Hmmm, the Flickr XP Uploader it appears to work somewhat, but there are some problems. First off, the tags that I add don’t seem to ever be applied. Also, if I add the pictures to a new album, that doesn’t seem to work either e.g. a new album doesn’t get created from the uploader. To top it all off, I tried uploading 109 pictures last night, and it stopped no less than twice which forced me to restart upload from where it left off. Am I the only one having this problem?

Explore2fs is a very cool Win32 program that allows you to explore ext2 and ext3 partitions from within Windows. This basically allows you to read Linux partitions from within Windows through a GUI. My only question is, why isn’t this a shell extension like the gmailfs tool?

Someone managed to get an evil spam through the old filters tonight. Here’s a little analysis of what this “person” was trying to do. Anyone care to run key.exe on their box to see what happens?

I’ve been using x2vnc to navigate between my Linux workstation and Windows laptop.
If you’re not familiar with the software, it basically works like this. X2vnc will let you use two screens on two different computers as if they were connected to the same computer. Even if one of the computers runs Windows 95/98/NT and the other one runs Linux/X11. There were two minor annoyances with x2vnc though. The first problem was that when I unhooked my laptop from the port replicator and the network, I had to restart x2vnc at the command-line. That problem I instantly solved with my mighty script, x2vnc_restart. The other problem, which was more difficult, was that the Windows and Windows Properties key seemed to have no effect on my Windows laptop. I set out to solve that problem today using xmodmap and vnc foo. The first thing I did was to setup the Windows keys in xmodmap by using the following .xmodmaprc. In the X11 world, the right and left Windows keys are modifiers named Super_R and Super_L respectively while the Windows Properties key is Hyper_R. You can see the key code for these by running the xev utility and dutifully pressing each of the buttons. Even after performing the xmodmap foo, my Windows keys were as useful as a whistle on a plow e.g. they still didn’t work. So, after upgrading x2vnc and TightVNC on Windows didn’t work, I tried using RealVNC (another VNC Client/Server install). After that, the Windows keys work as expected. See, it’s just that easy to setup a cross-platform development environment. ;-)

I’ve been playing around with iTunes (on Windows 2000) the past couple of days. I’m generally pleased with the way that it organizes music and helps with manually tagging. Say, you add five mp3s to your playlist that weren’t properly ID3-tagged. You can go through and enter in the song names on the playlist, select the new songs, right-click, choose “Get Info”, then enter in the Album, Group Name, Genre, Equalizer, and Volume Settings, and it properly tags the selected songs with the updated information. I especially like the per song equalizer settings which really helps maintain sanity for a large playlist. Winamp 2.x can do none of this on its own. Also, Winamp’s playlist support has always been a little dodgy since forever. I always hated that it didn’t save the playlist by default, and that it doesn’t have a save button in a convenient place. You have to click twice, and then it brings-up a “Save As” window. Then you have to click “Save”, then “OK” to overwrite the file. That’s no less than four-clicks to do a Save. iTunes takes zero clicks. Just add the song to a playlist, and it adds it to the playlist.

The major problem I have with iTunes is load time. What I like about Winamp is that it’s FAST and can load in under a second. iTunes takes about twenty times longer to load on my machine (800MHz/512MB). I think I could probably whack-down a Venti Latte in the time it takes for iTunes to load and start playing music. There’s got to be some way for Apple to get iTunes to load faster. I know that they probably don’t think much about it, but I’d like to be able to use iTunes for all my music needs. Right now, I leave all my mp3s associated with Winamp in Explorer because of load times on individual tracks and because there’s a cadre of plug-ins that support flac, shnf, mp3, ogg, and even mp4 (the iTunes format). Now, I’m using iTunes to listen to and organize playlists.

The other problem I have with iTunes is that the buttons (Play, Pause, Next, Previous, etc) don’t seem to work when the window doesn’t have the focus. What exacerbates this problem is that unlike nearly every other windows application, the brushed aluminum-style title bar does not indicate when iTunes _does_ have the focus. I know there’s probably some esoteric technical reason involving toolkits and some Aqua to Vole conversion foo, but it needs to get fixed as it’s highly annoying.

In addition to HijackThis and Spybot, Gregh recommends
BHODemon which is a slick demon that sits and monitors IE to insure that any “Helper Objects” that are added to IE are expected.

Wednesday night, I had to rescue a friend’s Windows 98 computer from Spyware oblivion. I was amazed at how far behind the times I had gotten in terms of spyware/adware removal with Windows and Internet Explorer. I hadn’t realized what nasty, evil stuff was on the Intraweb these days. When I first started working on the machine here’s what I noticed:

• Internet Explorer’s start page was about:blank, but some site appeared that continually popped up windows.
• IE Default Search was set to some dll on the hard drive
• HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run, RunOnce, and HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run had lots of suspect entries like "Winad.exe" and "Winclt.exe"
• Win.ini had a suspicious Run entry.

Now, whenever faced with this situation, I usually do the following. First, I run Windows Update about two to three times to upgrade IE and get all the Critical Updates. This particular box hadn’t been updated since like 1999. So there was something like 21 Critical Updates from The Vole to apply. After that, I then delete spurious entries from the various Run and RunOnce Keys from the Registry, run Ad Aware, delete suspect entries from Start Menu->Startup, and run sysedit to peruse autoexec.bat, config.sys, win.ini, and system.ini. This is what I _knew_ already going into the situation which is substantially more than most people.

To my surprise, all that couldn’t remove CWS which was causing Internet Explorer’s about:blank to download from some very questionable web site and I think _REINFECT_ the box by executing arbitrary code. Thankfully, the reinfections stopped ocurring after the Windows Update, but IE was still hopelessly infected with various toolbars and a nefarious about:blank redirect.

I had vaguely remembered that SpyBot was supposed to be a halfway decent program in the same vein as AdAware. So, I downloaded and installed it. It managed to find and remove loads of stuff that AdAware missed all without incident. It even forced a reboot of the box, and axed a bunch more malware that was immutable after Windows had loaded it into memory on boot-up.

I had never heard of HijackThis until googling for the specific problems I encountered over the course of cleaning this box. HijackThis informs you of every modification done to the Registry (post-install) that could be harming your system. It can then fix or delete any or all of the items that it finds. HijackThis managed to find even more malware hiding in the depths of the Registry that was missed by AdAware and Spybot. I promptly removed these items which were mostly extraneous IE toolbars and cruft.

After all of that, IE’s default page was fixed, however, Winad and Winclt remained in the process list. It seemed to me that these two processes were a very lame imitation of the famous Xerox/Motorola “Friar Tuck/Robin Hood-hack”. When you kill Winclt, Winad starts a new Winclt. When you kill Winad, Winclt starts a new Winad. Of course, when you delete the Winad entry from the Registry Run key, this process manages to rewrite it again within seconds. In addition, the executables were loaded into memory and immutable. So, they couldn’t be deleted when Windows was booted, and Spybot couldn’t manage to axe them during it’s boot-up removal process. My solution to this was to reboot and hold down F8 when Windows restarted. Boot into “Command-line Only Mode”, and do a
deltree c:\progra~1\winad~1.

Finally, I reran Spybot, HijackThis, and Adaware yet again, and purged the remaining malware in the depths of the OS. When I was done, the machine appeared to be clear of all the spy/ad/malware that had infected it, however, without reimaging the box, there’s no way to be 100% sure. After all, every executable is now suspect to having been tampered with.

I can’t imagine an ordinary member of the populace being able to fix problems like these. It’s amazing to me that Microsoft would allow such insanity to occur on its operating systems. I don’t see how normal trusting people can be expected to maintain a Windows system that is inherently insecure.

Acrobat Reader Speed-up is a little mini app that unloads a bunch of cruft from Adobe’s famous viewer. Apparently, since 4.0, Adobe has opted to load scores of cruft for DRM and other nonsense into their software. This mini-binary remedies the situation quite nicely.

I was wandering aloof about the intarweb tonight looking for the last 2.x release of Winamp. I stumbled across this site called oldversion.com that managed to archive every old version of WinAmp out there as well as a lot of other programs like Windows Media Player (WIMP) and Quicktime (teh suck). So, now I can run WinAmp 2.x without a cadre of AOLification. I think next weekend, BJ and I are going to hit a pub and come back and attempt to install WinAmp 0.20 on Windows 2003.