gBurner trial review - thumbs down.

gBurner is a shareware app that advertises that it is an unlimited, full featured trial, but with NAGS. In fact, it works for 30 days, and then stops being able to burn files that are > 300MB.

I downloaded it to burn an MDS/MDF (PSX image) file that ImgBurn could not, because it had multiple tracks. It did an OK job, in that it was able to import the session, with all the file names, and given the lack of warning or error messages one might think that it had loaded the file correctly. After burning, however, IsoBuster showed that it had skipped all but the first track, and had significantly under-burned the disk.

On the whole: un-impressed. If you need a free general purpose burning program, InfraRecorder is a better bet, and if you need a good Image burner, ImgBurn is the best bet.

It didn't seem to install any mal-ware at least.

Removing Spyware Protect 2009 / google redirect ( aka awareremover2009 aka sysguard.exe aka Antivirus System PRO)

There's a new variant of SysGuard on the loose, which first showed up Nov 9th, 2009. Most current anti-spyware software doesn't completely eradicate it, probably because it involves a rootkit. The first sign of the infection is a fake 'anti-virus' program which displays lots of fake warnings about viruses found on your computer, omitting itself, of course.

It's not clear what the vector was in this case - I didn't install any software for the last few weeks. I'm wondering if it's some remote exploit. When Spyware Protect 2009 first launched I was running Remote Desktop, and after it had launched my SSHD service (cygwin) quit working. I'm curious if anybody else had similar experiences.

It's easy to kill the program with task manager. Just look for a program name ending in sysguard.exe. The first couple letters will be random; mine was called fftwsysguard.exe and was found in C:\Documents and Settings\alan\Local Settings\Application Data\szvcxr (the name of the directory is also random). After killing the program with task manager it's easy to delete the main program from your disk. Finally, you'll stop Windows from attempting to load the program at bootup. Startup Control Panel is good for this.

This does not eliminate the infection. You'll also need to fix your hosts file, found in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

This file will include the following lines, which should be deleted:

91.212.127.227 awareremover2009.microsoft.com
91.212.127.227 awareremover2009.com
91.212.127.227 www.awareremover2009.com

The lines you want to keep are:

127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost

Even after doing this, Internet Explorer will randomly try to load awareremover2009.com, and IE/FireFox will be prevented from connecting to several anti-virus websites.

At this point, running Trend Micro House Call found and deleted part of it, but this did not fix the problem with the web browsers.


MalWareBytes found some additional parts of the infection:

Registry Keys Infected:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{b6d223f6-c185-49a2-ba7e-a03e84744702} (Trojan.FakeAlert) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Stats\{b6d223f6-c185-49a2-ba7e-a03e84744702} (Trojan.FakeAlert) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\{b6d223f6-c185-49a2-ba7e-a03e84744702} (Trojan.FakeAlert) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\AvScan (Trojan.FakeAlert) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.


Registry Data Items Infected:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center\AntiVirusDisableNotify (Disabled.SecurityCenter) -> Bad: (1) Good: (0) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center\FirewallDisableNotify (Disabled.SecurityCenter) -> Bad: (1) Good: (0) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center\UpdatesDisableNotify (Disabled.SecurityCenter) -> Bad: (1) Good: (0) -> Quarantined and deleted successfully.

But it did not catch all the registry changes; in particular several changers were made to make IE particularly less secure. See http://www.threatexpert.com/ for a list (actually, since awareremover2009 blocks threatexpert, here's a local copy).

Registry Modifications

• The following Registry Keys were created:
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Associations
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script\Settings
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AvScan

• The newly created Registry Values are:
• [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
• esdcsadr = "%AppData%\ijipdt\xxeusysguard.exe"

so that xxeusysguard.exe runs every time Windows starts

• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Download]
• RunInvalidSignatures = 0x00000001
• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Associations]
• LowRiskFileTypes = ".exe"
• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Attachments]
• SaveZoneInformation = 0x00000001
• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
• esdcsadr = "%AppData%\ijipdt\xxeusysguard.exe"

so that xxeusysguard.exe runs every time Windows starts

• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script\Settings]
• JITDebug = 0x00000001

• The following Registry Value was deleted:
• [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows]
• AppInit_DLLs = ""

• The following Registry Value was modified:
• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Download]
• CheckExeSignatures =

The changes you need to make here should be pretty obvious. The deleted values appear to be generally ok, as my other main machine doesn't have anything set for those values either. It might be a good idea to go into your IE preferences and reset all the security settings, just to be sure, though.

After all that, however, I still found that both Firefox and IE got randomly redirected to Ad websites when using Google. I tried to fix this using the following programs:

ESET online scanner found nothing.

Bit Defender Free Edition found nothing (full scan).

Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (Nov 2009), (win/system32/MRT.exe, full scan) found nothing.

Spyware Doctor (PC Tools) found nothing, and even if it had, the freely downloadable version only detects infections; you need to pay if you want to remove them.

I found my solution in ComboFix. The problem: sysguard installed a rootkit (hidden in atapi.sys), which prevents detection. ComboFix was the only program that discovered this. Ironic, since ComboFix is 100% freeware, whereas those other scanners were free demos/trials.

ComboFix was able to remove part of the infection (c:\windows\Downloaded Program Files\IDropPTB.dll), but not all of it: a hacked atapi.sys was detected, but not removed. UPDATE: ComboFix was updated sometime Nov 12th and the new version did remove the hacked atapi.sys file! so far, it looks like the infection is finally completely gone.

To make sure, I ran one last round of scans, in the following order:

BitDefender Free Edition found an infected file in the System Restore folder (suggesting that running system restore might have caused the infection to occur again!).

MalwareBytes found another 6(!) copies of the infected atapi.sys file in the System restore folder (once again suggesting BitDefender Free Edition isn't worth the trouble of dealing with it's constant nag screens).

Graffiti 10 years later.

Good handwriting recognition has been elusive in the PDA market. It was laughable on the Newton. Palm made their users learn an entirely new script. Modern PDAs, like the Apple itouch skip it entirely, even though they have 100s of times more powerful hardware (if not more), and rely on soft keyboards instead.

I was a relatively early adopter of the Palm - my 1st was a b&w Palm 3. Though the onscreen keyboard was clearly quicker to learn, I stuck with graffiti thinking it would eventually be faster. Maybe so, but 10 years latter when I pull out my old handspring visor I find that the onscreen keyboard is at least as fast as my relatively practiced graffiti.

A big part of this is that I still make typos using graffiti. If the software could just catch those few remaining mistakes i think it would beat the keyboard. With all the increase in processing power you would think a modern PDA might be able to do it, too. I doubt we will ever find out, though. The days where you could expect users to learn a new form of handwriting are probably over.

Game boy advance flash cart summary

It's getting a bit hard to find Flash carts for the GBA these days. At the moment Deal Extreme seems to be the only place still selling them at anythink like reasonable prices. You can also use these carts on a NDS to play GBA games, or even NDS games, if you buy a "pass-me" cart as well.

supercard - cheap and fairly good compatibility but has slow ram that can cause problems with some games. Real time save is a nice feature though. http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.2734

Ez-Flash IV - more expensive, but works with 100% of the games out there. No real time save, and sometimes you have to mess around a bit to get saving to work at all (see my post on advance wars). This is what I have, and I'm quite happy with it. Enough people own this that there's an excellent FAQ and active user forum. This is good, because the docs that come with the product are quite abysmal. EZ-Flash claims to have stopped making this product on their website but when I emailed them they told me that this is still in production, and that the one sold by deal-extreme is genuine, which is where I purchased mine.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22019

Yosemite vally Grocery store

They valley has a surprisingly large and fully stocked grocery store. It's maybe 1/6 the size of a regular grocery, but has at least one of just about everything you could want, from meat, to veggies, to dry goods. The prices are higher than in the Fresno area, but not hugely so - maybe by 25%? In any case, you can't beat the location, and the selection is sufficient to make just about any American dish you want.

Yosemite Lodge (at the Falls)

You can't beat the location. Lots of great hikes just outside your room's door.

The rooms are mid-sized; there is just enough room to walk around the beds, but no more. You wouldn't want to sleep more than 2 people to a room.  The rooms are clean and the beds nice and firm. There is no coffeemaker in the room, but you can get a free ticket for a complementary coffee in the food Court (1/day/person). The rooms do not come with fridges, but they can be requested. The fridges are about as small as a mini-fridge can get, and could hold about 3 2-liter soft-drink containers.

They advertise free Internet, but only people near the main lodge can access it from their rooms - the wireless doesn't reach far enough. To log into the wireless you call the front desk and get a 6 letter code that you enter into your web browser. I had to retry this process several times before it worked, but from thereon my machine was recognised immediately whenever I turned it on.Once I did get logged in, however, the speed was fine - certainly higher than dialup, but a little slower than typical DSL. Your other option is to pay 25 cents a minute to use an Internet terminal in the main lodge.

One gotcha: my room only had 2-prong outlets, so I couldn't plug my laptop in. A call to the front desk located a power strip that would do the conversion.

ATI radeon 9600se drivers that work

ATI suggests that you download the 9.3.1 drivers for the 9600 series (the 9600 is now on legacy support, so little to no new drivers are planned for release, and 9.3.1 is already a bit old). Unfortunately, at least under Win2k3, these drivers do not work with the 9600. Changing almost any setting leads to an immediate crash.

ATI does not maintain a repository of older drivers that I could find, but oldapps.com does, and according to

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/oldapps.com, they haven't added mal-ware to the downloads (though some of their downloads (e-donkey, etc) could be considered malware in their own right).

I tried ATI Catalyst 6.9, released in 2006. The default install set the 'hardware acceleration' (advanced button in display properties) to one stop above zero, which prevented any of the advanced catalyst controls from working, but after setting hardware acceleration to full and rebooting the full set of controls were enabled. The color-correction controls were a bit less advanced than those offered by comparable NVIDIA drivers, however (see screen shot). Most notably missing is the ability to control saturation for the desktop (as opposed to the overlay control, where saturation controls are available). On the other hand, the ATI seemed a bit more saturated than the GForceMX2 two card I replaced, where it was necessary to turn up the saturation in order to get realistic flesh tones. No such adjustment appeared necessary on the 9600.

Next I tried ATI Catalyst 7.9. Here too, I had to set 'hardware acceleration' to full before all the driver features were enabled. This driver did work OK, but didn't add any additional color controls (it did add some more fancy 3D quality settings, however). Disappointingly, however, the video preview stopped working when adjusting overlay color correction. Overlay video still worked fine in other programs however, and looked slightly better color-wise than it had under 6.9, I thought (this was very subjective, however). DxDiag revealed that Direct3d did not work with this driver.

Finally, I tried 8.9. This didn't add any new features, but all the features worked: video preview in the catalyst control center, and dxdiag passed all tests.

Google Chrome now supports spell-check in blogger posts

I've been using Google Chrome for a while, and on the whole it's a nice web browser. Given that the main job of a web browser is just to render webpages, how much value added can there really be? In truth, not that much, but Chrome does a very nice job of handling tabs, wastes less screen space than any other browser, and is quite fast. It also uses less RAM than IE and Firefox, if you run it in single process mode, though that does eliminate one of its nicest features: if the browser crashes, it only kills the current tab, and all others remain running.

There was just one nagging little problem, up to version 2.0.172.28. Though chrome has a built-in spell checker (not the very best, but it does a good enough job at making suggestions for most people), it only works on a subset of web forms. Most notably, it never worked properly in Blogger. Now, however, it does. Just right click in the form, and select Spellchecker options to enable it.

Avoid www.dollarsavingsdirect.com! What a pain...

It turns out that www.dollarsavingsdirect.com doesn't support ACH pulls from other banks, and they make it rather difficult to link other outside accounts. You can only link 2 outside accounts - the one you initially funded the account with, and then one other Checking account (savings accounts are not allowed).  Plus, with the checking account linkage you have to send them a voided check before it becomes active. Give that other banks have more competitive rates and better customer service, I'm kind of sad I ever signed up with www.dollarsavingsdirect.com (Emigrant bank). 

Making Advance Wars work With EZ-FLASH IV cart

Advance Wars does not work with the standard EZ-Flash loader. You need to use GBATA instead. The link below explains the steps requred.  To summarize: use GBATA's SRAM patcher on the .GBA file first, and then use the EZ-Flash loader to copy the .gba file, taking care to un-check the patch save box. 

http://ezflash.sosuke.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=13261&hilit=advance+wars

Download GBATA: http://gbatemp.net/index.php?download=224

The question this raises: is there ever a time where you should use GBATA first? I don't know yet. 

Turning off over commit in the Linux kernel

Linux Malloc's never fails (or at least not until you request more than 150% of the available RAM). This is because the Kernel is optimistic - even if you ask for a lot of memory, maybe you won't use it. Seems like a bad bet, but as long as it's true, everything will run fine. As soon as it's false, the kernel starts killing processes randomly. Yuck.

This is because the swap partition does not grow. If you ask for more RAM than your actual ram PLUS your swap partition, Linux will happily "give" it to you, but has no recourse in the situation that you actually touch all those pages.

In the case that you want Malloc to fail if there's not enough available RAM (such as in embedded code), what to do?

The solution is to modify the kernel, or use syscntrl at run-time. I prefer the permanent solution, so here's how to do it.

In mm/mmap.c, about one page down are two variables which control the "over commit" strategy. Starting around line 80:

int sysctl_overcommit_memory = OVERCOMMIT_NEVER;

/* default = OVERCOMMIT_GUESS; heuristic overcommit */

int sysctl_overcommit_ratio = 0;

/* default is 50% */

Postscript: doing this often results in mallocs failing even when there is clearly lots of RAM remaining. It seems that Linux makes the general assumption that over commit is on, and kind of breaks if it's turned off. A better strategy may be to allow the default (default = OVERCOMMIT_GUESS; heuristic overcommit), and modify the code to be slightly more conservative. I find that heuristic overcommit tends to guess that there is about 2% more RAM available than really is. This would probably vary between machines/kernels/apps running a bit, though I haven't tested it.

Growing Kumquat's in a pot

Kumquats are delicious mini-citrus fruit with a sweet outer rind and a sour flesh. When eaten whole they are a wonderfully sweet, sour, and pungent experience, all in one bite-sized morsel. 

Even better, Kumquats can be grown in a (large) pot, something really not possible with most other types of sweet citrus. 

You can buy the plant from Lowes in San Diego for about $30. I decided to try growing one from seeds. Typically Kumquats are grafted onto hardier rootstock, which is not so easy for a home grower.  But you can also grow them from seed. These general tips on growing indoor fruit trees are also helpful. It's a slow process, but you can also try rooting a cutting.

If your Kumquat never flowers, you may need more humidity. 

Asparagus pasta

Prep time: 10 min with Cuisinart to chop asparagus, otherwise ~20 min. Total time: about 30 min. Serves 2 people, or more if you go heavy on the pasta. 

1lb asparagus	Chop into thin circles, about 1/8th of an inch or thinner.  A Cuisinart makes this a snap!
3 T olive oil (or Butter)	Sauté in pan with oil until asparagus is tender. Butter tastes better than olive oil. Start the pasta
2 cloves crushed garlic 2 T lemon juice 1 T Worcestershire sauce 0.5t pepper 1 t salt angle hair pasta (cooked volume of pasta should roughly equal the volume of the asparagus)	Once all ingredients are mixed in (including pasta) it's ready to serve.  Worcestershire sauce is important to the taste, but soy sauce could be subbed if needed.  salt to taste - 1t is the bare minimum amount  I like to go easy on the pasta - you could easily add more than I suggest here.

You can make it more filling by adding in 1lb of ground turkey. 

(T = table spoon, t = teaspoon)

(c) 2009

Beef stu with beans

This stew is heavy on the veggies, and has zero potatoes (beans fill the starch role).  Yummy!

Prep time: about 1 hour. Total time: about 3 hours, depending on how tender you like the meat. Remember to use a big pot; this makes 2-3 gallons of stew. 

1.5c pinto beans 1.5c red kidney beans	Soak overnight & then simmer for ~ 1 hour
olive oil for pot 2lbs London broil steak 2 medium onions 2-3 garlic cloves	Cut beef into small pieces (< .5in on a side) Chop onions and mince garlic Brown beef in a large pot (cook until water boils off), then add onion and garlic and cook till onion is transparent.
0.25c flour	Add flour and cook until light brown.
beef bouillon (~8000mg sodium) 1t Worcestershire sauce 0.5t ground pepper 0.5c water	Washington's rich brown seasoning and broth is the best, but Wyler's beef bullion is almost as good. I put in enough to get 8g of sodium, but that may be too salty for some tastes. Add all, and mix until bullion is fully dissolved.
7 c water cooked beans	I like to use the water from the beans, which adds extra flavor.  Cook until meat is tender, perhaps 1 hour.
7c carrots  3c celery 1lb frozen peas	Remove peas from freezer to start defrosting them.  7c of carrots is roughly a 2lb bag of carrots.  Chop veggies smaller if you want them to cook faster. If you like crisp veggies, add carrots an hour before you want to eat, celery ~30 minutes before, and peas ~15.

I like to cook the beans a long time so that they split open a bit and thicken up the stew nicely.  If you don't like beans, try it with 8c of potatoes. Finding the right bouillon is key to this recipe. Look for something with MSG and onion powder. Plain old beef flavoring is a bit too dull.