This month I am doing NaNoWriMo. The idea is that lots of people all over the world are each writing a novel in a month time. There is nothing shared except the the hardship we are putting ourselves through. It's a nice thing and I am participating for the fourth time. I think I also wrote about it once or twice in the past.
However, there is a twist to this story. As there should be a twist to every story, of course. The twist is that I am not aiming for the goal that NaNoWriMo sets. After doing 100,000 words instead of 50,000 last year, I decided to draw the trend line and go for 150,000 this time around. I suppose I wanted to keep in the challenge.
The thing is, I'm not on schedule. I'm far behind. I'm not on schedule... for 50,000. I have a lot of words to catch up. And I don't know how I can possibly do that just yet, but I am not giving up hope just yet. It's like something I was talking about last night: "The only time there are no options is when you have given in to one of them."
Considering that I haven't written a single word yet today, it makes little sense that I am here writing on my blog instead of on my novel. Why then am I doing this? I suppose it has something to do with the fact that I might be doing better on writing on my blog regularly (every day in this case) than I have ever been and that's worth something to me too. I'll go write on my novel right away. I promise.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Friday, November 18, 2011
Once again: Request
Yesterday, I found that people are actually using my ages old XMLHttpRequest script. At least, that's how some people end up on this blog - after googling for "Jasper's HttpRequest script".
Well, it's quite old and uses techniques for compatibility with older browser which basically have been given up on today (IE 6). Still, I think the thing should still work. But it wasn't hosted anywhere, so now is my chance to fix that. Here's an all-new link to the script: link.
I do want to revisit the script some time and update it and all and perhaps it will even some day be integrated into GoodLooking. Until that time, feel free to use the script from the link above. There is one thing I do ask you for, though. I would like it if you let me know what you are using the script for. Just out of curiosity, really.
Well, it's quite old and uses techniques for compatibility with older browser which basically have been given up on today (IE 6). Still, I think the thing should still work. But it wasn't hosted anywhere, so now is my chance to fix that. Here's an all-new link to the script: link.
I do want to revisit the script some time and update it and all and perhaps it will even some day be integrated into GoodLooking. Until that time, feel free to use the script from the link above. There is one thing I do ask you for, though. I would like it if you let me know what you are using the script for. Just out of curiosity, really.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Honorable Mention: ComboFix
Yesterday, I had a run-in with a virus. The very first popup which said something was wrong already had the looks of not being legitimate to me, but then everything became very obvious as the virus started to get in my way whenever it could and tried to keep me from doing just about anything on my pc.
I'm good with computers and good with Windows (well, XP anyway, and that's what I'm running), so I managed to find the one way they had left open and knew how to get just about anything done from that little window I had.
I found that my files where being hidden and that it set my settings not to display any hidden files every few minutes for as long as the virus was running. I had to jump through quite a few hooks, but finally I managed to tell my updated firewall/antivirus (I used the combined term, as I was actually using a third tool: the active defense) software to terminate the virus's process and ban it from starting up again.
I fixed a few things that I the virus had left in a bad state, ran a full virus scan over my entire computer and used sfc /scannow to have Windows recover any damage to core files done by the virus. (I am pretty sure it did stuff with ping.exe somewhere along the road...)
I was still leaved with an incomplete system: my all programs menu in the start menu was wrecked and it had also been messing around with the shortcuts on my desktop and in quick start. Additionally, my virus scanner appeared not to have found the virus, so it was still there even though it was being blocked from running.
I looked for something to fix the missing shortcuts. I found a note somewhere that ComboFix did things like that.
ComboFix far surpassed my expectations. Seriously, it mentioned a few things it was going to have to remove, but moreover I found in the logs that it had removed both executables I had identified as malicious myself. Additionally, it removed shortcuts to its "cover-up" the System Fix program the virus was saying I had to purchase the full version of.
However, it did also fix Quick Start, All Programs and my desktop. I don't know how it did that - is the information which enough to rebuild those stored in the registry or something? That would explain why some applications didn't return properly (I was already assuming that they were the ones not doing things properly rather than ComboFix). It would be a bit redundant, but right now, I'm not second-guessing the situation. Everything is fixed. All because of ComboFix!
Thanks, ComboFix!
I'm good with computers and good with Windows (well, XP anyway, and that's what I'm running), so I managed to find the one way they had left open and knew how to get just about anything done from that little window I had.
I found that my files where being hidden and that it set my settings not to display any hidden files every few minutes for as long as the virus was running. I had to jump through quite a few hooks, but finally I managed to tell my updated firewall/antivirus (I used the combined term, as I was actually using a third tool: the active defense) software to terminate the virus's process and ban it from starting up again.
I fixed a few things that I the virus had left in a bad state, ran a full virus scan over my entire computer and used sfc /scannow to have Windows recover any damage to core files done by the virus. (I am pretty sure it did stuff with ping.exe somewhere along the road...)
I was still leaved with an incomplete system: my all programs menu in the start menu was wrecked and it had also been messing around with the shortcuts on my desktop and in quick start. Additionally, my virus scanner appeared not to have found the virus, so it was still there even though it was being blocked from running.
I looked for something to fix the missing shortcuts. I found a note somewhere that ComboFix did things like that.
ComboFix far surpassed my expectations. Seriously, it mentioned a few things it was going to have to remove, but moreover I found in the logs that it had removed both executables I had identified as malicious myself. Additionally, it removed shortcuts to its "cover-up" the System Fix program the virus was saying I had to purchase the full version of.
However, it did also fix Quick Start, All Programs and my desktop. I don't know how it did that - is the information which enough to rebuild those stored in the registry or something? That would explain why some applications didn't return properly (I was already assuming that they were the ones not doing things properly rather than ComboFix). It would be a bit redundant, but right now, I'm not second-guessing the situation. Everything is fixed. All because of ComboFix!
Thanks, ComboFix!
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The Secrets The Internet Has Not Discovered Yet
It's pretty awesome when you find out about something, and then google it and find that there are only two websites that have written about. That just happened to me.
It was all about the song "How Could I Be So Wrong" by Sylver that was playing. I suddenly heard for the first time that the singer was actually singing the line "I wish we had some lyrics for this song".
Wut?
Well, I googled it and even though the song has been out for two years now, that sentence was only to be found on two sites, one in English and one in Dutch. It might be that google is set up not to search websites in other languages, so I'll just stick to the fact that I'm the second English website documenting that secret. Awesome.
And I'm proud of it.
It was all about the song "How Could I Be So Wrong" by Sylver that was playing. I suddenly heard for the first time that the singer was actually singing the line "I wish we had some lyrics for this song".
Wut?
Well, I googled it and even though the song has been out for two years now, that sentence was only to be found on two sites, one in English and one in Dutch. It might be that google is set up not to search websites in other languages, so I'll just stick to the fact that I'm the second English website documenting that secret. Awesome.
And I'm proud of it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)