Snippets of Hendrik Christian Daily Life

Yeah right, yesterday I received quite a number of links from my MSN Messenger buddies, giving me a link to a picture of me, with a link to download an executables. Knew straightaway that this was a virus/worm/trojan, whatever.

I searched through Symantec's website, but the information was not there yet. So, being a curious bit, I downloaded a copy of the executables, and scanned it using Norton Antivirus. Clean, it said.

Never mind, I copied the worm to a separate system running in Virtual PC, ran it, and see what it did. Nothing much I could discover except that the virus kept spawning msnsched2.exe every 2-3 seconds which I presume slowed down one of my friend's friend's machine. After satisfied with seeing what the virus/worm/trojan did, I closed the virtual PC and discarded all changes. Being a virtual PC, so no harm was done. One of the thing I love about Virtual PC

If you happened to click on that link yesterday, please help yourself and your MSN buddies by cleaning your system. Get the removal tool from Symantec. You can also read further information about the worm from Symantec.
Now, who's so, forgive me, DUMB, to click on that link yesterday?

Posted at 11:48 am by hendrikch
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Date: 02 April 2005. Time: 0900 hours.
Plan A: Go to Pulau Kusu. Status: Cancelled. Reason: Late and Raining
Plan B: Arcarde at Harbourfront. Status: Cancelled. Reason: The arcade was not there anymore.
Plan C: Play pool at Harbourfront. Status: Cancelled. Reason: Pool is located at the same place as the arcade. So...
Plan D: Go Sentosa. Status: ON.
Here are the pictures when we went for outing at Sentosa. We started early in the morning, went there to play beach volley ball, some went kayakking, then played pool, had chips and brownies for lunch, and went to Magic Wok at Novena Square for dinner. Weekend well spent, despite it being Plan D. Nuff said.

Gathered in Harbourfront Tower.

Arrived at Siloso Beach at Sentosa. It's a nice beach now, though the sands are imported.

Kayakking, burning some calories.

Enjoying themselves.

Now, who's at the other end of the phone? hehehe...

Aftermath from Sentosa, though it was not the end of the day, yet.

Posted at 11:14 am by hendrikch
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Following up from my post last week, I tried the "transparent" screen trick on my own. Not so perfect yet, you'll notice the wallpaper is off a bit, but not bad for a first try, isn't it?

Posted at 07:13 pm by hendrikch
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Last Thursday, my colleagues and I went to Zouk Wine Bar for get-along day, to know each other better, accompanied of course by food and drink. Here are the pictures.

My table, but from my face expression, I look as if I was drunk while I was not.

The other table.

Finger foods and drinks.

That's Lychee Martini I was holding.

Posted at 04:26 pm by hendrikch
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Today, 7th of April, Microsoft has released the final version of their latest MSN Messenger 7, build number 7.0.0777, with download size at 7 MB, about 7 months after it entered its beta testing stage since September 2004. Now what's up with 7's ???

Download MSN Messenger 7 now from MSN Messenger or Microsoft Downloads
View Microsoft Press Release

Posted at 05:06 pm by hendrikch
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This morning, I did what I usually do everyday, wake up in the morning, do all the morning chores, then took my bag, my wallet, my watch, my handphone, and my iPAQ, and set off to office. That would be a normal day. Today is not one of those days.

For a start, I found my iPAQ suddenly hard-reset on itself, making me lose all my data and applications and whatever inside. For those who don't know what hard-reset it, it is a term for Pocket PC equivalent to clean format in desktop PC world. Basically, it reverted back to the state when I first got it, clean, default-factory settings.

Fortunately, I got my daily backup, courtesy of Sprite Backup which does its backup every morning at 4 AM. Easily, I just restore my backup, and I am up and running in less than 5 mins. It's just that I have lost everything since 6th April 4 AM.

Not so bad. So, after a series of unfortunate events, I hope my experience serves as a lesson to everyone about the importance of backup. And of course, do backup of your backups as well. Just in case.

To top off my day, I left my handphone at home, so I will not be contactable for the whole day. Really feel bad about it. Luckily, it doesn't happen very often though.

Posted at 11:09 am by hendrikch
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Here’s a fun little flickr gallery of “transparent desktop screens”. Users take a picture of whatever lies directly behind their displays, crop them accordingly, set the picture as their new wallpaper, and take a picture of the whole set up. Ultimately a lot of time spent on something that only works if you don’t move the computer at all, it’s a novel little visual trick nonetheless (and not Photoshopped, either.) If nothing else, it might give you some inspiration for fun desktop wallpapers of your own. Or you could use someone else’s and pretend to be on another desk altogether.

See them all at Transparent Desktop Screens Gallery. [via Gizmodo]

Posted at 02:16 pm by hendrikch
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First thing first, Google has recently announced plans to double the amount of storage space in Gmail to 2GB. The increase appears to have already begun. Mine now is 1103 MB and increasing by the minute. Only 5 minutes ago it was 1100 MB.

Second thing, since today's April Fool, so, I don't know if everything will be back to 1000 MB tomorrow morning. We'll see.

And oh, now it's 1105 MB.

Update: If you go to Gmail's homepage (you need to sign out first if you are signed in), you'll see their top secret Infinity+1 storage plan with a counter of the storage space they are giving now. Also, they now support Rich Text formatting for email, no more plain text, hahaha.... at last... *excited* To see what has just been launched by Google, check Gmail's What's New page. For my space, now it's 1112 MB.

Update 2: It seems Gmail space is increasing at a rate of 10.24 KB per second. That's exactly 0.01 MB per second. Going at that rate, we will hit roughly 1413 MB by midnight Singapore time. Now it's at 1138 MB.

Update 3: Now we have passed the 2048 MB (2 GB) mark, Google continues to give us more email space, albeit in much slower rate now. If I don't count wrongly, it's roughly 0.1 KB per 3 seconds, equals to 2.88 KB per minute. Interestingly, this calculates to 1 GB in one year. How about that? By 1 April 2006, I reckon, our Gmail space would have been 3072 MB.

Incidentally, this is my 200th post in my blog, since almost one year ago, 18 April 2004. Averaging one post every two days, not bad.

Posted at 03:21 pm by hendrikch
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Continuing yesterday's installing spree, here are few more software I installed last night.

WinRAR - Open .RAR files
TweakXP Pro - tweak many settings in Windows to my heart's content.
FlashGet - so many downloads, so little time, this download manager can split your download up to 10 parts and download them simultaneously.
Logitech MouseWare - utility for my Logitech mouse.
Nero 6 Reloaded - CD/DVD burning utility. Been using Nero for couple of years now.

In addition, I also disabled unnecessary system services in order to make my system run faster. Taking a cue from BlackViper's Windows XP Service Pack 2 Service Configuration page, I disabled quite a number of services, and save close to 100 MB of memory during Windows load. Worth your 15 minutes, but please be aware of the risk. Do not disable services which you don't understand.

Posted at 09:59 am by hendrikch
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As I am installing new software to my PC, I will post here and let you know, just in case you find something interesting. Without further ado, here they are:

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2005 - Antivirus, which according to CNET, is better than Norton and McAfee
ZoneAlarm 5.5 - the best firewall software out there. You need it to protect your machine from intruders.
Opera 8.0 - my favorite browser above all, though Firefox is also a good contender.
Copernic Desktop Search 1.2 - The Search Engine for your PC. How about being able to search any file on your machine faster than you can blink?
Microsoft Money 2005 - finance management software.
MSN Messenger 7.0 Beta - needless to say, complete with Messenger Plus! 3.5
ACDSee 7.0 - fast photo viewer and manager. Some may consider Picasa or Adobe Photoshop Elements.
Acronis TrueImage 8 - disk imaging software. backup my system, just in case.
Adobe Reader 7.0 - everyone need this.
Microsoft Office 2003 - everyone should need this as well. I installed Word, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote.
Winzip 9.0 - de facto compression software. Some may consider WinRAR or some other software, doesn't really matter, it's just that I have been using Winzip for ages.
pdfFactoryPro - print any document to PDF format. No need for full-fledged Adobe Acrobat.
PowerToys for Windows XP - I installed TweakUI and PowerToy Calculator.
Microsoft ActiveSync - to connect my Pocket PC to my desktop.
Daemon Tools and arniWORX extension - mount an ISO image as a virtual CD drive.
UltraEdit - call it advanced Notepad

That's all for now. I think I'm going to install few more apps on my PC tonight, will let you posted when I do so.

Posted at 09:03 pm by hendrikch
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