Throw A Mouse

Assuming that software always has to be compiled…

Who compiled the first compiler? And how?

Screenshot of Google Notebooks plugin for Firefox

Google Notebooks is not the most popular service of Google, but I find it very useful lately. It provides the possibility to create and easily edit lists online, which can be either private or shared. For the way I organize myself this feature is a bit less than perfect.

The only thing i didn’t like is that it is not integrated in my GMail, as all the other Google services I use and this made it a bit difficult to access. However, the Google Notebooks plugin for Firefox browser fixes this issue.

It installs as a normal plugin and is just a discrete button at the bottom of the browser interface. When you need to bookmark a page, or you need to check already added bookmark, you can click the button and a little version of the Google Notebooks interface appears (as shown on picture). It has the full and complete usability as the normal interface of the Notebooks.

You can download the plugin here. Enjoy!

As we all know, Windows is a kind of operating system which is quite vulnerable to malicious code, which we call virus. I wil explain later the kinds of viruses and their damage, but now I would like to focus on virus removal.

What is important to keep your Windows system free of viruses is:

• To apply all security updates provided by Microsoft
• To use a reliable anti-virus software and keep it updated
• To avoid downloading files from suspicious sites and to be careful what kind of e-mail attachments are opened

Of course, as new viruses appear daily, it is qite possible to catch a new virus, which your anti-virus software doesn’t detect yet. In this case, the best (and easiest) procedure is as follows:

1. Scan your computer once again with an anti-virus software. Safe the log.

2. Download HijackThis utility. It is available here.

3. Install the utility and run it. Choose the “Do a system scan and save a log file” option.

4. When the log file is generated, go to hijackthis.de website. There you can parse the generated log file.

5. Check the result. If there are items marked as security risk, do the following:

• Make a google search for the suspicious file. We do not want to delete system files or drivers ;)
• Delete the malicious files. If you do not have access permissions to delete them, you should reboot your computer in SafeMode and try then. Note that some files and folders are hidden by default in windows, so if you don’t find the suspicious file, you have to make them visible.

6. If there are no items found as security risk, and you are sertain there is a virus on your system, you can do the following:

• Check the HijackThis log file manually. This means you have to Google every of the running processes listed in the log manually.
• Check your computer for rootkits*. You can do that using RootkitRevealer. Note that this utility shows all hidden files, not only rootkits.

7. Now, in case you want to help out your anti-virus software and this way safe other people’s computers, you can send them a sampe of the newly discovered virus. You can do this as follows:

• Before you delete a file, pack it in a password-protected archive.
• If deleting the file fixes your computer, send the archive to your anti-virus company as well as the scan results. They will analyze the sample and add to next definitions.

That’s all. Good luck in the fight with the malicious code.

* Rootkt is a malicious code which has the ability to hide itself. That kind of unwanted software is the most difficult to get rid of.

Most people are using too simple passwords, which they change maybe once in life. That is a big security issue. Besides, but with little effort it is possible to generate easily strong and secure passwords.

There is a password system, that is simple to learn and provides secure passwords, which are always different, but still easy to memorize.

The system can be based on two rules only:

1. Generate a random sentence, which you can remember easily. Hint: Create a very special, weird sentence, so you wont forget it too soon, like: “To cook is fun with 5 Germans in town!”. From that sentence take always the first letter, that builds the first part of your secure password in this case: Tcifw5it!
2. If you build a password for a website, then take for example the last letter in the main part of the URL as an addition. For example if you register on youtube.com: it will be the letter “e”.

Put those rules together and you have a dynamic and secure password algorithm. In this case you built Tcifw5it!e

It’s important that you use at least one number and one special character like “?” “!” “.” etc. in your secure password. Of course my own system has other rules, but be creative to make your own rules. For example, instead of the last letter of a URL, you can take the sum of the letters as an additional part to your strong password.

Invitation

As reported by engadget, Apple will announce new laptops on October 14.  Thats pretty cool, since speculations were rising more and more in the past weeks.

That arrives at the right time for me.  My current iMac is getting too slow for extensive use of Apple’s Aperture. And I want to try to use a new Macbook Pro as a desktop replacement. If this succeeds I will look for a Cinema Display, which should get an update by Apple too within the comming months and maybe already next week.

Stay tuned!

Using Google Search as a calculator is a commonly known feature. One guy (or girl) discovered that this function can provide also wrong results. If you let calculate Google the following subtraction, it will fail:

399999999999999-399999999999998

Funny fact, I just wonder how this person figured that out… too much time? ;-)

The official release date is October 13, but it’s already possible to download OpenOffice 3.0 as the final version on different mirrors. Here you get the list of all available mirrors. Look for the folder “stable” on the mirror site, there you can find version 3.0. Enjoy!

Darina and me are beginning to learn C for diving into professional programming. First we are collecting some sources to get a basic knowledge about how to learn the programming language C. We decided for C because Darina has already knowledge about it and it is a bit easier to learn than C++ or Java. But provides more possibilities than Pascal ;-)

Here is a short list of resources and C tutorials (will be updated in future):

• C programming Tutorial from cprogramming.com
• C Language Tutorial from physics.drexel.edu
• C Video How to’s from apex

In a future post we will write about the requirements for developing in C and we will provide further tutorials and howto’s.