The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
.:10:16:44 PM:.
Outlook Express XP freezing
My friend's dad's computer was freezing the moment Outlook Express started. It's kind of difficult to help especially when you can't see what you're working on but well.. you have to make do with what you get. What made this problem unique was that Outlook Express appeared to be loading and then suddenly froze with the message "Not Responding".
At first the suggestion is to move to Outlook which my friend had installed but she really didn't want to do that. She wanted to fix the problem. Even when I checked Microsoft they had articles on how to migrate from Outlook Express to Outlook. Looking at the articles though gave me a few ideas to see if the inbox might be corrupted. Your "inbox" is really one giant file that all your messages get added to if anything goes wrong with that file then your entire inbox is broken. After figuring that out, a quick google, I found a solution that I quickly adapted.
.:7:59:02 PM:.
rlhsxlgm.exe update
Found it on SARC discovered about the same time. Anyways it seems that it's a Beagle Variant (and not Bagle according to ZDNet; W32.Beagle.I@mm to be more precise.
Remember to backup your registry before you delete anything and to also turn off your system restore before you delete. Instructions from Symantec are here.
While we're on the topic, often people think of signatures as unneeded data but signatures can be used as a way to help you make sure you know who you're talking to. Of course you can encrypt or "sign" your e-mail but something as simple as a signature goes a long way.
Monday, March 01, 2004
.:11:42:16 PM:.
New Virus? rlhsxlgm.exe
Got this in the inbox today. It seemed to have picked off e-mail addresses from the latest website.
Subject: ^_^ meay-meay! Message: I don't bite, weah! password for archive: 40286 Attached: TextDocument.zip
Inside the text document is a program with a file folder icon making you THINK it's a folder but it's labeled rlhsxlgm.exe . AVG didn't detect anything and neither did Norton as of March 1st 2004, 23:41 MST.
.:10:12:12 PM:.
IFRAMES, DIVS, CSS Oh My!!
It's been a while since I've posted some HTML stuff so without further ado here we go! The current trend for a lot of blogs seemed to be the use of a scrolling window or section within a page. It's handy because you don't have to worry about tiling and stretching your graphics. You can (as it seems to be the way a lot of people are doing it), create your layout in your favourite graphics/photo editor (e.g. Fireworks, Photoshop, GIMP) design your layout and then slice it.
With the advent of having a little scrolling window, you get people who start to use IFRAME. Now IFRAME isn't that bad, in fact it's very good for setting up a scrollable window or a tiny little "frame" quickly and painlessly but it's always good to know alternatives. Why? Well what if you want to view a blog on a cellphone or pda? What if you're too lazy to remember the way an IFRAME works? Enter the DIV....
blah<br />
blah<br />
blah<br />
blah<br />
blah<br />
blah<br />
blah<br />
blah<br />
</div>
In order to make it 'scroll' you need to set a height and width just like you would with an IFRAME tag the CSS then makes use of the overflow:scroll setting to cause scroll bars to appear. I've added the border so that you could see the edges. If you wanted to, you could add more CSS to change the way the scrollbars look for IE browsers but essentially this is it!
