E-Musings Mon Immorata

Will AVERT Stinger Redeem McAfee? Powerful free standalone virus scanner from McAfee detects 'n destroys current threats, Firefox tweaks with a sneak download link for Firefox 1.0 Beta, and comparing how the open-source 7-Zip compression format compares with .TGZ and .ZIP Once an antivirus powerhouse, in recent years McAfee's solutions caught fewer of the bad guys. And the company's offerings were soon overtaken by a very wide range of competing products. But I think the free AVERT Stinger will help redeem McAfee antiviral soul. Even I, to my regret, dismissed AVERT Stinger as a useless product. But its not. In fact, it's one of the most powerful antivirus products available. Extremely simple to use, there's nothing to install. Just download the file and run it. You don't even need to download a separate signature file. Everything is included in the single executable. And every time the virus signatures are updated so is the program. The only file the program creates on your disk drive is a customized preferences file. Stinger scans Windows processes, as well as disk boot sectors, self-extracting executable (a common virus delivery platform), compressed files and even MIME and UUencoded content. It can delete infected files, quarantine them, or just report which were infected. The current Stinger 2.3.4 release detects and cleans over 50 Trojans, worms and viruses, including W32/Bagle.ai@mm, W32/Mydoom.n@mm, and W32/Lovgate.ae@mm through W32/Lovgate.ak@mm. And is a great second line of defense after your installed antivirus. With all the hoopla and hype over the relative insecurity of using Internet Explorer, I (like many other surfers) have attempted to change over to a safer browser: Firefox and Opera. The only problem with the latter is it can't handle ActiveX objects in any form. And its JavaScript and CSS implementations are a bit buggy as well. With GMail being part of my email life, the browser I use has to work with this service. And Opera can't render the page. So perforce I use Firefox. Therefore I'm most interested in tweaks that improve performance. Many of these enhancements can be made manually, but its so much easier (and faster) to use a wizard-based interface instead of fiddling with settings. One dead-easy tweaker is CB Mozilla Optimizer 1.6.3. The second is Flexbeta FireTweaker XP 1.0 RC1 (needs .Net framework installed). If you want to know more about Firefox, including keyboard shortcuts, configuration options, performance settings and how using themes and extensions improve your browsing experience, there's an all-in-one Guide available. The site also has a grab-bag of other tweaks for FTP and processor over-clocking. Firefox as browsers go is quite neat. Even though to start-up it does love to consume processor resources. On a Windows 2000 SP4 system with 256 MB RAM, I clocked Firefox using nearly 85% of the CPU before it loaded. It wasn't much better on a Windows XP SP1 system with 512 MB of RAM, where it consumed nearly 65% of the CPU. This behaviour is common to both the original Mozilla builds, as well as the (supposedly) enhanced third-party versions. The only feature about Firefox that I really dislike is having to restart the application every time I install a new extension. C'mon folks, if the Windows world has managed adding enhancements without needing to close the browser, or to restart Windows, I'm sure Firefox et al can do too! You can also try out a very early (and possibly highly unstable) version of the forthcoming Firefox 1.0 browser. I won't bore you with the details, but after spending a whole week struggling with a payment gateway. I've learned to appreciate well-written and structured technical documents. In this instance, although the manuals were voluminous and available as PDFs. The writers hadn't learnt to exploit the medium. And its ease of cross-referencing using hyperlinks. So if you write technical documentations, think of the folks who read the manual when in trouble. Make their life easier. Offer a complete list of errors. And to be really helpful cross-reference each error to a possible cause with a solution for each error. Your customer will love you for it. News about a new Winzip 9.0 SR-1 release with 128- and 256-bit AES encryption and support for the 64-bit deflate standard, got me looking at data compression utilities. There are several competing formats like ACE, RAR, 7-Zip and ZIP for Windows, SEA, SIT and HQX for Mac, and ARC, TAR, GZ, BZ for Unix. And where you have multiple formats expect multiple tools. There's the freeware ZipGenius that supports 20 different formats including the open-source 7-Zip and other Windows and Unix ones. Or you can use the shareware PowerArchiver 2004 that also supports nearly the same number of formats. 7-Zip is a format to watch. Besides being open-source, it offers a compression ratio that exceeds the Zip format (even in its 64-bit deflate avatar) by as high as 10 percent! 7Zip also includes self-extracting. And is used by Mozilla installers for Firefox and Thunderbird. However despite the advanced claims, when I compressed 8 MB of Outlook Express mail folders, both 7-Zip and Total Commander's archive to Zip at maximum compression created 2 MB files. I then archived 205 kB of .TXT files where ZipGenius created a 96 kB 7-Zip and a 79 kB TGZ (tar.gz) archive. Yet Total Commander's built-in archiving created a 99 kB ZIP archive and a 78 kB .TGZ file. And yes, while I may be cheating a bit using Unix formats, most archiving software is now able to handle them. So do I keep ZipGenius. I think for now Total Commander is enough for me; especially with the free Zip-NT library installed. If you like experimenting with cutting-edge stuff, MSN now offers a Sandbox show casing new technologies Microsoft is working with or has acquired. Like Lookout, a .Net-powered add-in that indexes Outlook emails, contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, journal. As well as mapped IMAP folders and even Exchange accounts and Public Folders. Plus files on your computer or accessible via network shares. I download a copy and it I must say that finding information is even easier than before. Other MSN Sandbox projects include MSN's new Search, its Search toolbar and the TerraServer project that offers maps and aerial photographs of the USA, and some other countries too. Finally, if you have experienced your web browser (usually MS IE) attempting to open blank windows. This behaviour is caused by an easily removable Trojan. Of these the best is a HijackThis plug-in, About:Buster which you extract and run. It scans your Internet Explorer browser cache to check if the Trojan code exists and remove it if found. When I last checked, the HijackThis web site was unavailable. But Google maintains a cached copy. That's it for me this week. Stay safe and make sure to scan your system for evil critters! Click Here to Email Me