E-Musings Mon Immorata

Casualties Of War While Bagel & Netsky battle it out for top spot, we found lots of interesting way to make Windows work better This week there's little new virus activity. With even the past weeks of intense warfare between Bagel and Netsky is winding down. But there are now 21 Bagel and 20 Netsky variants in circulation! Unfortunately, like all conflicts the casualties of war are littered about and the quantum of virus-infected email has increased well beyond previous epidemics. The easiest identifier, beyond the subject line, is the message size -- 24 or 32 kB -- with an attachment that's either a .PIF, .ZIP, or .RAR. Although the latest Bagel.U variant changes the attachment extension to .EXE! I depend on my older Popcorn version (freeware that supports multiple accounts) to scan the contents of the many mail accounts I have. Once I identify messages bearing the Mark Of Cain I mark them for deletion. Yet the funny thing about most of today's virus epidemics is that the most careful amongst us often suffer the most from the fallout. My boss being a prime example. He regularly checks if our corporate firewall is fully-stealthed using the GRC Shields Up! checker (even as the GRC web server's security certificate has a name resolution error). And revokes network privileges of any employee found with a virus on their system. So imagine his surprise, nay consternation last Thursday when his computer inexplicably ran out of disk space on a 40 GB partition shortly after being powered on and downloading email! The file-spawning virus responsible had been detected and quarantined by the installed anti-virus. However, Windows appears to backup system-related files in a separate, hidden, Recycler folder. And regardless of the Recycle Bin settings, Recycler is found in every disk partition. So if you too use a mail scanner, set it to Delete Infected/Virus Mail Attachments instead of Quarantine. And periodically check the Recycler folder (Windows Explorer > Tools > Folder Options > View > Advanced Settings > Hidden files and folders | Show) and delete its contents. If you use Outlook, or Outlook Express (OE), do disable the Preview Pane as this permits scripts embedded in HTML documents to be executed. Outlook users should install the free Pocketknife Peek COM add-in to safely view (reply, or delete) messages without launching scripts, HTML code or runtime attachments. In an era when every other email has an attachment, Peek's tabbed view allows me to review the attachment name and extension before deciding to keep, or permanently delete (Ctrl+Del) the message. If you are wedded to OE consider migrating to Thunderbird. I now use the (still) as-yet-unreleased Thunderbird 6 (March 11, 2004) which leaks fewer resources (than the regular v0.5 release) and can render HTML without opening various hidden doors! The downside is that Thunderbird still makes it very difficult to import existing OE mail folders; especially if you have multiple profiles configured. Equally strangely, you can't migrate mail folders unless you have an active Internet connection. I do wonder about the logic! This past week the Search service tool bar wars were upped a notch! The long-dormant HotBot service seems to have revised itself. And now offer not one, but two separate search bars. The Desktop Beta is another IE search plug-in. The second, Deskbar is a Windows Desktop search bar similar to Dave's Quick Search. However both bars go well beyond the Search Net resources approach used by Google and Yahoo. The Desktop Beta includes an RSS reader and can spider email (Outlook/OE), files, RSS feeds, IE browser History, add custom pages and block pop-up advertising. The Deskbar can search your computer and the Internet, and includes an alarm, calculator, and on-line calendar. However the Desktop is not without its flaws. Every time I accessed the RSS Reader panel it would disable pop-up blocking. And in the 10+ days since I first installed it I have been unable to search for keywords in either email or files. Also, since MyIE2 is my primary Web browser, this specific add-in doesn't work; unlike the Google tool bar. If you want to be involved in (yet another) Trend Micro Beta, the company is looking for testers of its new PC-cillin Anti-virus designed to work with the forthcoming (Technical Preview released last week) Windows XP SP-2. The latter has a considerably augmented and improved firewall. Trend's new anti-virus includes separate scanners for local file, email, downloaded objects, spy ware and Trojans. The Beta period will run for 4-5 weeks, and the company is offering a full product for a 6 month trial period. If you have questions about the best kind of NTFS partition, I found an excellent on-line resource, Radified Hard Drive Partitioning Strategies, that very lucidly explains, with linked resources, the best approach the to knotty issue of the right cluster size for a specific partition. In an effort to speed disk seek times on a 5400 rpm drive, I had used 16-64K clusters, only to find that the disk defragmentation software included with Windows 2000 is unable to defragment clusters larger than 8K! Still, the huge cluster sizes did well for Office nd Windows programs, but weren't very efficient for .TXT, RTF, Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org document files. If you're wondering why I haven't suggested downloading the recently released OpenOffice.org 1.1.1rc3, well its because I read on one of the Beta sites that version 1.1.2 will be released shortly. And unless you are having various system issues with 1.1.1, the download isn't worth the upgrade! So be patient and hold out a bit longer. I recently read a great article on PC World Online about various search engines. Do give it a read, you'll be surprised by the depth of knowledge available online outside of Google which is fast returning very irrelevant searches. Instead do look at ZapMeta which takes off where Google falters. Far more focused, relevant results and you can view the site in real time using the Quickview option. At work, I need a project management application. But my company can't afford Microsoft Project with all its bells and whistles. So I trawled the open-source sites looking for a solution. And found the independent Java applet Gantt Project 1.9.11 rc2 (March 23, 2004). Available as a .JAR file it can be run if you have the Sun JRE installed. The Microsoft JVM (Java Virtual Machine) won't do. The software is quite full features, and once you understand the backward logic used, its pretty easy to setup project plans. There's also a plug-ins that export your charts as PDF. That's it for this week, until the next time Stay Safe! Click Here to Email Me