Vaccination Location Deliberation

So I had to get two vaccinations (boosters) in my shoulder(s) for an upcoming international trip. The nurse tells me they will each cause soreness for a couple of days. She then asks which arm(s) I'd like the shots. When prompted for her professional opinion, she defers back to me, offering no assistance in this very important decision. After deliberating for a couple of seconds, I opt to take both shots in my non-dominant arm. Man, that soreness kicked in quick! By the time I was in my truck, my left shoulder felt like it had been punched a few times.

Anyway, after telling my wife about this, she thought I was crazy for getting both in one arm. She said she would have put one in each, to lessen the maximum pain per arm. I figured that I wanted a fully-functional good arm.

So now I pose the question to you, loyal reader. How would you distribute the shots? The poll on the right will be active for a couple weeks. At the rate my blog is read, that should equate to 2.3 votes. Please vote and/or comment!

My monkey

Hey, this is the Internet, right? And this is my blog? And I can write about anything? Well, that can mean only one thing: monkey statue time. I found a picture of my favorite monkey statue that I had taken sometime ago (he's the one holding the green ball below), and now is as good a time as any to immortalize it. Without further ado:


PS: My wife hates this monkey statue. If he ever turns up missing, at least there is photographic/bloggographic evidence of his awesomeness.

Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab Computing Resources

If you're starting out trying to build your first (or second, or whatever) parallel program, I've found that the Lawrence Livermore National Lab keeps a very nice page on High Performance Computing. It looks like it's maintained by a guy named Blaise Barney (awesome name). He does a great job of organizing it and writing the tutorials on various topics.

Lately, I've been using it extensively as I build my first significant pthread application. The tutorial on that topic has handy links to the original POSIX documentation and the provided examples are really well done, making it easy to get coding on your own project.

The site also has information and tutorials on other stuff like MPI and OpenMP, as well as documentation describing the pros and cons of all of these parallel programming tools. Not much else to say on the topic, just wanted to document it for myself and maybe make it easier for someone else to find it in the future.

Win32/Glenwiry.P : The Final Chapter

Well, this is the conclusion to my epic glenwiry.P trilogy (in case you missed it, the first two posts were a roller coaster of emotion, drama and raw excitement). I noticed that my latest anti-virus definitions were downloaded when I fired up the computer this morning (8:20am PDT). So I tried the following:

1. Disconnected my router from the Internet.
2. Went to the "Tools" tab of the CA antivirus software.
3. Clicked "Quarantined Items."
4. Restored the three "wextract.exe" files that were quarantined Thursday night.
5. Ran a virus scan of the WINDOWS/system32 folder.
6. Did a happy dance.
   

With those files rightly restored, the new antivirus definitions didn't think wextract was a bad apple. This more or less confirms that CA blew it, and then they fixed it rather quickly. I guess they decided to hold off on releasing the fix for glenwiry.p until they actually release that trojan into the wild! Ha! Just kidding. Or am I? Maybe? No, really, I am not even sure anymore.

So chances are, if you never had the glenwiry.p problem, you aren't going to see it anytime soon because the current definitions don't produce a false positive, and if you did have the glenwiry.p problem, you can probably go ahead an restore those files. Again, this is just based on my own experience: do whatever you want to do at your own risk. I am not a security expert, I just play one on the web.

Win32/Glenwiry.P follow-up

Just thought I'd post a little follow-up to my post from yesterday. I am still not completely comfortable saying I'm 100% certain that the Computer Associates quarantine of wextract.exe is a false positive, but based on everything I have read and know, it seems like a false positive is most likely. I'll probably leave those files quarantined until either CA issues a fix or my system suffers for not having it available.

I've seen some folks saying it likely ISN'T a false positive (how's that for a weird double negative) because ZoneAlarm has been noted as flagging these files too. Well, turns out that ZA uses the CA anti-virus engine. At least that's what CNET said last summer. If that is still true, I think it provides even more evidence that we are just looking at a bad definition in the CA tools. If I'm wrong about the ZA-CA connection, I hope someone lets me know.

What is really bothering me now is that CA released a fix for a presumable trojan before it was even known to exist in the wild. This is evidenced by the complete lack of any Google hits on Glenwiry.P before this antivirus definition update last night by CA. Even CA's own website doesn't have any information on the Glenwiry.P threat as of the time of this posting. If that's the case, how is it being caught by their antvirus tools? Perhaps they released the fix There has always been speculation and conspiracy theories that antivirus companies may actually create viruses/threats. An interesting business model, indeed. Though, it is a neat trick to catch a "threat" before anyone has ever heard of it, even yourself. But, hey, what the heck do I know? I'm just a once-in-a-while blogger.

win32/Glenwiry.p fiasco

So I think the most recent update of Computer Associate's virus scan definitions is giving false positives on wextract.exe. If you have real-time scan activated you'll probably get C:/WINDOWS/system32/wextract.exe and C:/WINDOWS/system32/dllcache/wextract.exe quarantined by your anti-virus software. This might prompt Windows to put up a red flag and demand that you insert your operating system install disk. Not sure yet what the best fix is, so I am going to wait out til the next update from CA which should fix the problem. If that doesn't happen soon or my system has problems due to the quarantined/missing wextract.exe, I will probably restore the quarantined item using CA's tools that come with the anti-virus software.

This all did give me quite a scare though since I pride myself on keeping as secure a system as I can considering I am running Windows. Anyway, I hope this post helps somebody not feel as freaked out as I was initially. There isn't much info online as of now.

Oh, as a side note, I would be careful about going to sites you might find by searching for glenwiry. I think many of them are bogus. If you do go to one by mistake, don't try and click any videos posted there. And if you browser goes into a pop-up hell, you should ctrl-alt-del and kill the browser process. That should get you out of the pop-up carousel.

If I learn anything new tomorrow I'll try and update here, but as you can see by my post history, I am not the most prolific blogger.

RMA my RAM (with no mar on my arm)

My laptop started acting wonky. Specifically, it started to spontaneously restart whenever the computer had been running for, say, 40 seconds. That is quite annoying. After doing a little research online, I figured that I had a bad capacitor. After ripping apart my laptop to look around, I realized that a laptop motherboard doesn't have the kind of capacitors discussed as being part of the capacitor plague. After looking around some more, I became convinced that I probably had a bunk RAM stick. If your computer is spontaneously restarting, you might want to suspect a CPU overheating problem or power supply issue or bad driver problem if the restart happens after more than a few minutes, but should suspect bad RAM if the restart can happen very quickly (sometimes during boot) or still happens when your doing something like checking BIOS. As I was investigating the problem on my laptop I had tried to get into the BIOS and the computer froze (didn't restart because that is a Windows response to the bad RAM) and that was the last clue to me that the RAM was at fault.

I had bought a 1GB stick from Newegg.com (which I highly recommend for all computer component shopping) a little over a year ago. I was able to pull up the old invoice on my Gigaram RAM. I went to the Gigaram website and found their RMA (returned merchandise authorization) policy and followed it. After about 3 weeks total, I had my replacement RAM at only the cost of shipping my broken RAM to them. Could have been faster, but having the lifetime warranty honored was a good feeling. The fact that Newegg kept a copy of my invoice avaialable to me and that Gigaram honored the warranty made this a fairly painless experience. Thanks Gigaram and Newegg.