Category Archives: Technology

Nintendo 4DS Announced

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Nintendo 4DS Following the successful launch of the Nintendo 3DS last week, Nintendo fans got a treat when it was revealed this Friday morning that the next version of the hand-held portable would be called the “Nintendo 4DS”, and support what game industry experts call “time-altering software”.

The Infinite Generation Portable

One of the lead developers was quoted in an interview as saying “After pioneering motion-based controllers and releasing the first 3D device that doesn’t require goofy glasses, we figured space-time vortex manipulation was the obvious next step. At Nintendo, we don’t just think of our products as ‘gaming devices,’ but as devices that let you alter the fabric of space and time itself”.

President and CEO of Nintendo of America Reginald “Reggie” Fils-Aime was also quoted as saying “Cha-ching!”.

 Time Travel
Nintendo software engineer Hubert Farnsworth said that the device uses patented time-extending and compressing software, based on the same technology that makes standardized tests seem to last forever.

“Once we realized it was possible to warp time through the mere application of algebra and geometry, it was a simple leap to designing a working time-warping chip (TWC),” Farnsworth said. “I can’t imagine any problems with putting this technology in the hands of children.”

Nintendo had no comment on rumors that 11th Century Chinese Emperor Shigeru Miyamoto, whose name is the same as the famed creator of Mario and The Legend of Zelda, was actually a time traveler from the future who used his collection of innovative platformers and game mechanics to conquer the country in less than 2 years.

What do you think? Will Nintendo’s ability to make you your own grandfather pay off or will it be crushed by Sony’s PSP2, which supports a revolutionary (for Sony) touchpad.

Future Release Date

Nintendo also announced they will have the device finished in a couple hundred years. Despite this production delay, Nintendo promises they will then use the completed Nintendo 4DS to travel back in time so that the device will be available by the holidays. Price is expected to be around 50 trillion dollars, and comes with a 2GB memory card, RAR (really-augmented-reality) cards, and a plutonium charging station.

TSS Symposium Preview – Throw Away All The Rules. Now What Process Do You Follow?

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I'm Speaking at TheServerSide Java Symposium As previously mentioned, Scott and I are both be presenting talks at TheServerSide Java Symposium in March. In preparation for the conference, we are providing sneak peaks of talks this week on the blog.  Scott gave a sneak preview of his GWT lecture.  He has so much information it didn’t all fit in his slides!

I’m giving a talk titled Throw Away All The Rules. Now What Process Do You Follow?” Here are just a few points from my upcoming conference talk:

  1. Testing – for anyone who knows me it isn’t a surprise that I consider regression critical.  But it isn’t always easy to get started.  And yet, the pain of not having it is large.  See how a testing strategy can evolve.
  2. Deployment – a repeatable deployment sounds like a corporate bureaucratic thing.  Yet knowing what is in production and how to get there quickly is an agile concept.
  3. Leader – Note I said leader and not project manager.  Even if you don’t have a project manager, someone needs to be running the show.  Or in the case of Scrum – the team is the leader.

Hope you enjoyed this sneak peak of my conference talk.  For more, consider coming to my session at the conference. If you register with the coderanch discount code, you can save $200.

a virus encounter

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Due to my struggles with Open Office Impress, I decided to take advantage of Microsoft’s at home use program and install Office 2007 on my home computer.  Short story, I had a dormant virus on my machine that showed up as soon as I installed Office 2007.  This reminds me why I avoid Microsoft products like Internet Explorer – way too tightly coupled to the operating system.  Longer story:

Symptoms

Right after I installed Office 2007, my Windows XP computer started exhibiting a number of odd problems:

  1. Took 30-45 minutes to shut down the computer
  2. When downloading an attachment from Firefox, Firefox hangs.  Killing it in the task manager and re-launching Firefox keeping the tabs intact indicates the file is still downloading and it completes.
  3. Starting postgres via a shortcut opens a DOS window saying “starting” and hanging.
  4. Starting the postgres process in Services gives:

    Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

  5. Internet Explorer does not open.  (I can’t say when the last time this worked was.  I only tried in hopes I could use the Windows Update site.
  6. Add/remove programs shows an empty list.  (Meaning I can’t uninstall Office 2007)

What I unsuccessfully tried to fix it

  1. sfc scan now from Yahoo answers
  2. Running three registry commands from Microsoft knowledge base (also mentioned at Yahoo but I wasn’t about to touch my registry on the advice of a third party site.)  The first gave an error, the other two ran.
  3. Microsoft’s registry fix.  I was able to download it (painfully), but got “install server not responding”
  4. Avast full scan – it hung on the file “c:\windows\system32\drivers\acpiec.sys” about 10% through my hard drive.

What finally worked

Avast’s boot time scan is supposed to run before the drivers are loaded.  Since there was clearly an issue in the driver directory, I decided to try this.  I still didn’t think I had a virus at this point.  The problem CLEARLY showed up right after installing Office 2007, making it Office 2007’s fault, no?

I tried a few times to run the boot scan.  This took a while because each shut down took so long.  And the first two were “unsuccessful shutdowns” where Avast didn’t get the cue that it was supposed to run before Windows launched.

Luckily the boot scan logs everything it finds so you don’t have to watch it.  The process ran for a number of hours and then logged to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Alwil Software\Avast5\report.

The boot scan found a few corrupt zip files (Apache ant documentation, some class file jars) and a bad Open Office OLE file – all of which it logged and ignored.  It then found seven infected files.

Infected by “Java:Jade-“

Avast says this is caused by old Java exploits.  I don’t think these are a problem and am virtually certain they aren’t the cause of my issue.  However since they are in the cache and I hardly use NetBeans, I just deleted them.  (I use Eclipse for development.  NetBeans is only installed for the FIRST robotics plugin code.)

File C:\Documents and Settings\me\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache\6.0\19\66c54313-5302a8c6|>c.class is infected by Java:Jade-A [Heur],

File C:\Documents and Settings\me\Application Data\Sun\Java\Deployment\cache\6.0\52\59ec2974-343db254|>vload.class is infected by Java:Jade-C [Heur], Deleted

Infected by “Win32:Alureon-KG”

Microsoft describes this trojan as being responsible for a range of harmful activities.  None of them look particularly relevant to the problem I’m having.  But they are in a temp directory so no harm in seeing them go.

File C:\Documents and Settings\me\Local Settings\Temp\encrawsxmo.tmp is infected by Win32:Alureon-KG [Trj], Moved to chest
File C:\Documents and Settings\me\Local Settings\Temp\masneowxrc.tmp is infected by Win32:Alureon-KG [Trj], Moved to chest

Infected by “Win32:Malware-gen”

This isn’t good but I don’t have any Symantec products installed anymore.  I switched from Norton to Avast over a year or two ago.

File C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\CCPD-LC\symlcrst.dll is infected by Win32:Malware-gen, Moved to chest

Infected by “Win32:Malware-gen” (part 2)

Eureka! Two dlls are infected by something.  I don’t know which of these was the root cause of my problem, but it was clearly one of them.  I went to check what each of them are for since removing a system file is risky.  dkvcm.exe is a known virus file.  I couldn’t find anything on the dll good or bad.

File C:\System Volume Information\_restore{202550A8-7A33-4BCA-9586-051D24DDBF8F}\RP1238\A0204372.dll is infected by Win32:Malware-gen, Moved to chest

File C:\WINDOWS\system32\dkvcm.exe is infected by Win32:Malware-gen, Moved to chest

Conclusion

I seem to have had a virus lurking that came to life when I installed Office 2007.  Thanks to Avast, all the symptoms are gone now and my machine is back to normal.