I have upgraded the site to Wordpress 1.5 at the beginning of the week. The new version features a cleaner administration interface and a bunch of new features. One of the nicest ones that I will need to put to use soon is the new spam protection for comments. I had to turn my comments off earlier this year because of an annoying casino site that systematically wrote spam comments for every single one of my posts. I think everything on the site is working correctly. Let me know if you see anything strange.

I spent Thursday night remotely working on a computer belonging to a friend of my wife’s, riddled with spyware, trojans and viruses. The first problem seen was that Internet Explorer would not work at all. When starting it, it would simply display a page saying that the page request could not be found. Classic behaviour of spyware.

My first step was to send her a copy of Mozilla Firefox, my favorite reliable browser from the Mozilla foundation. With this, I was then able to access the internet again. I then went on to download Ad-Aware SE, a good spyware killer. I started running a scan using it. A few second after starting the scan, a dialog showed up, saying that the computer would be shutting in 60 seconds, as requested through an RPC call from a service on the system. I was not sure what to do at first and the machine rebooted.

After some research on the web (and two or three reboots trying different things out), I found that the shutdown command probably came from the pest I was trying to remove, which might be the MS Blaster worm or other known worms. I also found that it was possible to stop the shutdown of the computer during the countdown by running the command:

shutdown.exe -a

You can run this command from the Start | Run menu or by creating a simple batch file. Once the shutdown was aborted, I was able to run Ad-Aware and remove most of the problems. I then ran a scan with Spybot Search & Destroy and got rid of the rest of the problems. Finally, a good scan from AVG Anti-Virus caught some last remaining problems and the machine was clean and ready to go.

I learned something with this darn shutdown command that I won’t forget.

The latest incarnation of the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Enterprise, has just been cancelled by the UPN network. Althrough the third season was a bit of a drag, season 4 had some great story lines and kept my interest up from week to week. It’s a real shame that UPN decided to cancel it. There is still a campaign going on at SaveEnterprise.com to try to get the show back on another network. Check it out to participate in the efforts to try to get the show back on the air.

For a while, everyone was saying that season 8 of Stargate SG-1 was going to be the last one. However, I just learned today that both SG-1 and its spin-off series Stargate:Atlantis have been renewed for next year. Personnally, I have gotten much more attached to Atlantis since I have seen all episodes as opposed to SG-1 where I’ve not even seen a quarter. The beginning of Atlantis was a bit slow but the second half of the season was explosive and the characters keep getting more attaching.

As well, I just saw that a video game is being made set in the Stargate universe. It is a first-person game (probably a shooter) and will be called Stargate SG-1: The Alliance.