HB blog

My PC is HP/Compaq Presario 1950NX and it come with integrated Video Card (Nvidia 6150) and 1G RAM.

Even it has good CPU (Athlon XP 3800) lack of memory and slow video card did not allow me to use high detail settings even on older games.

To improve the performance of the system I’ve added 1G of RAM (~$50) for total of 2G (4×512M).

And added PCI expressx16 video card from DiamondMultimedia Viper HD 2600 XT 512M (~$65).

As usual the upgrade was not flawless.

I’ve disabled the driver of NVIDIA card as noted in installation document that come with the card (always read those documents they contain important instructions) and set from BIOS PCI express as primary video controller.

After that I’ve installed the card and then the drivers from the CD.

Up to here no problems…

But after I started video player I noticed that simply there is no sound. As usual I verified the cables - so many times I simply did not plug them, but everything was OK.

Then I opened control panel -> sound and audio devices to see for my surprise that the sound card was set to none.

Next step was to check Device manager - only one adapter was listed - ATI Function Driver for High Definition Audio…

After seing this It light up - The Video card has HDMI output and is capable to transmit audio via that connection. This was counted as sound device and since in BIOS onboard audio was set to AUTO it was disabled.

Simply setting it to Enabled bring back my sound.

A vulnerability in the Snoopy library was announced today. WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard.

Even it does not seem as high risk vulnerability it is recomended to upgrade.

For more information.

After I finished my browser tests (see previous post for details)  I started removing the browsers I do not use or the ones in beta phase.

For my “surprise” only componet that stated on my system and there was no obvious way to remove was as all of oyu already  guessed - googleupdate.exe

Even I removed the chrome browser this application was not removed and in top of it still active and connectiong to google servers for report.

After seraching internet I found instructions on how to remove it.

To Uninstall GoogleUpdate.exe:

1. Stop GoogleUpdate.exe in Windows Task Manager
2. Run msconfig and disable GoogleUpdate.exe under StartUp (no need to restart)
3. Delete GoogleUpdate task in C:\WINDOWS\Tasks
4. Delete “Update” folder under your C:\Documents and Settings\Your name\Local Settings\Application Data\Google
5. Clean up any term with “GoogleUpdate” in the registry file via regedit (Warning!). If you’re not sure about doing this, then just use CCleaner to clean up the registry.

Finally gone.

Most of “ux” users and administrators use remote terminal to connect to administrared machine.

One of the popular choises, minly because of it’s portability is PuTTy only putty.exe is needed and no installation is required. In addition it is free.

Downside is that sometimes there are problems with terminal emulation - not necessary coming from putty, but still annoying.

One of my problems is that when vim is in insert mode arrow keys do not work. For long time I was no able to find solution to the problem, but finally i found one. Just type this in your home folder:

echo syntax enable > ~/.vimrc

This did the trick for me. Hope it helps to you too.

Today I was hit with a 0-day virus - ZBot/Backdoor.Paproxy or whatever antivirus companies call it.

It came as E-mail claiming to be from UPS (You guess now why UPS virus is in quotes) and was a zip file with executable inside. UPS_INVOICE_978172.zip to be exact, but there are several variants.

Usually the common is that they contain as subject line:”[RE] UPS Tracking Number” followed by random number.

Most of the e-mails were detected (as spam) by the antivirus scanner on mail gateway, but some reached end users.

To be honest this one was really good in attracting them (the users) to open it and some did….

This was no pleasant experience. Right away PC rebooted and trojan was installed.

Other problem was that there was only 2 companies who were able to detect it this morning (the number increased to 13 afternoon).

After updated virus definitions from Symantec were installed Backdoor was detected and removed.

Lesson learned: NEVER open executable from attachment.

Here you ca see if your antivirus is up to date with that particular virus.

Another  version…

UPDATE: There are new versions not recognized by Symantec yet. So follow above lesson.

After I rebooted manually my database server I received following message in mysql log:

[ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Incorrect key file for table <name of the table>.MYI’; try to repair it

The fix is relatively simple

1. Go to MySQL console - mysql
2. Point to correct database - use <database name>
3. Issue command to repair - repair table <name of the table>
4. Sit back and wait - it will take some time

Lenovo is shipping new ThinkPads preinstalled with huge amount of software you do not really need.

This slows the boot process to the levels new computer should not be.

Here is the list of software I removed from T61:

• All MS Office related (trial) - Later I’ll install the products we have license for
• SQL server (yes it is installed) related
• Windows Live toolbar
• Norton Internet Security - Will replace it with Norton Endpoint Protection

Other option is to reinstall the system from scratch.

Excellent tutorial on how to do it

Tip: Do not connect the system to internet until you are ready to. It starts right away to download and install windows updates and will slow down the machine.

Upgrade to latest version.

As usual not without problems. This time maintenance plugin blocked the access to the site and I had to unblock it manually. Fortunately I was no the only one to have similar problem and quick search showed the solution.

I needed to check multiple addresses for use.

I did not find any ready solution so I wrote a script.

I called it psweep.sh

Here is it(comments are welcomed):

#!/bin/bash
# Sweep ping
# 1-st arg ip 2-nd start 3-d end
#
# Written by Hristo Benev
#
# rev 0.3
#
for i in `seq $2 $3`; do
ping -c 1 -W 1 $1.$i >/dev/null 2>&1
#ping -c 1 -W 1 $1.$i
if [ $? == 0 ]; then
echo “host $1.$i is up”
else
echo “.”
fi
done
# changelog
# 0.3 added progress

Recently I remarked that my Foxmarks do not sync anymore…

After going to Log file I discovered that I have error 400 (unknown error) .

Quick search on Foxmarks site showed me that I’m not the only one.

Automatic fix did not work for me, so I was forced to do manual fix.

Be sure that you have latest version of your bookmarks on the PC you do the fix. Otherwise you may have problems with missing bookmarks.