Imagine looking at your computer desktop, and seeing this:
Today, a jet airplane slid off the runway at Toronto Pearson International Airport, crashing into a gully 200 feet away. To see your home city on CNN.com is a pretty weird feeling.
Notice the weather feed in the first screenshot. To say the weather was severe, is an understatement. I saw a good two minutes of hail accompanying the lightning and constant down-poor.
By far, my biggest source of spam comes from being listed on WHOIS. There are protector and privacy services available, but not for .CA domains (or other country codes).
So, right now, I’m looking into a new domain name. Unfortunately, “Ilias” is also a first name in Greek, and the name of an open source project for teaching tools; so when I did a lookup of ilias domains, what do I get:
I’m exploring my options.
My apologies to everyone who has sent me website feedback in the past month. As you may know, my previous computer (specifically the motherboard) broke down, and I had to get a new one. Getting all info back, and setting things back to normal has taken some time; but I’m now getting around to website feedback, and updating my site.
Any Deer Park (Firefox trunk) users, who like to use the SpellBound extension, will probably have noticed that SpellBound does not work on Deer Park Alpha 2, and the latest nightlies.
To fix it, you need to download and install (or unzip) the latest Thunderbird trunk build.
- in Deer Park, disable the SpellBound extension
- close Deer Park
- in the Thunderbird program folder, go into the \components\ folder, and copy the files: myspell.dll and spellchk.dll
- paste them into the \components\ folder of your Deer Park program folder
- start Deer Park, and enable the SpellBound extension
You should have to restart Deer Park, and you’re done! 
Many people don’t know this, but the XPI blocking feature in Firefox is also in the Mozilla Application Suite, starting at version 1.7 and up. They just couldn’t get a user interface for it, on time for Mozilla 1.7.
By default, the “Enable Software Installation” setting will not block anything. Simply unchecking it, will turn XPI installing off all together.
To enable software installation, but but only for certain sites, you first need to enter about:config in the browser location bar, then search for the preference xpinstall.whitelist.required, and set it to true.
By default, there is one site on the whitelist: update.mozilla.org. To add a site to the list, use about:config to look for the pref xpinstall.whitelist.add, double click on it (or right-click on it, and select ‘Modify’). Set the value to the domain you want to add. For example: ilias.ca
To remove an entry from the whilelist, you’ll have to close down Mozilla, go to your profile folder, and manually remove the entry from the file hostperm.1.
It took a while for my shipment to get across the Canada/US border, because Friday was a Canadian holiday, and Monday was an American holiday; but my new Dell Dimension 3000 finally arrived!
It’ll take a while for me to install my software, and restore what data I have; but I’m back.
I predict that Brazil will beat Argentina 3-2 in the Confederations Cup final tomorrow.
Get this. I got a voice message today regarding my laptop, “Your laptop needs a new motherboard, which will cost $500 (CAD) plus tax (15%).” I haven’t called them back; so I don’t know if that is in addition to the $100 labour charge (probably is). In total, that would be $690 CAD.
As I said in a previous blog post, F-Prot detected a few files in my Java Plugin cache. I assume those files were sanitized. Nevertheless I cleared the Java cache, rebooted, and my computer worked fine for the remainder of that night. The service person took one look at Limewire, and suspected that was where I got a virus. I hadn’t used Limewire for a couple of weeks prior.
Here’s the wake up call. In addition to mainly using the family computer for now, I took out my old laptop. It’s an IBM Thinkpad 385XD. The screen is as faded and red as can be, but the rest of the hardware still works very well. In fact, there’s a clear difference in the quality of the product, as opposed to my current laptop, which I got from MDG. Maybe I was spoiled with a Thinkpad; but I get the feeling my MDG was just a crap product, and I had just gotten used to it. I work my PCs pretty hard; and I’m willing to bet that I simply over-worked my MDG laptop.
As such, I think I’m probably going to get a new computer, rather than paying $600+ dollars for a new motherboard. I’ll probably go for a Dell PC. The IBM Canada warehouse is actually about 20 minutes from where I live, so I’m also going to check that out.
Well, it looks like my ‘online time’ will be low for a while longer.
This computer virus I got looks to be more than a software problem. It also looks like I’m not going to be able to retrieve my info. I’m not going to get my laptop back for at least a week. Till then, my ‘online time’ will be much less.
Well, it a appears I got a computer virus.
I don’t exactly know how. F-Prot detected a few files in my Java Plugin cache last night, but the service person took one look at Limewire, and suspected that.
So, my laptop is out gone to be serviced for the next while, with no guarantee I’ll have my data, when I get it back. The ironic part is that I recently bought an external hard drive, and moved a lot of info I had on CDs to it. Not much in the way of important info, with the exception of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird profile backups from May 26th. I did manage to transfer most of my current Thunderbird profile before the computer froze. I then couldn’t get that far again. The important info is on a partitioned drive, so hopefully it will not need have to be deleted.
Having said that, don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me in a while. I’m posting this via the family computer, and trying to salvage what I can from the external hard drive. It’s also a good time to go to a bar.
