turns up in the soundtrack. I was sitting listening when it struck me that I didn’t have the song, or ANY songs by the Crash Test Dummies, so I made a bee-line for Amazon to see if I could find anything.
Amazon’s marketplace is a fantastic place to find older CDs and things. I also recently picked up a Fastball album for next-to -nothing. Similarly, the Crash Test Dummies album was only about £3.50, including delivery. You can’t argue with those prices! I’ve managed to collect all of Vertical Horizon’s back catalogue, as well as some other random stuff, like a Lilac Time Japan-only album.
I think I’ll have to start digging through Amazon marketplace a bit more, picking up albums I really should have, but just don’t, for one reason or another. I might have to look into more Crash Test Dummies albums, as I can appreciate them more now I think.
Odd Ad
Monday, June 12th, 2006The phone company Three seem to outdo themselves with wierd adverts. They certainly seem to ‘work’, as I’m not only talking about them, but linking to them on my blog, and I get no money for this.
It’s just such a wierd advert. As is this one. They’ve got a whole ‘other world’ quality to them, and a very wierd style that I like. I prefer the current crop over the older animated ones with the homicidal little creatures; they were a bit too wierd in my mind.
Key to my Hard Drive
Saturday, June 10th, 2006Here’s something I’d honestly not considered. An interesting read on Engadget (I found it on Digg) about some people planting trojans on thumb drives and leaving them around. People plug them in, it runs, sucks data off the PC, et voila, free information for the hacker!
It’s not something I’d considered mainly because I’ve never actually ‘found’ a thumb drive laying about. I’ve had them given to me after they’ve been handed in to lost property (they really were lost) but I think in future I’ll be watching where I plug stuff in. It’s easy to get blasé about such things when you have all the antivrus and patches you think you could ever need. Even people like me who “should know better” get caught out now and then!
So long 98
Friday, June 9th, 2006It appears Microsoft are going to pull the plug on Windows 98 support earlier than originally anticipated. I’m somehow not surprised; sureless MS has been holding back a group of developers to sit around and fix code in ’98, developers who could be doing much more useful work elsewhere (such as in Vista!).
Personally, I think it’s about time. Windows 98 is old and clunky. I haven’t used it properly in ages. I daresay there’s going to be a lot of people out there still using it in some capacity. Most of those using it will probably be doing so for ‘legacy’ reasons. There’s going to be a significant number of businesses with legacy applications burbling along which do some arcane task and nobody has yet gotten it to run on XP, or they haven’t seen the point if it’s due to be phased out anyway.
There’s going to be a group of home users in the same position – they apply the ‘aint broke, don’t fix’ mentality to it, which is perfectly valid. Many people will be happily plodding along doing their odd bit of web surfing and emailing. There’s a workaround solution for those people; use a different browser. As long as they are firewalled and running up-to-date anti-virus software, they should in theory be OK. True, if something does still sneak onto the system it could compromise it, but then again that usually applies regardless of how recent your patches are.
Of course, ultimately the best option is to just upgrade completely. It’s always nice to have new toys anyway!
Yack Yack, Weather, Yack, Yack
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006Today was a nice, warm, pleasant day! The sky was blue, with a few whispy clouds, it was hot, but not too hot – you could still wander around without sweating to death, and there was enough of a breeze to keep things nice. If the entire summer is like today, I’ll be happy!
Unfortunately, I have a feeling it won’t.
