Into the Void

“MindManager: Linear Thinking takes you straight to the expected.”

Email about using mapping software to create linear procedures for engineering processes.

—– Original Message —–
From: Leslie
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 7:21 PM
Subject: mindthingy

This application is for hierarchies. The design process is linear-sequential. What you need is a simple checklist.

1. Draw preti pixchrs
2. add part nubmers
3. etc

Mind Manager: Linear Thinking takes you straight to the expected.

“Say hello to free-form thinking. Your brain doesn’t process in a linear fashion. Neither does Mindjet. Now you can think visually with dynamic layers of information displayed in a limitless arrangement that lends clarity to any project.”

Ontology software maps interrelationships between objects and concepts in a given domain in ways that aren’t intuitive to a linear-sequential mind. I’m not sure how Mind Manager will help write a procedure because procedures are by definition linear and sequential.

If you want to bring in resources like test equipment or people then a scheduling program like Microsoft Project Standard 2007 is more in order.

I was evaluating different mind mapping software at home. I set it up so that as I ran through my Saturday morning web work it would remind me of related tasks in case I wanted to work by tool or by priority instead of running through them in sequence. As the weeks went on I found I was adding children and siblings and dropping files and links onto it, but the license ran out and I was too cheap to buy it.

Mind mapping software is easier to use from the start of a project. If you input an existing data set and impose a well-thought-out rational structure on it, you’re totally missing the point. The creative process doesn’t have a rational structure. If it did, it would be called engineering. Oh *snap!*

There is a Mind Manager viewer so that users can only view the mind map. Mind Manager also can export to pdf, html, word, ppt, etc.

There are lots of available Mind Manager maps. No matter what you need to do with a mind map, you can probalby adapt an existing map to do what you want.

Don’t forget Microsoft Office templates. I think this one, “To do list for projects,” will work just fine for a test procedure.

HONcode: E-mail encrypt

This little gadget is on the HonCode site. Enter your email address in the top section and it will generate a little javascript snippet to hide it from spiders.

Microsoft DreamSpark

Dreamspark is Microsoft’s program for getting free development tools into the hands of students, in hopes that when they get out in the business world they’ll ask for the tools they’re familiar with. Or in Microsoft’s own words:

It is our hope that the DreamSpark program will spark your creativity and help you harness software’s transformative magic to turn your good ideas into reality, by equipping you with the tools you need to succeed and excel during your academic experience and skills you will need after graduation.

Are you a student? Here’s what you can get:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• XNA Game Studio

… and more.

That’s right, these are the same goodies that old women like me have to pay hundreds of dollars for.

[ad]

Neowin Giveaway >> 31 Days of the Dragon

If you haven’t heard about the HP 31 Days of the Dragon, hear about it. They’re giving away a kick-@55 computer every day for 31 days. Neowin wanted to get folks to participate so I generated an mp3 about what I’d do if I had a dragon. Which I don’t.

The first thing I thought of was Puff the Magic Dragon. Most of the folks who were around for that whiny little gem now pretend that they never puffed, or if they did, they didn’t inhale. Trust me, guys, your mom and dad - or grandma and grandpa - burned enough rope to reach Colombia and back. They already [b]had[/b] their dragon and they traded it in for an Escalade.

So then I thought of the Dragonriders of Pern. It had its moments, but all-in-all I want a dragon, not a horse with wings. If I wanted a horse with wings I’d get a Unicorn - or is that a Pegasus? Well, it would have to be the one that doesn’t need for me to be pure of heart.

How about the dragon in The Hobbit? Smog was it? No, Smaug! Jewel-encrusted underbelly and all. If I had that sucker and his treasure I could buy a laptop the size of New Jersey. Too late, that little bugger Frottage or Frodo or whatever his name was killed Smaug, took the loot, and wasted it all on half-pints. And beer. Not a bad deal, actually.

I briefly considered that Robo-dragon in Dr. No, but even as a kid it didn’t frighten me. I need something really scary.

And then I thought of it! Here’s my dragon and what I would do with it. Kneel before me!
the_lesliator.mp3

– The Lesliator

Create your very own Semacode tag.

What is Semafox? Semafox is an easy way to create a smart 2D barcode (aka a semacode) using your web browser. There’s nothing to install or uninstall. Bonus… the QRCode reader from KAYWA can decode it.

As always, my search for this item resulted in something totally unexpected, in this case a Ruby on Rails book called BLiXy’s PREDOMINATELY IMPROMPTU big book of cryable, injectible ruby. Oddly enough, it is a Ruby tutorial in comic book format. This is a sample entitled When You Wish Upon a Beard.

http://www.laptop.org/

It’s here, the ideal gift for early adopters.

We’ve been hearing about the $100 Laptop for months now. It seemed like a pipe dream. A laptop for children in third world countries? It would have to be an engineering marvel. The kids often live in houses with dirt floors. They often don’t have electricity. Internet infrastructure - or even telephone service - is non-existent in rural towns. They’ve probably never seen a computer before. They’ll have to learn the OS and the software without the a priori assumptions of a Westerner. Getting computer teachers trained has to be a logistical nightmare! How can this possibly work?

The answer is one that wouldn’t occur to most of us… Cooperation on a global scale!

It’s the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. This program attempted to design, build and distribute laptops for under $100 to children in third world countries.

In December OLPC had a promotion where if you donated a laptop you could buy a second laptop. PLUS you get a year of free Sprint wifi access at places like Barnes & Noble, St*rbucks, etc. that you can also use with any other wifi devices you may own - laptops and PDAs. The Sprint access alone is worth the price of the laptop.

The XO has totally new hardware with VERY low power consumption. The XO has a very cool GUI called “Sugar” that’s usuable even by kids who can’t read yet, much less read English. Sugar is based on a trimmed down Linux OS with programs written just for it. Programs like a music synthesizer, Turtle Graphics, word processing, a web browser and that’s just the START of it!

Since The XO is intended for third world countries, it has wifi - no ethernet infrastructure is necessary. They’ll automatically connect at power up to other XOs that they find. This enables the kids to work on collaborative projects. Not just chatrooms, but writing music together in the music workspace! Collaboration is the key to the future.

The XO has two antennas and uses them to triangulate and display a 2D map of surrounding XOs and wireless access points. It took a while and I had to change some of my router settings, but I was able to connect to the Internet with my XO.

There is an available hand crank to charge the XO if you don’t have electricity in your village. I think they said there’s a solar battery charger available too. They also have wireless teacher access points that enable the kids to get on the Internet and see what’s going on in the rest of the world. This is a really ambitious project. I did what I could.

I’ll post an update if the Give One - Get One program runs again. Your donation is partly tax deductible. And you’re doing something good for less fortunate kids. It’s a win-win game.

I signed up with a site called Outside.in a few months ago and they turned me down because I don’t have enough geotag info in my blog, i.e. I write about ideas rather than local coverage. I guess they figured out that nobody interesting is going to geotag every post.

Now Outside.in has changed things so that they can read a feed and include only items with geographical information in them.

Testing Hatboro, PA.

Two new worms use St. Valentine’s Day as bait

PandaLabs, Panda Security’s laboratory for detecting and analyzing malware, has detected two new worms, Nuwar.OL and Valentin.E, which use the topic of St. Valentine’s Day to spread. I suppose you could call them love bugs.

Both Nuwar.OL and Valentin.E arrive by email with Valentine-themed subject lines. They may even appear to have been sent by someone you know.

The first one of these worms, Nuwar.OL, uses an email with subjects like “I Love You Soo Much,” “Inside My Heart” or “You’re In My Dreams” to trick the recipient into opening the website that downloads it. The webpage is very simple - a romantic greeting card with a large pink Valentine’s Day heart. Surprise!

Once it has infected a computer, Nuwar.OL spreads itself by sending out a large number of emails to people in the user’s email address book. This activity can slow down both the infected computer and the local network.

Valentin.E also spreads by email. Watch out for messages with subjects like “Searching for true Love” or “True Love” and an attached file called “friends4u.scr.” If you run the file, Valentin.E shows a new desktop background to distract you while it makes several copies of itself on the computer and emails copies of itself to all your friends.

“Both cases are clear examples of social engineering techniques used to spread malware. They use attractive subjects - Valentine’s Day greeting cards, romantic desktop themes, etc. - to entice users to run [email] attachments or click links that ultimately download malware onto their computers,” explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs.

It would, of course, would have been far easier to reformat my hard drive.

The problem seems to be a bagel variant and has something to do with files named
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\hidr.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\srosa.sys
and possibly an infected NETWAITING.EXE file.

I have tried multiple rootkit detection and removal programs with varying degrees of success.

McAfee Security Center says that no parts of my McAfee software are enabled. It says that parts of the software are missing and I have to reinstall.

McAfee Rootkit Detective 1.1 flagged hidr.sys and said it would remove it, but it didn’t.

F-Secure Online Virus Scanner is unable to download all its files - I suspect the bug is blocking them. Their Blacklight program has been integrated into the new scanner. Oh well.

AVG Free won’t install - it can’t find one of its installation files - I assume the malware is deleting it. AVG is my number one favorite free antivirus program.

Panda Anti-rootkit, available from Download.com, found the files and renamed one of them, but the problem came back next boot. Panda offers a number of free tools too, including an online scanner called ActiveScan and a beta online scanner named nano-scan. The big thing they offer is repair utilities for specific infections.

EliBagle v10.75 located the files and a registry entry. I rebooted in safe mode. I deleted the files. I deleted the registry entry. And just to be certain, I deleted the preload file for hidr.exe.

At this point IE is no longer going out to strange web sites. I can only hope that it was unable to download something even worse while McAfee was down.

My McAfee subscription is still active, but I haven’t decided whether to reinstall or to switch to something cheaper and just as useless.

Technorati: bagel+variant rootkit Panda+Anti-rootkit Panda+ActiveScan Rootkit+Detective F-Secure trojan

I found a related topic on the What the Tech forums.
http://forums.whatthetech.com/Someonething…ml&hl=srosa

It may be the same as my problem. The tool mentioned in the article, Blacklight, is no longer available, but the company has a dozen or so FREE special-purpose disinfecting tools. Time to make the donuts… errrr…. bagels.[/i]

Update 12/3/2007:
Got it! With a a couple of utilities and a brief foray into the frightening forest of “safe mode.” Why do they call it safe mode when you can do so much damage from there?

Please, folks, I’m just messing around here. DON’T DO WHAT I DID TO FIX YOUR PROBLEM!!! I’m an old lady who does regular backups and I often screw things up bad enough that I have to reformat. One thing about having two hard drives is that your data is (usually) safe from your tender ministrations.

So.

This thing seems to have been a Bagel variant. The gist of it is that it runs as a driver. An “intercept directory listings and delete anti-virus files” sort of a driver. Regular spyware cleaners don’t even look at drivers. So [i]that’s[/i] what a rookit is! Now things are starting to make sense. HJT didn’t list this bug.

Bagel hid its files well. Once I ran something to detect rootkits I had something to work with - filenames and registry entries. I couldn’t find anything to clean it automatically, but as I said, I’m not afraid to reformat. In a DOS command shell “dir sr*” listed the file srosa.sys. No other way of listing the directory could see it. Not “dir,” not “dir s*.” I couldn’t list hidr.wtfever it was called, but when I tried to delete it the error message indicated that the file was indeed there but couldn’t be deleted. Safe mode it is. I deleted the files, modified the registry, and sacrificed a small animal to the ‘Net God in hopes that my laptop would reboot after what I did. Hey, stuff happens.

So after all that garbage, my laptop is no longer going out to sites in Eastern Bloc countries looking for… trouble. My hope is that I didn’t delete some driver that, say, enables me to play movies or burn mp3 CDs for the car. That remains to be seen.

However, there is an entry left in the registry called LEGACY_SROSA. Since it doesn’t expressly list the path of “srosa” I’m not sure whether to delete it.