Sunday, June 16, 2002

Bleh -- 4:39 pm CST, Update by The Master

Went to lyrics.com today to check out some System of a Down lyrics, and re-discovered the evil of javascript ads. I got hit with a bunch of (expletive) junk from www.newtopsites.com that ended up opening windows until my machine went right to it's knees. However, a quick add of their DNS names to my hosts file, with an address of 127.0.0.1 fixed their little red wagons. If you like your machine dying under the assault of a poorly designed ad server, go ahead and visit lyrics.com. Otherwise, I'd say go someplace else. Grrrrr...

Hmmm, maybe it IS time to switch to Mozilla. I believe it's got stuff built in to fix this kind of ****.

J.t.Qbe comments: Oh yeah, it's really a kick to turn off popup ads. Give Mozilla a try!

A.T. Hun comments: In Mozilla's menus, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Scripts & Windows and uncheck "Open unrequested windows." Works like a charm. I assume it would be a similar option for Netscape 7.x. I had forgotten how much Mozilla was saving me from until I tried to use IE for a week or so on my folks' computer.

Silence Your PC -- 3:57 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ever since I built my new Athlon XP 1800+ box, one thing I've noticed is how much noisier this box is than my old one. The main reason for this is that it has six fans in it. I don't really notice it until I use my old box. ExtremeTech has some tips for reducing noise. I suppose if I really wanted to cut the noise, some of those fancy case fans would do the trick. Maybe when these fans die I'll get those, but the noise isn't bad enough to warrant buying them now.

Happy Father's Day! -- 3:21 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A very happy Father's Day to all you Dads out there, especially The Haus' own J.t.Qbe, The Master, and J! We're taking it easy at home today. Mrs. Hun is making a few of my favorite things (including my all-time favorite dessert) for supper tonight. I plan on eating like a pig. After dinner I have some Berliner Kindl Weisse and a Boon Kriek. Mmmmm . . . Bier.

J.t.Qbe comments: I'll echo A.T. and wish y'all a happy Father's Day as well. If you do it right it's a tough job, but I dare you to find a more important one!

Saturday, June 15, 2002

Real Virus Threats -- 10:37 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Today I got a couple of very similar emails, both with two attachments. One claimed to be the latest patch for Internet Explorer. It even had a forged microsoft.com address. Of course, the wording of the email led me to believe it came from someplace where English is a second language. Sure enough, it came from Brazil. Here's the text:

Hello,This is a IE 6.0 patch
I wish you would like it.

Yep, that's the normal correspondence I get from BillG all the time. I wish the author would fling himself into an active volcano. This is our good friend Klez. Rah. Technically, it's a worm, not a virus, but I wanted to play off yesterday's headline since I'm so very clever.

Remember, kids, if you aren't expecting an email attachment, delete it unopened! I know I did! Of course, I got this message in my Red Hat 7.3 install, so Klez wouldn't have been able to do anything anyway.

J.t.Qbe comments: That's worth repeating: don't open up unexpected email attachments. Better yet, don't open up any attachments in Outlook--just say no to Outlook. Still better: don't use Windows!

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