Flash mob robs wisteria 7-11!

I heard today from a friend that a flash mob organized over the internet using tweets robbed a Maryland 7-11. This seems really a dumb thing to do considering all of these folks are caught on video. I am not sure what signal are they trying to send here... Check this out -

This happened on the Maryland/DC Metro Line

This is the metro line I take everyday. Usually it ends up being a boring, unhappening ride but occasionally a drunk or psycho gets on the train and entertains everyone. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I missed this particular service. Check out the video.

Checkout my new blog

Finally, having battled with SEO, I am putting my thoughts together in this new blog. Hopefully I will have the time and energy and the prodding of few smart people to keep it going here :).

If you are in the Atlanta area, call on my brother's new Handyman biz

Especially if you are commercial - a hotel, office, building or industrial enterprise needing facility management maintenance work, he is offering some really good deals to sign you up as customer at this point. The company - Crisis Solutions of Georgia has a good deal of experience in this kind of maintenance work. Especially pools, large scale equipment etc. If you own a home and have regular handyman work, you may want to give Crisis Solutions of Georgia a shot as well. Tell them I sent you there and get a discount!

Fluent News: Best free News app on the iPhone

I have tried several free news apps on the iPhone. The USA Today application was definitely the pioneer among the news apps which a lot of applications have copied or adapted from. The other onesI tried: Fox, ABC, NPR and a no brand version - Fluent News. The last one has turned out to be the best one for the following reasons: it collects the stories from multiple sources (so it has the most content of any other apps), the editor puts all the related stories together and sometimes when I want to find more, I click on those and the app downloads the news stories upfront which means after the application is loaded, it still operates after internet access is gone (which is why I love to read it on the train)...

OS4 and iPhone 3G

My experience with OS4 upgrade on the iPhone 3G has been devastating so far. I think with this upgrade Apple may have released something which users can misconfigure in a way that makes the applications really slow. Most of the time I am reading news or mail, my phone has now become unresponsive. Several clicks or attempts to scroll the window down are met with tough resistance almost as though the screen has become insensitive to my touch. I am planning to spend some time tomorrow to find out what kind of tuning I can do on the phone to make it faster and more responsive...

Can't install new software on windows due to "Installation in progress"?

Frustrated as I was, I happened to kill some installation process on my PC. Unfortunately this sent Windows into a death spiral as after that it refused to install or uninstall anything else. So much for concurrency. I guess I had a "feature lock up" scenario. Googling on this gave me 20 different answers for a variety of instances when this happens with Office and versions of MS operating systems. Finally what worked was this. Open up the services and then disable the Windows installer service and enable it again. That did the trick. It didnt make any sense to me since I had already cleaned up a registry entry for "In Progress" for the installer, but it did work...

Trojan.BHO - whew!

Over the July 4th weekend, my computer got infected with this spyware/virus. The behavior was interesting. It indicated that my computer was infected and that Add/Remove programs was disabled. Then it prompted me to buy Anti Virus software called AV Security Suite. When it repeatedly did so and I couldn't get rid of the messages, something was clearly up and this time it was different. There were numerous issues in all:

1. I couldn't run the Remove Applications tool from the Control Panel.
2. On clicking on any google or yahoo results, my browser would be taken to an unsolicited (but respectable :) website. Typically these sites would list the AV Security Suite solution as something I should buy. 

Now its been few hours and I think I have successfully eliminated all the files related to this attack. I have some notes here which could help anyone else having this issue.

The first phase of fixes made by Malwarebytes Anti-Malware software worked really well: it deleted most of the major Trojan files on the first run. However the second and third runs revealed more files to delete. This was quite odd since it seemed like the virus was self-generating or something. Eventually I was still left with a sporadic redirection problem: Both Yahoo and Google search results would get redirected to arbitrary sites. Now these would be random sites. And the problem would kick in every now and then. It seemed like there was something slithery still sneaking around on the computer.

Then I tried a whole bunch of other software:

1. CCleaner: This cleaned up my entire PC, my Startup Menu etc., Everything except my Desktop I think. It didnt help with the virus at all. However it did leave me feeling clean on the PC ;)
2. Spybot Search & Destroy: Again, this software found some low risk cookies and files. No big deal. I am sure by tomorrow these files would find their way into my PC by tomorrow.
3. Super AntiSpyware. Again same results as the Spybot.
4. HijackThis. This was the tool which did it and I found that a normal user may find it very hard to use. In just a few seconds, it exposed a few settings for the BHO registry entries that were causing my browser to behave as it was. And deleting them was a quick snap as well. None of the other tools found/exposed what HijackThis (made by TrendMicro) did. Good job!

Overall the experience was eye-opening. My PC came with Vipre Enterprise software suite and that also was not any help at all. It couldnt find the bad registry entries and it was not able to detect/delete a lot of the files found by the other tools.

I feel that since my last dealing with a computer virus, nothing has really changed. Its only the players which has changed. The state of the industry is still the same - there is no single fix-all as maybe the viruses keep evolving...

Update: Unfortunately my fixes didn't fix it all! The PC is still suffering from tabs or redirects at random to unsolicited websites. This affects only searches done on yahoo and google. On clicking on a search result, sometimes (like the third or fourth time) I would be redirected to a bunch of websites opening one after another. Luckily none of them are offensive. Pure junk and inconvenient.

Tried the following today:

1. Microsoft Security Essentials: Piece of junk. Just like other microsoft software, this one is buggy and has its own problems. Couldnt even connect and download its database from microsoft website.
2. Prevx. This has seemed to work and it did detect a virus (and it was the only one) when my browser was opening random websites. It immediately killed my firefox and said it cleaned my hosts file. I havent had the problem since. Lets see. My fingers and everything else I can cross is crossed ;)

Jawbone Icon -- kool or what?

After doing a research on a lot of Bluetooth headsets for my phone, I finally picked the Icon and have been testing it out past week. At this point, it still is standing out as the best gadget I bought in the past few months. If you too are looking for a bluetooth headset with A2DP support, please need to read on...

The Jawbone Icon is one of the newer headsets in the Jawbone family and it comes with support for listening music as well - and it is very convenient and easy to wear. When you look at other options to hear music you come across a lot of headsets offering stereo option. If you need superior quality music you may be better off with a wired headset. Bluetooth may not be for you. Among the Bluetooth headsets there are a few stereo options as well with a detachable second headset.If you follow the keep it simple philosophy, the Jawbone offers a pretty good option. Couple of cool features attracted me to Jawbone -- its option to have voice announcements, easy redial, uploading new firmware (which is how I got the A2DP version on it). It fits great in my ear and has probably 6-8 different fitting options. The music quality is also pretty good so overall its a good package.

What's in a job...

If you read Andy Grove's article in the recent issue of Business Week, he does leave you wondering about what is going to happen to America's superiority in the area of innovation. I think most of what he says is right. But maybe not all of it. For example, the U.S still reigns supreme in design innovation. The iPhone is one example. I can probably say the same for a lot of software products. However the U.S has lost significant speed in terms of implementation (and manufacturing industry as Andy claims in his article). I feel the science of implementation is being perfected in Asia beyond what it ever was in the U.S. Scaling and Quality share the same commentary. The U.S has become a land of ideas. However we must remember that ideas are dime a dozen and easy to copy. One out of thousand ideas ever succeed in the marketplace and ideas by  themselves never are a competitive advantage. In fact most simple ideas are improvements thought upon current technology and are built on the foundation of knowing the implementation or manufacturing side of the equation. In the near future, most of this innovation is going to come from outside since nothing is made here in the U.S except needles and specialty screws...