Monthly Archives: January 2010

Intrusive software

I’d like to take a minute and complain about one instance of software that did things to my computer which I didn’t expect. I’m not talking about a virus where the transgression is fairly obvious. I’m talking about Silverlight – one of the less successful attempts of Microsoft to take over the web. Even though few web sites use it, Microsoft, of course, uses it prodigiously on their own. One web site that I frequent is the Tuva project, created by Microsoft, which hosts a video collection of Dr Richard Feynman’s lectures on physics, and instead of Flash Microsoft opted to use Silverlight to deliver the video.

My computer is fairly slow, so web video causes it some discomfort, but while watching the lectures I found that any other program (apart from the browser) that I try to use at the same time is completely unresponsive. The reason for this is because the moment the page loads the Silverlight component, the priority of the browser’s process is increased from “normal” to “above normal,” and as it pegs my CPU at 100%, no other program can function. Job well done!

Richard Feynman quote about nature

Nature only uses the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Dr Feynman is referring to the fact that if you can find a simple mechanism that explains a complex system, then you can expect that mechanism to work in other places, possibly throughout all of nature. You can explain the motion of the planets around the sun with Newton’s theory of gravity and then notice that that same theory works for humans being pulled toward the center of the Earth, and that our solar system orbits around the center of the Milky Way. Thus, an example of the “small piece,” to which he is referring, is gravity.

Insight into grad student’s life

I saw this on a grad school oriented forum. I thought it was hilarious, but go ahead and judge for yourselves.

In my department in grad school (not humanities) we were told by our director of grad studies that we should aim for A-’s because anything less meant we didn’t work hard enough in our classes and anything more meant we didn’t work hard enough at our research, such that we had too much free time to spend on our classes.

A gentleman of a virus

A friend of mine got a virus yesterday that did the usual stuff: porn pop-ups, fake anti-virus solution offerings, etc. What made the virus exceptional is that it was contained within a single binary on the hard drive, located in %appdata%. It was nowhere else. In addition, it had two registry keys that placed it in the startup list for both the computer in general and the current user in particular. Once I removed all these, there was absolutely no trace of the virus left! Usually viruses latch on to Windows and become a symbiotic organism. Windows would work fairly poorly with the virus running, but if you attempt to remove it, Windows would completely stop to function. The only thing I could find that was tampered with was that Internet Explorer was set up to use a proxy which pointed to localhost:5555. After the virus was gone, IE stopped working of course, but it was simple to fix. I know what you’re thinking right now, and all I can say is “Well, of course they use IE!”

I guess the people who program most viruses just like causing mayhem apart from whatever monetary gains they might get from interested parties. But not the ones that invented this virus… I regret to say that I forgot its name, and it is now too late to find out what it was. I wanted to extend my thanks to them for being such gentlemen.