At work we use drafting software called Microstation. It originally ran on UNIX workstations, but was soon ported to PC’s. However there are still little UNIX touches. One weird thing in UNIX is how things are sorted. Usually when you sort things with numbers and letters in the name, the numbers sort to the top. In UNIX for whatever reason, the numbers sort to the bottom. Since Mac OS has been based on UNIX for a while (I guess this is why, I don’t know for sure), the iPod sorts songs the same way. So 10,000 Maniacs is at the end of my Artists list instead of the top. Continue reading “Sorting Like an iPod”
Category: Computers
McAfee
I have been using commercial antivirus software for a while. I don’t know that it is necessary to do this because Windows has some decent protection as part of Microsoft Security Essentials or Defender or whatever they are calling it. Plus there are some free tools that are pretty good. But Fry’s always has antivirus software that you can buy and then get a rebate for the entire price, making it free. So far I have always gotten the rebates, but twice I had problems, once with Kaspersky and once with Norton, where they told me I didn’t fill in the submission correctly. However, after I complained they sent me the rebates anyway. Sometimes I will get a couple of products the same year just to try them out. I had written about past experiences a few times already. Right now I like Norton the best because it only scans when I am away from the desktop whereas McAfee takes 8 hours or so to scan on my laptop (better than Kaspersky which I gave up on after the scan took many days).
Master Password
One nice feature of Firefox that I started using on my laptop (I had been using Sea Monkey as my browser on my desktop until this week when I finally switched to Firefox) is the master password which you enter once and then it will keep track of all the different usernames and passwords for most sites that have them. The problem with the master password is that a lot of times I leave the browser open and then the computer goes to sleep and I don’t think about it anymore. Now if anyone were to break into the house, all they would need to do is open my computer (I don’t have a Windows password) and they could get into all of those sites if I had left the browser open. Most of the really secure sites don’t work with the master password, but it works on enough sites that I wouldn’t want someone to be able to do that.
So I thought it would be good if the master password would expire or time out after some amount of time, but there doesn’t seem to be an option for that in Firefox. A search found an extension that will do this, but just a little more digging found that Firefox can do this on its own through some config settings. I didn’t even know about config settings, but you can get to them by typing “about:config” in the URL bar.
Once that page opens you have a long list of settings. There is one setting called “security:ask_for_password” that is the master setting. If you set it to a value of 2, then you enable the password timeout. Then you can go to another config setting called “security:password_lifetime” and change it to the number of minutes you want the master password to work. The default is 30 minutes, which I figured wasn’t enough, so I changed it to 150 minutes. I don’t usually use the laptop in the morning, so by the time I leave the house it has been 8 or more hours since the laptop was in use. With 150 minutes, I might only need to enter that once at night and it will stay good. It’s easy enough to change later.
Win 7 Antispyware
Tonight Mom called and said she thought she had gotten some kind of virus disguising itself as anti-virus software. She kept getting a window popping up telling her to download some software. She knew that she wasn’t supposed to do this and that McAfee was supposed to protect her from viruses. But McAfee had let this one through. [In fairness to McAfee, it turns out her subscription had expired several months earlier.]
This isn’t a virus so much as it is a trojan and like so many of them, once it gets on your computer it is very hard to get rid of. By manipulating the Windows registry it prevents executables from running so that you can’t install anything or run programs, and it stops you from getting to websites where you might find help or download fixes. Even if you can find the virus’ executable files, they will reinstall themselves the next time you open your web browser or any other executable. Awful.
Wine With That Ubuntu?
I am still working on Jenny’s Gateway laptop. I got her HP laptop working pretty well using Windows 2000 and she reported that they were able to surf and get a paper written for school this week, though they couldn’t print from the laptop. But the Gateway is the one that eats up hard drives and the fourth hard drive is now showing problems. The laptop just won’t boot. For some reason it did boot a couple of times for me and I was able to install her copy of Office 2007 on it, but then I opened Word, the computer froze and I’ve never been able to get back into Vista again. I can use a Vista installation disk to boot the computer and I can boot it using Ubuntu, but Vista won’t reinstall because it doesn’t think there is a hard drive there. Interestingly, Ubuntu sees the hard drive and installs no problem. I even tried installing Windows 2000 by formatting the hard drive, but Win2k wouldn’t recognize the hard drive either. I tried different partition schemes involving Ubuntu and Windows and then formatted the whole drive with Ubuntu and tried to install Windows over it and still nothing. Ubuntu does say that there are some bad sectors identified on the hard drive.