Plakboek

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

Virus madness

Frustrating session, trying to remove virus and trojan software from a heavily infected notebook computer running Windows XP. I have a picture of my old IBM R30 thinkpad computer here. This problem was causing the owner some grief with a flood of outbound e-mail each time they connected to the Internet.

Thankfully Symantic was able to stop .. but only to a point. Check out the picture. This image is not a special effect or background picture but an overload of hundreds of warning messages that needed to be individually closed. The barrage of alert messages prevented any meaningful use of the computer by the owner. This was only part of the problem with other viruses and trojan software lurking on the laptop. You can see a portion on this r30-virus series of screenshots that I took.

I managed to clean up the laptop with Spybot and some other tools. Afterwards I replaced Internet Explorer with Firefox, deleted Outlook and installed Thunderbird and Open Office. Lastly I educated the laptop owner about not opening odd attachments or links on web popups. Next step was to install Xubuntu.

So far the advice and action seems to have worked.

mood:

drained

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Sunday, January 14th, 2007

Leverage the technology

I notice in a recent Age Newspaper report that the Northern Territory Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) is piloting some laptops from the OLPC to decide whether to go ahead with a trial program involving a whole class of Australian students for an extended period. From the extended pilot project they are keen to establish the learning benefits and identify the associated teaching strategies and resources required.

Perhaps we should not be suprised to read that some Australian indigenous children are exposed to conditions typical of those expected in developing countries. Although we contacted the Australian United Nations office about their knowledge of the OLPC project last year, nobody got back to us. At least now from the news report I have a real person to contact and try again.

ITWire reports (6 Jan 2007) that Google's Open Source Program Office donated to some notebook computers to schools in Fiji. The 10 Lenovo Thinkpads were delivered with Edubuntu, Open Office, Gimp and other specialist education software preinstalled. In the post, MIT staffer Jonathan Proulx indicated that the use of Free Open Source Software was critical to the sustainability and adaptability of the project. "Since it's free, there's no additional software cost when the project expands, or if community groups wish to further leverage the technology."

I raised the article with the KhmerOS team to gauge their thoughts of this Linux distribution.

mood:

contemplative

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Friday, February 24th, 2006

Around the VITTA table

Planning around the table

Interesting VITTA planning weekend with many issues to consider by the Committee of Management. I am glad that these venues provide wireless for all their guests for a swag of reasons. Whilst I could do an idle desktop or Internet search during reports, others were checking out new features of the website that I was reporting on. This meeting soon broke up to watch an outdoor wedding that was taking place below in the country garden.

In between meeting sessions I helped enable wireless on PDA's, configured notebooks and ran adhoc workshops on Moodle or OpenOffice. It was great to have a walk and talk outside with amongst the vinyards, gardens, security geese and old buildings.

In the evening the lads and I retired to play some pool. I played two very poor games, missing the ball twice and forgetting what ball I was supposed to sink. This was followed by a spectacular series of six, straight shots that cleared the table and ended the game! At that point I promptly retired to do some cartwheels outside.

mood:

exhausted

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