An Obituary printed in the London Times
Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.
He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn’t always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.
Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).
His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.
Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.
Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.
Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.
He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I’m A Victim
Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.
MBR Infected USB Hard Drive
A short while ago I found my USB HDD was detected as being infected with a virus by McAfee. I surmised that it was the USB HDD as it the virus alert only ever appeared when it was connected to the Laptop running McAfee. AVG Free didn’t detect the virus. Now it was quite interesting behaviour as the infected application would come up as a random file on the C drive and sometimes a more innocuous file name. For example: ‘C:\…\jqs.exe’ (a Java 6 executable) and also ‘**\WMIPRVSE.EXE’. These files weren’t actually infected and cleaning the file(s) infected via the McAfee console did nothing and the virus alert kept coming.
The Trojan that was detected was a ‘StealthMBR!mbr’ virus. So by the very nature of its name it appeared the Master Boot Record was infected. A quick Google search showed that the MBR could be repaired using the Recovery Console from XP installation disk ad the FIXMBR command.
I backed up the files on the HDD (175 GB! A scan on the backed up files showed no viruses) and then proceeded to repair the MBR. Quite simple and quick. you just boot up a system with the XP installation disk and hit R for the Recovery Console. You will need the administrator password of the system you are on in order to run the RC. I used DISKPART to detect the device name of the USB HDD; just make sure you don’t delete any partition or you will lose your existing data!
So with everything I needed, I ran FIXMBR \DEVICE\HARDDISK1 on the infected drive and then Y and enter to proceed with the repair. Half a nanosecond later the MBR was repaired (I ran it a second time just to be sure) and I then tested on the Laptop with McAfee. So far so good – no alerts and no data loss.
Chinese Email Forms
There does not seem to be a definitive answer to correctly present Chinese language emails that are generated from online forms. I found this out whilst creating an online enquiry form for a Chinese site.The Chinese characters would appear in the my inboxes as garbled characters rather than the true Chinese characters they should be. UTF-8 should be used for Charsets both in the HTML document and the PHP Email Class. This allowed the body of the email message to display correctly but the subject was a different matter.
After scouring php.net for a while as well as google I stumbled upon some code that allowed the subject to be displayed correctly: $esubject = “=?big5?Q?”.$subject.”?=”;
big5 is the charset I wanted the subject to be displayed in
Q is the Content-Transfer-Encoding, in this case quoted-printable
$subject is my subject variable
mailto Commands
For event registration, it is ideal to have the recipient complete their details in a form that can be properly validated and collated in a database for easy administration of the attendees to the event as well their relevant details. The forms and databases can take some time to develop but ultimately are more efficient and effective in managing the administrative nightmares associated with events via a single repository of the information. Emailed RSVPs can sometimes be lost and hard to track in inboxes but for small events the mailto command can be modified to capture information. Read the rest of this entry »
Nine Inch Nails Brilliant
To say Nine Inch Nails has helped shape me over the years would be an understatement. I was beside myself when they announced their tour dates for Australia and made sure I had tickets to see them when they played at Festival Hall. Gordon and I rocked up to the screeching banshee that was ‘Jaguar Love’. I still don’t know if the lead ’singer’ was male or female but they certainly knew how to scream their lungs out for every word of the set. I think I need an ear transplant. Sorry to any fans and the band but they were just abysmal. Needless to say the biggest cheer they received was when they announced NIN would be on soon. YAY! Read the rest of this entry »