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Installed another anti-virus today, the fourth. The behavior of my poor Windows box has come out of control lately. At first, it was quite subtle, and the computer obeyed my orders. Reluctantly though, but still my actions meant something. Suddenly things started to worsen dramatically. Soon I ended up with the couple of nice blue screens, followed by minor data losses.

None of the installed anti-virus packages, I run at least twice a week, showed any signs of malware, except for the usual handful of tracking cookies in my browser. It’s quite irritating when you feel having absolutely no control of your own computer: the network indicators blink, the hard drive crunches like crazy, the memory is full of … and to complete the picture you are totally abandoned desperately clicking and pressing all alone. It lives its own life and I quite happy for it, but to tell the truth, my plans are a little bit… different.

After a quick lunch I decided to take a moment to run all of the checkers once again. When all of them reported a green light, I took it all in my hands: opened the processes list and started identifying what’s running module by module until several suspicious processes were spotted and recorded. Then Goodling their names, I learned they really were Trojan downloaders what perfectly explained the naughtiness of the box.

Information of this sort is usually provided by the producers or malware removers and in this case it was Prevx1 who seemed to know a lot about my troubles. I will put it shortly. It found and removed about 10 severe problems, and passed the control over the computer back to me. Phew, now I feel at home again.

Psshh… It’s watching you reading from my system tray.

Three years ago, when I was working for a company, we were obliged to build the daily timesheet reports. No one really analyzed them, but the management thought it was a good idea to control productivity of the staff. Should mention it didn’t work? It took less than a day to the staff to learn playing the tricks with their reports to make them look genuinely productive. What was the point in them if no one was interested in the outcome?

Recently I have become interested. The question I asked was where all my precious time goes. Of course, I’m working hard as most of us do, but do I spend all of the time productively? By this I don’t mean work with no breaks for eight hours just to wear yourself out in couple of weeks. The breaks are as important as uninterrupted working sessions. My goal though has become to spot unnecessary time eaters and bad habits for merciless removal.

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… in ignorance. In his “not a better aggregator” series (1, 2, 3) Pito raises an important point. It’s not the aggregator that makes your reading better; it’s something that helps you discover the relevant quality material in first place. He knows what he says. We are working on the BlogBridge project together and face the unprecedented information overload. You wouldn’t believe what number of new sites, blogs and e-mail users emerge each day. It’s horrifying.

For a person, who wishes to follow what’s going on in the world, discover new places, do everything consciously, it becomes increasingly hard these days. I remember when I knew that the Linux documentation is here and the anecdotes are there; everything was so simple. Now we have 10 millions of Linux documentation sites, 50 millions of fun stories sites, and hardly ever will you be able to scan through all of them. This is perfectly applicable to the young blogosphere growing enormously.

If I like gadgets, most of you would recommend Engadget. But imagine unimaginable, I don’t like iPods and hate reading about them as all the news look alike written by an overindulged 5 year old (and there’s a grain of truth there, am I right? ). Who will be filtering that out for me? I like cars and someone showed me a nice site about cars. I stopped looking for options and don’t think now that there are a million and a half of other. Now what if I do? How can I make a judicious decision on where to go first? If I were to visit all of them, the life would end far before I reached even a half of them. The information availability quickly becomes a curse these days and it’s unavoidable.

The oracles of the past foresaw this and started building directories, search engines with rating features, tagging systems of all shapes and sizes – all to aid people to help others find what they need. I just realized that we are trying to jump on a runaway train with this. The information grows, it multiplies and we aren’t likely to catch up with the blistering pace of the process. It’s not possible to organize it all whatever you do, sorry.

Here we approach the subject. To be continued …

Today I would like to share one extremely useful tip on overriding DNS information. But first, how it may be useful. Let’s imagine that:

• You are running a site and planning the migration to a different provider. You wish to move your data first; then switch the name to point to the new location and then leave the old one. The problem is that before you switch the domain name to your new location, you can only guess if the site is working fine or not.
• You are building a site for someone else and need / wish to access it using its target domain name. It may be necessary if there are some places where you hard-coded it etc.
• You wish to show your friends what a great hacker you are. You open your browser, type in the name of some gigantic site you’ve “just hacked” ( i.e. microsoft.com ). Voila… “Vasya was here.”

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