Jeremy's Blog

I’ve been fighting with what was apparently a Trojan for the past couple of days. Now, I’m running a new Toshiba Satellite that was bought from Best Buy, so it’s got a lot of the usual default crap. McAfee is defaulted to the machine, and it’s one of those where you can’t take it off without screwing a bunch of stuff up defaults, too. So, I just have to disable it and hope for the best. Anyway, I tried the AVG Free Edition, which I quickly found out isn’t worth crap. Because, it found a few really minor things when it scanned and removed them, but this virus killed it. I couldn’t even get it to start, much less scan.

So, I got a copy of PC Tools Antivirus. A paid, legal copy, mind you. Scanned my computer with it and it found and removed the Trojan and everything’s working perfectly again. The initial scan takes quite some time, though. Long enough for me to have a nap and get back up to see the ending portion of the scan. But, all and all, it’s a solid product and I’ll be using it for my Antivirus Software from today on. I’ve also got the PC Tools Spyware Remover which is an excellent product, as well. I recommend them both.

So, I was in the middle of a conversation with Onyx and playing on Geas when all of a sudden my internet decided it wanted to die. Well, it’s bad enough that the internet died, because I was really pissed about that… but, it interrupted me when I was talking to her. Now that pissed me off.

Comcast came out here and fooled around with some stuff and it’s working again, thankfully. Now, I’ve got to try and get some work done.

Can anyone tell me what Firefox’s deal is, lately? On Windows, there’s that annoying memory leak in 1.5+, and in the latest release (1.5.0.4) on Linux it’s just unbearably slow. I’m using Opera right now, and it’s so much more responsive and manageable … too bad it doesn’t like a lot of the fancier javascript and far too many sites look like crap …

So, I’m now on the new version of Ubuntu. In the update, I ended up only having two problems. When apt went to update the gdm configuration file, my laptop decided it was time to just randomly turn off, and that interrupted the upgrade process. Luckily, that was easily rectified with a quick sudo dpkg –configure -a …

Next problem was once the upgrade was completed, my wireless decided it didn’t want to work anymore. So, I had to go into the living room and hook directly into the router to grab a few extra packages and extract my wireless card’s firmware from the driver and stuff like that. About 10 extra minutes of work, and my wireless is now working again.

And I’ve finally realised a small fraction of the extent of my geekiness. Since there wasn’t much else I could do during the upgrade, I took the laptop into the bathroom and set it up by the bathtub and took a hot, relaxing bath while I was monitoring the upgrade. So, I feel refreshed and a lot better, and my laptop is upgraded and all shiny-like. Two birds with one stone, eh?

Anyway. Time for me to get back to work.

Sometimes pictures speak louder than words:

I think I’m going to be here for a while. Excuse me while I pray for no major conflicts.

So, my brother wants me to help him pay for something he really wants … Being the wonderful and kind brother that I am, I “allow” him to let me use his monitor to help with my dual monitor addiction, in exchange for my helping him pay for whatever it is that he wants. Life is good. Productivity is on the rise. Now, if only I could get rid of these distractions …

I’ve been borrowing my brother’s monitor for the past couple of days to see how well I could manage a dual monitor setup with my laptop, and just from the first day I was already in love. It is really great to be able to code on my laptop and Alt+Tab to my browser on the monitor right next to it and then just hit Ctrl+R to refresh. And if I’m really feeling froggy, I just set Firefox to auto-refresh every sixty seconds or so, and just keep saving my work as I go. Constantly being able to see what you’re changing without having to look away from your code makes it really easy to stay on task and not get distracted. I definitely recommend a second monitor to any of you programmers who might be reading this. Heck, I recommend it to anyone who might not be so good at multi-tasking.