I just updated my kernel to preemptive 2.4.16.

Well lunker went off and tied the knot. Tara and he went off to Disney World today. As promised at the reception, here’s the link to Gregcostuff.

I updated the pictures page tonight.

A coworker of mine had an amazing thing happen by just browsing the web. His default url (homepage) for Internet Explorer was modified to add some “Cnetadd.com” prefix that displayed pop-ups for various browser events (load, unload). The amazing thing was that the options bar that allows you to change that url was greyed-out! Apparently, some site exploited a known flaw in Internet Explorer to set the key HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftInternet ExplorerControl PanelHomePage to 1 in the Windows Registry. Deleting this key will allow you to set your homepage again in IE 5.x,6.x, set the key to 0 in IE 4.x. A whole page of registry key definitions exist at http://www.goblyntown.com/ref/reg/.

I was a bit shocked to find that some piece of adware/spyware was happily running on my windows machine. Apparently, if you install Kazaa (including Morpheus), the targeted advertising application, eZula is installed BY DEFAULT! I was further amazed by the fact that “uninstalling” the program didn’t completely remove this software from my system. I had to manually delete several registry keys and files in addition to running the uninstaller.

Ezula Detect

If you’d like to completely remove eZula from your system, there is a great article on how to do that here.