Just finished LOGAN’s Mystery Of Time And Space Adventure (c) 2002 Jan Albartus (LOGAN) which is a pretty tough flash game – had to cheat twice to do it though 🙁
Month: March 2004
A neat use of flash to create a puzzle game – can you escape from the CRIMSON ROOM?
My Outlook tip was published as Outlook Daily Tips: Tip 111: More SMTP Servers on Monday. I didn’t get to see it until today as I was out on customer sites.
I was suprised to see on the Guardian’s blog that AT&T users can now send sms texts to European mobile users. I thought that as sms’s were just texts to numbers, that they were therefore global and they could already send us texts. I’ll have to see if my Brother In Law can send us texts…
Apparently, according to Symantec, the virus we discovered on the network yesterday is W32.Randex.gen which is a name given to a family of virus’s – which has been around since December 2003, so why on earth did Symantec not pick it up? VERY scary.Update The AV Update that we downloaded at about 10pm last night detected this file and deleted it but I’m still unsure as to why its been available since December. I was going to try doing a heuristic scan on it to see if the av would pick it up but can’t as the new defs have got to the file. I think if I get asked to renew Symantec AV next year I may well be testing different software as this is the third virus get past the detection routines in as many weeks – and we are paying a lot of money for this so called protection.
Just a heads up that there’s likely to be a new virus as msclock.exe in the windows\system32 directory that gets added to hklm\software\microsoft\windows\run and runservice It seems to replicate using common shared folders with weak passwords. msclock.exe looks like internet explorer if you look at the icons and has a description of internet explorer. Not much else is known at the moment. Nav with avdefs of today do not pick it up, neither does panda a/v software.
With msclock.exe running you will not be able to launch regedit or taskmgr. rename these files and then run them…..more details to follow….argh i hate consulting sometimes.
I’ve just been looking at the Yahoo news about the Columbus shooter capture including the slideshow of photos. What is a bit disturbing is that after 4 pictures there is an advert for a 007 James Bond game on the Yahoo games domain in which a car comes into view on the screen and a sniper scope focus’s in on it. This seems to me to be entirely inappropriate considering this is what the guy was doing and he managed to kill someone.
You can complain about this by going to Yahoo advert feedback and clicking on the ad feedback link.
A friends pc came back for diagnostics/repair after claims that the boot device was inaccessible. When I booted it up this afternoon it worked fine for about 10 minutes before crashing with a Kernel error. MS lookups showed this was an error in the SCSI plane or devices using the same interrupts. There were no SCSI devices in this box. The disk was making some nasty clunking noises though. Popped it in the other machine and ran a quick test on the disk and it failed with a Read Test Element and told me that the warrenty had run out on the 22nd Feb this year! I backed up the data using Ghost and then ran scandisk which gave no errors. Popped the disk back in the original machine and ran a quick test followed by a full test – no errors (and its nice and quiet again). I guess the first test relocated the duff sectors..
Hopefully the disk will last a bit longer now and at least it now has a backup of the machine, the latest antivirus updates (not a year old – tut tut tut!) and all the windows patches installed.
Shouldn’t have spoken so soon…first boot into windows and the clunking starts up again and the machine hangs when I try to install the AV software 🙁
Update Ok – it was the disk even though there are no errors reported by the software. I replaced the disk with an old 6gb drive and everything seems to be hunky dory. Now downloading the 42mb of patches for windows.
I tried to download the UltimateBootCD today and use (for the first time) a BitTorrent client like they asked me to. I was getting 4k/s download. In the end I stopped and went to the Alternative mirror and ended up downloading at 50k/s and bittorrent is meant to be oh so wonderful!
6 weeks and 1 day after Gateway Peugeot took my radio out of the car as it wasn’t getting a signal, the replacement has finally been fitted. The excuses for the delay ranged from “Peugeot will not send a replacement out until the old one is received” (which was the first excuse for a couple of weeks), then I got “They have to be shipped from abroad” (I could walk “abroad” and back again in 6 weeks). Finally last Wednesday I told them to have one fitted by the end of the week and was told that “we will have to contact Peugeot head office to get that authorised” so I told them they’d better hurry up and do it. I also complained to the head office last Friday @4.36pm (a week ago) via their online website contact page as there was no contact phone number supplied. Monday at 11.51 I got a reply acknowledging receipt of my email. 3pm it was given a case reference. So it looks like it takes 3 hours for emails to travel between departments in Peugeot.Yesterday (Thursday) at 6pm I got the reply “Thank you for your email dated 15th March. May I first of all say how sorry I was to learn of your disappointment with your vehicle and apologise for the delay in reply. Indeed, it is always a cause for concern should any customer express disappointment with eitherour product or the service that our dealer network provides. I should explain however, that although we are of course, interested in the overall operations of authorised dealers, they do operate independently and are therefore, responsible in their own right for their day to day trading activities. I am sure that in view of the aforesaid information, you will appreciate why it is difficult for us to comment in detail at this time and therefore, I have sent copy of your letter to Gateway Motor Co. for further investigation. You should expect to hear from myself in due course with the outcome of my investigation. In the meantime, I would like to thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Yours sincerely, Aina Ogunade-Paul Custoemr Care Manager”
So basically the company can trade under the Peugeot name, they can sell Peugeot cars (and only Peugeot), goods need to be authorised by Peugeot but they are totally independent and Head Office can’t do anything about it.
The only good side of things is that I didn’t have to order some bright paper and a pen to create a sign for the window saying “If you buy a car from this Gateway Peugeot dealer you may end up waiting 6 weeks for spare parts and have a car in the garage at frequent intervals – Beware!” and then park the car outside the showroom.
Incidentally the first song I heard on the Radio was Shania Twain’s I’m gonna get you good which has some weird misheard lyrics