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Using Feedburner now:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/talfryn

as some people reported difficulties getting the previous feed to display full posts and images properly. Please let me know if this works.

While troubleshooting my recent GChat connectivity woes, I was examining and scrutinising every little corner of my FireFox browser. Gradually I came to notice that while surfing my blog pages, mysterious calls to ‘dg.specificclick.net’ were being made.

First reaction was: spyware!!

I Googled it, and traced it back to… Sitemeter, a popular statistics tracking service that I have been using for years. Apparently, they had started using the specificclick.net tracking cookie without informing us users. Following some common advice, I promptly removed the code from my blog.

And… ta-da. Pages are loading much faster too (apologies to my friends who have complained that my blog was draaaging, but hey - hurray for decontamination)!

I’m still using a N73 but my Palm has long since died. Too lazy to acquire a proper PDA and to conduct the prior appropriate research that accompanies one such purchase, I merely stuck to my dying Nokia and have been loading it with one feature after another. With it, I can open and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and pdf files, check up the entire Merriam-Webster dictionary, translate English-Chinese and Chinese-English, seek directions from a MightyMinds pocket Singapore street directory, and run my life on Goosync.

Now, without my phone, I’d be quite dead. But without Google, I’d be even deader.

Google Calender occupies a permanent first tab in my Firefox browser, whether at home or in the office, and Google Mail follows a close second with Google Docs (makes things soooo much more convenient; I wish others’d use it more!) right behind. I’ve been lovin’ it since they introduced Tasks to Calendar, and it’s the reason why I’ve been working less in Thunderbird lately. After all, everything’s synced with everything else in all directions.

As the trend goes, I usually select an assortment of plugins to accompany the adoption of a new theme. This round’s pickings are:

• Category Icons - See those little icons by the categories? And at the top of every post? It’s easy to install and configure. They’re cute, too.

• Flexible Upload - Integrates with the default WP media/image uploader; enables you to resize and stamp a watermark on images as you upload them.

• Lighter Menus - I used to use Admin Drop Down Menu, but found this to be even better. Aesthetically, and technically as well. A must-have for the admin backend.

• Now Reading - a customisable library of books (info fetched from Amazon.com or .co.uk) that you can display on the sidebar… or on a separate page. Needs some knowledge of PHP to tweak if you’re picky about presention.

• Sideblog - It’s what I use for the mini-posts in my ‘latest wruffs’ box. Works like minor status updates. Posts under the categories assigned to the Sideblog will not show in the main posting area.

• WP Automatic Upgrade - Does exactly what it says.

• WP-Cache2 - For a faster site. Reduces the server and database load (I hope. Given how my site likes to exceed its bandwidth limit every so often.) by caching pages.

No more blotchy notebooks and vivid colours for me. I felt like I’d lost myself in that notebook theme… it was too messy, too fancy. I like things clean, simple, white. Minimalistic stuff. So I found this theme which hovers somewhere in between all the previous white-based themes I had… and there. I’m back. My photos in the headers are, too.

Comments now support Gravatars, so you can have a pretty little avi by your name whenever you leave a note on the blog.

Three weeks ago, I received a few suspicious messages from one of my friends in Sydney. They go:

“hey whats up? check this out !!!
http://cool.smy9.info
brb…”

And then I started getting these from a number of my Aussie friends. Looks like a bot would send a message from their account just before they went offline, and since I couldn’t get my warnings through when they were still online, I’ve had no choice but to block them off my list for the time being. The link would vary, but it’ll be something like:

http://just.cool.03phg.info
http://-username-.pics.skaq.info
http://-username-.images.05b7b.info
http://www.kfytsj.info/
http://www.rhqwcp.info/
http://www.cfkxrn.info/
http://www.mxbpkr.info/
… … and more of such nonsense

This Aussie-based page says that some of the links would ask for your MSN email and password to gain access to view some photos that the sender has supposedly uploaded. Although this site claims the spyware originates from email spam, I believe it can be spread via MSN as well, whether or not you actually click on the link. This morning, I received another such message from one of my friends in Singapore, and a few hours later a friend notified me that he received from me a similar message, advising me to check my computer. I carry out an anti-virus and anti-spyware scan every night, and so for this evening I ran one earlier than usual. So far it’s found a Trojan (’Generic 10.CRH’) and I’ve gotten rid of it. I’m not sure how it came through, since I’m using Trillian and not an actual MSN client, so I’m hypothesising that it’s linked to my Windows Live account. I’ve since changed my account password as well.

My bandwidth went over the limit, due to file transfers (am migrating to a new host). I’d never thought it’d happen, but the site’s back up now. Bloglessness was hard to bear!

Never realised how useful these could be, until now, when I was presented with a challenge to mmm… do something tricky. Working on a couple of websites at the mo.

Then I realised I could use these for my location updates as well. I could replace words with images, but for aesthetic reasons I’ll stay put with words. Completely customisable, exploitable, and potentially extremely useful. Be creative, go get the coffee2code custom field value plugin!

Easily retrieve and control the display of any custom field values/meta data for posts, inside or outside “the loop”. The power of custom fields gives this plugin the potential to be dozens of plugins all rolled into one.

Since I like to hop all over the place, I thought that it’ll be nice if there was a plugin that would link the IP to the country and display a little flag, just so that there was an icon showing where I made the post from. I found this, and other similar ones, but all of them deal with comments and comment authors only (have a try - post a comment, or click on an old post with comments to check it out). I’ve tried but I haven’t managed to find one for posts and post authors; I’m not sure if WordPress logs the author’s IP?

I think I went slightly mad back there, for I had to re-install Windows XP multiple times. The first time I did it, it gave me two options at systems start-up asking me which operating system I wanted to boot. There were two Windows XP Pros. Did some troubleshooting and it was the boot.ini file (again!!). ‘Corrected’ it and the blasted re-loop came back once more, even on a new installation! Threw in the installation CD and did it all over again, twice. First to make sure that I had every single partition in it was deleted and reformatted (I left one of them - the non-system files partition untouched during my first installation, but leaving a mystery EISA partition there since I read contained original system diagnostic tools). It didn’t work, so in my following attempt I removed the EISA partitions (yeah, one more had appeared) and just wiped the entire drive clean before proceeding. It worked. Got into my new Windows, and started looking for drivers and basic stuff. Had a bit of hit-and-miss there; my application panel wasn’t working, and my system could detect no audio device (despite having the appropriate drivers installed), and there were some conflicts with my wireless technology. Turns out there was a certain order in which the chipsets, drivers and modems and buses and what have you had to be installed. When approached in the wrong order, they won’t work. Now I think my lappy’s fine… almost back to normal. A spanking brand new normal.

It’s amazing how disruptive how a failing Windows can be. Almost my entire week gone… and now I’ve got a lot of emails and other stuff to catch up on.

One thing led to another. Seriously, this is getting way out of hand, occupying entire days…

Hardly a few hours after Windows had started operating as per normal, it then began to act quirky. The title bar of whichever window I had open in Windows Explorer started flashing and getting out of focus, pulling up ‘My Computer’ would take ages and at the end only to result in a blank folder, Safe Mode still doesn’t work and would only initialise a re-loop, all my System Restore points had disappeared, and worst of all, the whole system would stop working without warning and for no reason, sometimes when I am signing into Windows, and sometimes after I’ve logged on and am doing something. Anything. It would just freeze, and I’d had to do a hard reset. I could get nothing done.

Then came another surprise: it gave me a “Invalid Boot.ini” message upon reboot, and so I thought it could be solved by doing that trick through Linux again. But this time, it displayed yet another error: “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: WindowsSystem32Hal.dll”. By that time I had managed to find an XP Pro installation disk, so I put that in and ran the Recovery Console, trying out almost every single tip there was to be had on the ‘net. Tried dumping in a working copy of HAL.DLL from another XP computer too, but it still couldn’t find it or load it.

I was thinking of giving up, and succumbing to a re-format and re-installation of XP, now that I had backed up all my files and had a copy of the installation disk.

So I went ahead, through gritted teeth, and tried to re-install Windows.

BUT when I got to those dreaded blue screens, I was told “Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer” and could proceed no further! Turns out that my laptop was using a SATA controller that isn’t natively supported by XP. Again I turned to Google for the answers… tried a couple of things, and found one which worked - a technique called slipstreaming which allows you to incorporate drivers into a bootable installation disk.

Hurrah for my old S2020 with dual-boot Windows and Linux for acting as my technical ambulance ops centre, without which I’d have been thoroughly crippled.

I’m now midway through re-formatting my drive… if the installation does not come through, I’d really go crazy!

There is a teeny weeny bit of stubborn hope left but no joy, no joy at all thus far. Am working between my old S2020 (which has just powered itself off for no good reason) to look for solutions, and the current S7110 running Linux live to back up all my Windows files on the same system. Such a demanding and high maintenance child is Windows! Oh why can’t I find my XP installation disk…?

Yesterday afternoon, I was trial-and-error-ing with some freeware for removable media recovery. After a few rounds of installing and uninstalling new programs (since none of them seemed to work), I realised that the box that should appear when I right-click a file or folder in Windows Explorer keeps failing to turn up, and instead, Windows [...]