Monthly Archives: January 2006
Brace Yourself for Nyxem Virus
From ZDNet, here are the facts for the next big worm to hit us:
- The Nyxem virus was first reported on 16 January. These machines are now hard-coded to propagate the virus on 3 February.
- Nyxem propagates itself by harvesting e-mail addresses on an infected machine and as a network worm. Hence more additional emails and network traffics, and possible slow down e-mail response time.
- Nyxem will delete all Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF file types from a compromised PC.
So brace yourself, update your Antivirus signature, and don’t be gullible by opening those socially engineered e-mails. Like the T-Shirt said: “Social Engineering: because there’s no patch for human stupidity”, therefore don’t be stupid.
Dislikes Any Website? Pee on It!
Netdisaster has won “Best Innovative Website” title in Yahoo! UK’s Finds of the Year 2005 competition. Dislikes Microsoft? Pee on its website responsibly. You can also vomit, acid pee, drop dog poop, and do all sorts of yucky and wicked stuffs on whatever URL you want. It’s a good feel tool for those of you who are full of wrath and sense of hatred against anybody. 😀
Disclaimer: I’m no Microsoft hater, and therefore I won’t pee on their site. So if you click the above link, pee at your own risk!
How To Make Column-Mode Selection in Visual Studio
All text-editors on Windows, including Visual Studio; generally operates in line-mode (and implicitly stream-mode too).
Stream mode selects text in a “stream”, beginning with the first character selected and ending with the last character, just as if you were reading the text. Line mode selects full lines of text. Both of them are characteristically equal in terms of their modus operandi, i.e. they work in lines; it’s just a matter of how much texts are covered by the selection (either all or some).
There’re some circumstances where you want to select in columns instead of lines. Selecting text in column mode is similar to drawing a rectangle around the text you wish to select. See the differences in the following figure:
Many people do not know about the column-mode selection in Visual Studio, but it’s just as simple as holding the ALT key while rubberbanding your text (selecting text by dragging the mouse). Pretty handy, huh?
Making The Most of Your Day
Ben Franklin used to say: “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”. Now we know why.
Time magazine recently published a guide to the human’s mental clock, which should help us making better use of our time. The guide was composed based on the two most common human stereotypes: early person and night owl.
Based on this guide, here are the reasons why Ben Franklin statement is scientifically correct despite it was a mere product of conventional wisdom:
- Early persons have more time for productivity in their mental clock. In average, they have 6.5 hours for problem solving as opposed to 6 hours for the night owls.
- Big chunks of night owls’ productivity times fall after 6 pm, which means it falls outside “business hours”. If night owls work for employers, that means they have a lot to catch up with the early persons at the end of office day.
- Early persons have more time for rejuvenation in average and it falls just in time after business hours has passed. Night owls’ rejuvenation time occurs during business hours, which means they won’t be able to use it optimally. This also implies that early persons will have more time to enjoy lives without sacrificing their productivity, whilst the night owls must barter their productive times for one of those fancy, romantic, or family dinner.
- That 5 straight hours of optimal problem solving time for the night owls that fall between 6-11 pm is making me nervous. Nobody is able to stay productive for 5 hours continously without a break. Distraction will come, you will take a break; if you’re a slow starter, that means most of that 5 hours will be only for getting into the-zone, not staying in-the-zone.
- Night owls often skip breakfast, which is scientifically proven as the most important meal of the day and the biggest supplier of brain food.
So, if you fall into the category of night owls, switch now to achive more in your life. I’m a night-owl too, and I’m definitely attempting to switch to early person.
Who’s Clicking Who?
A new wave of cybercrime has arrived: click-fraud. As you know, Google AdSense is way to attract web traffic and potential customers to your site. You pay Google a few cents for every referral from your Google ads. Unfortunately, we’re living in the days where friends are rare and competition is fierce; so your unscrupulous competitor started to think creatively: “wait the minute, how about if we keep tapping on our competitor’s ads, that would certainly cost them money, wouldn’t it?” Creative indeed, and soon they’ll probably come up with an automated bot to do the clicking for them. This kind of click fraud is intended to destroy the enemies, even at the expense of more revenue for Google.
But click-fraud also took its tool on Google. As you know, Google also offers a way for you to make money from your site by hosting the AdSense. The more ad clicks fueled by your site, the more money you’re making. Obviously, human beings are born to be greedy. So the site owner started to commit click-fraud (by clicking the ads they’re hosting) too in order to reap more money from Google.
John Carreras, who was a victim of this click-fraud scheme has decided to make a difference, and so “Who’s Clicking Who?” was born. That’s good, but it’ll be better if the protection for AdSense customers came from Google themselves, right?
The New Old Thing 