See the last Virtumonde related post for more information, but I’m currently cleaning up, tweaking and updating a friend’s laptop. For some reason, after installing Windows XP’s Service Pack 3, I had major problems with the display being severely under performing. It has been a while since I saw Windows in a 640×480 resolution, and probably close to twenty years since I encountered a 4-bit colour scheme!
Anyway, there were a few other hangovers from the massive updating done (it seems it hadn’t been allowed to update Windows or the anti-virus app in a long, long time), but most of these were simple to fix. For some reason, finding the correct drivers for a Compaq Presario 2500 series laptop (a 2580US to be specific) wasn’t easy. I don’t know whether Compaq don’t optimize for SEO very well (lack of clear results from Google), and if they don’t think people will easily need to be able to find drivers for a slightly old laptop, but if you find yourself in the same position, here here. I can currently only vouch for the video card drivers as working well, but I’ll be checking if the other drivers are more recent and an improvement later.
Sep 22 2010
Compaq Windows XP Drivers
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Sep 22 2010
Putting Asides Inside Your Site
On this blog posts are displayed in two different ways. The normal method is the post’s title is displayed, with the date, categories and then the main post content itself. However, whenever I send a tweet, using up all that space for something that will be less than 140 characters just seems silly. This is where the AsideShop plug-in comes into play.
You decide which categories a post must belong in, and the plugin will then decide whether to process the post as normal, or just present the actual text of the post, with a small link to the comments section after it. This can save around 60-80% of the space used normally, and hopefully helps to make tweets a little more natural, and doesn’t stop the flow as much. You could of course reverse what I do, depending on the topic of your blog, and have all categories except for one or two be set as asides. If you blog about fashion, the plugin could set up so it misses clothing for children posts, but all others are just presented in a minimalist fashion.
You can also set whether asides should be displayed in a compact form all over your site, or only on certain pages (a bit like the Google AdSense plugin, you may want it to only appear on the homepage, or archives, or search results etc.
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Sep 22 2010
Virtumonde
A friend of ours recently bought a new laptop (the first time I’ve had a chance to play with a proper Windows PC that has a touchscreen!), and asked for some help with her old one. I hadn’t seen the old laptop in nearly two years, so I assumed all was fine with the machine.
No, it wasn’t, would be the short version. With a couple of trojan and viruses onboard, the poor thing had slowed down to a crawl and wouldn’t behave at all well. Hardly ideal behaviour for a computer that the owner wanted to try and sell! Virtumonde (specifically the Trojan.vundo and Trojan.vundo.b variants) were causing the most bother to remove. In case I forgot in the future, or it helps someone, someday, to skip a few hours of head scratching and repeated virus scan, reboot, virus scan, swear, reboot cycles, I though I’d post a couple of links that proved very useful in removing the infections.
To see the different methods people have tried, head on over here, but in most cases, you can skip straight to here, to learn how to use Rkill and Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware to clean your computer. Do read the notes carefully, and either print them out, or open them on a second PC, as you’ll need to close all programs at certain points.
There are other infections to clear off it, and I need to swap data from the old PC to the new one (I didn’t want to start the process of copying 45Gb until I knew it was clean), but I’m now getting there!
Sep 22 2010
All in One SEO Pack
Next on the conveniently alphabetical list of plug-ins used on this site is All in One SEO Pack. I’ve not mentioned Akismet, as it comes with WordPress automatically, kills spam for you, and if you have a blog without it enabled (or something similar), these posts aren’t likely to help you much.
So, getting back to the All in One SEO pack, the basic premise is that you install and activate it, and after a couple of minutes of tweaking your site will appeal so search engines a lot more. As is true with the AdSense plugin I mentioned earlier, you could manually make almost all of these changes within the theme you use, and by editing fields for each page and post you write. However, not only would you need a fair amount of SEO knowledge, you would also find it adds on to the time you need to maintain your site every day. If you sell books on your site, you want to concentrate on the customer information and products, not the back-end work. To fine tune the settings, you will need to a little research into what settings make the most difference, and to be honest, I’ve not done very much at all apart from accepting the defaults.
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Sep 22 2010
Tracking Thieves
I came across a piece online titled “My Relentless Pursuit Of The Guy Who Robbed Me”, and thought you might like to read it as well. When reading this article, just click on the continue reading after the first five paragraphs.
It reminded me of an incident a couple of years ago when Mum was buying something on e-bay for her and John’s wedding. One set did not turn up, despite having been paid for, and the seller seeming legitimate. As time was counting down, Mum was understandably starting to stress out about it.
Starting with a name and e-bay account, I decided to see what I could discover about the person, who’s excuses were starting to sound pretty phoney, and I hoped to at least name and shame the person if they didn’t sort things out ASAP. In the end, I found their home phone number, the names of their family members, the address, parish council they served on, their workplace and boss’s direct number, and a couple of other little things.
Eventually, armed with enough information to ensure we had the right person, and multiple avenues of approach re. turning up the communication of our displeasure a few notches, a friendly local policeman had words with the e-bay seller, and within a day or two, all the goods turned up! Pure coincidence, I’m sure. I don’t know if I could have started randomly calling parish councillors anyway, but her boss wouldn’t have phased me 🙂
My thanks to Matt Mullenweg (the creator of WordPress) for the heads up on this story.
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Sep 21 2010
All in One Adsense and YPN
It has been more almost two years since I wrote a series of posts on the plug-ins used for this WordPress blog. Since then I’ve cut down on some of the code that did nothing on the front end for visitors, but did slow down the server somewhat, especially when occasional spikes of high traffic occurred.
So, I’ll go through them alphabetically, mainly because that way it is easier for me to keep a track about which ones I’ve already mentioned. I’ll try and stick to one post per plug-in, but for the simple/popular ones, I’ll probably combine posts.
First on the list? All in One Adsense and YPN. The principle behind the code is to provide a one stop shop for blog owners, whether they write about their life in Kazakhstan, to place PPC adverts (Yahoo and/or Google’s AdSense) on the page. You just type in advert network’s ID, select whether you want text, image or both type of adverts, and the dimensions that are allowed. Once you have selected the colours to be used (text, background, URLs etc.), number of ads per post and/or page and the justification (top, bottom, left, right, centre etc.) you are all done. If you want to wrap the advert within some code (be careful with Google on that one), or hide the adverts from certain types of pages, it just takes a click or two. One minor thing you need to notice is that the plug-in’s config page is titled just “AdSense”, which normally throws me for a few seconds if I haven’t changed any settings in a while.
You can of course simply add the exact code you want into template files manually, but should you change themes, or just update it to a more recent version, you’ll always need to make sure you’ve kept a copy of the code and where it was inserted, then hope the new/new version of your theme will work as well without too much tweaking. Using a plug-in means you can skip all of those headaches and just know it will work.
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Sep 19 2010
Just shot this clip (#qik) htt…
Just shot this clip (#qik) http://qik.ly/CeuLq
Went and watched the Davis Cup across the road from us (big thanks to the friends who got the ticket for me). It was Switzerland vs. Kazakhstan, and I think we won on penalties after the third red card was displayed to our striker?
Tennis isn’t really my forté as you may have guessed, but it was interesting to watch, and not even a mild hangover prevented me from attending. Just a little late 🙂
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Sep 19 2010
At the Davis Cup, watching Kaz…
At the Davis Cup, watching Kazakhstan play Switzerland. http://twitpic.com/2pwsmk Thanls to ome good friend who gave me a ticket.
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Sep 18 2010
Just shot this clip (#qik) htt…
Just shot this clip (#qik) http://qik.ly/Cdk8m
This was shot a few weeks ago when we were at Vaqueros but I seem to have forgotten to stream via Qik at the time. As I’m going to the tennis tomorrow, I wanted to have the backlog cleared from my phone’s cache.
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Sep 17 2010
Anna’s first go on a bouncy ca…
Anna’s first go on a bouncy castle! http://twitpic.com/2pa8vk
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