491 Viruses Found

June 16, 2005 5:45 a.m.
Pearl: “Good Morning, Aimee”
Translation: 491 viruses found.

What a way to start the day. I fell asleep last night while running a complete test on my system. I got paranoid after the spy ware attack. I guess I was right to be paranoid though. And all these viruses were found in a ghost folder named C:\Uploads. I could swear I didn’t see any such folder while I was browsing around my file system last night. *sigh* it’s a pain to maintain windows pc’s. You get the feeling the entire world is against you!

Pearl, I have a confession to make. I’d like to say I was just a victim of another random attack but I caused all this! *whine*. I was searching on lime wire for a cracked version of super bounce out the other day. I know, stupid mistake. I was suspicious because it was a zipped file with just a setup.exe file in it. But in desperation of having something to take my mind off work, I ran it, nothing happened. I had a feeling there was something wrong, but I shrugged it off. Lesson 1: Stop Piracy :p, Lesson 2: learn to trust your instincts! If it looks wrong, don’t take the risk! I can’t believe how stupid I got. Don’t you worry pearl, I’ll be more careful with my pirating next time :p

Pearl Wars etc

I updated my resume! I actually just got home from work. It’s June 16, 2005, 11:43 pm pearl time. I blog through outlook which is why of all the blog service providers that I’ve subscribed to, blogger was the only one that offered posting via email (or maybe blogger was the only one who made the feature easy to find?) As I am not always online since I don’t have the net on my fingertips, I use outlook. YES I USE WINDOWS! At least it’s a licensed version! It’s available for UP students enrolled in Com Sci so what the heck right? I’ve long wanted to migrate but the Imagine Cup project has me hooked on Windows. Personally, I’m not anti-anything. I welcome any software that works and anything that doesn’t give me a headache. Speaking of headaches, I almost had a major heart attack this afternoon. Flashback

I was booting up pearl when I noticed a strange and unfamiliar icon on my status bar, one that had no exit option on right click except stuff about 180searchblahblah (blahblahs mine). All of a sudden spy ware alerts from Microsoft AntiSpyware came popping up repeatedly and when I scanned my system I got 17 infected files! Quarantine or remove? Who the heck chooses quarantine? Perhaps those people who’d like to study these so called malware. After a thorough scan I rebooted pearl. Ahk! The weird icon was still there! So I ran msconfig and there I found several weird looking programs set to autostart. I found stuff like hkcmd.exe which, after searching, was a program bundled with intel stuff, I was kind of in a panicky mode so I wasn’t able to read well what it was supposed to do. I just read that it wasn’t a threat and moved on. Same with igfxtray.exe. There were these weird entries though, fejgl.exe and of course the 180searchblahblah.exe (blahblahs mine). So I unchecked the both of them and restarted my pc. After doing so, I ran the Microsoft AntiSpyware full scan again and it detected 2 more infected files. Removed. Reboot. No more weirdo processes running! But when I looked at my msconfig, the entries for that fejgl.exe and 180blahblah (blahblahs mine) were still there. I downloaded this tool called MSConfig Cleanup which amazingly cleans up your msconfig. I used that tool to delete the entries and poof they were gone. I took an online virus scan, TrendMicro’s House Call. It’s a java-based online virus scanner. But before TrendMicro got a chance to detect it, my local virus scanner AVG detected it. There were about 3 and one of them, I bet was the culprit for all that spy ware popping up. It was the Super Bounce Out I downloaded through limewire :p

okay.. So these are one of the things that annoy me about pirated software. You don’t really have someone’s neck available for squeezing every time your software threatens to kill your system. Them darn malware were detected before they made a drastic spread. I’ll be leaving pearl on for a thorough scan. I’m not quite comfortable yet.

I mentioned that my net access is limited, well, limited to the following:
• Dial-up at home which I rarely have access to, I live in a boarding house where lots of people share one phone line
• LAN access
o CS Department, LAN access via Jael’s utp.
o Tech Factors Office, but this is work so… :p
• Dilnet Wifi accessed from:
o Engg Library (no I don’t pay 20 bucks/hr, I make sure pearl is fully charged before going there)
o DEEE 2nd floor lobby, Indian-sitting by the wall. Wait, that was when I had classes there (but all of a sudden, without warning, IT WAS DISSOLVED, on the LAST DAY of admat period)
o Engg 2nd floor lobby, Indian-sitting against one of the big columns outside the lib (these are the times out of library hours)
• Free Public WiFi @ Robinson’s Galleria, East Wing (Figaro, Bo’s Coffee, etc.) Free WiFi! But this was during the summer when I had work there.
• Pay Public WiFi @ Seattle’s Best via Airborne access, price is steep @ 100/hr but I guess that will have to do in cases of emergencies

おやすみなさい！

reFreshing

This day was great. UP Cursor and the other organizations in the CS Network of UP Diliman held a one-day orientation session for the freshies to prepare them for what lies ahead. My role as one of the tutors for Computorient was to give the “kids” a taste of programming in a linux environment, using the VI text editor and compiling using gcc which by the way means “GNU Compiler Collection”. Yes, it was the undying “hello world” program again. I didn’t want to break tradition. I must say, that was the first c program I ever wrote and the first source code that I fully understood, back in my c-programming-introduction days about 5 years ago when I started out with Computer Science at Xavier University, Ateneo de Cagayan. I must admit seeing them this afternoon made me reminisce about the good old days when I was an eager freshman. Then something went seriously wrong, I LOST THE PASSION! I guess I got distracted by a lot of things, things that I can’t really pinpoint right now (or should I say refuse to ;p) But anyway, I hope these freshies get started on the right foot and I hope they have a long and happy CS life ahead of them (and hopefully the long life will not be exclusively spent in UP *toothy grin*)

Imagine?!

Wow, what a week. We finally finished with imagine cup. Three days of programming and I felt my brain kinda fried out. We finished last although our project did catch attention. Too bad we weren’t able to spice up the marketing side of our presentation. I think we could have done better, except on the day of the presentation, we were all too drained to come up with a good presentation. Thank God Tweety came up with that last minute tag-line. It really did save our presentation. Although we didn’t win, we got a few job offers and some to fund the development of our application. Which I guess would be a good sign that our project was not a nonsense one. Team Vulcan is going to Japan and we’re accompanying them as alternates. I’m excited about it even if it doesn’t show. This will be the first time I go out of the country. Woohoo! J I’m excited really, what’s making me sound so glum? It’s the work that we all have to get into in the coming month, before the contest. We have to start beefing up our project. WE GOTTA WIN THE WORLDS!!! Ambition never hurt anyone right? J

 

IMAGINING the CUP

Major cramming. Head hurts. Stomach hurts. Back hurts. Speaking of, better get back to work

Dating Myself

I never thought dating myself could feel great! It’s been a long time since I really treated myself out and spent time out alone. I started with a movie this afternoon and I decided to go all out and go on a movie binge! So here I am, still at gateway. The movie was great! I heard some bad feedback about it but i’m glad I went on and saw it for myself. It was definitely a different kind of movie. The way the story was laid out and the way the entire movie was shot was definitely different. Well, it was something similar to cool world but not cartoonie at all. Anyway, whatever anyone says, I think the movie was great!

 

After the movie, I planned to get myself some coffee at Starbuck’s but when I went out, I overheard a jazz band playing at Café Adriatico and when I saw the drummer, I thought I saw my Art Studies instructor, Sir Jerry Valenciano. I remember him telling me he played in a jazz band when he saw my drum sticks sticking out of my bag one time. I took a closer look and when I saw his tattooed arms, I knew it was him. I decided to go ahead and treat myself some more so here I am, enjoying the music, the blueberry cheesecake and a cappuccino at Café Adriatico.

 

Cheers!