Dooms-(the)-day

Let me see. I've had my breakfast. My daily 1 hour dose of watching music video on YouTube. Have read the morning paper. Now the only thing left to do, doomsday be doomed, is hit the bed and go to sleep; for those who don't know, I work in the night shift for BPO in Bangalore so don't be surprised about me hitting the sack at 9 in the morning. Like all Doomsday predictions and prophecies, this too shall pass. I'd rather not (literally) lose my sleep over it, even in the unlikely event that the LHC or Large Hadron Collider does cause a black hole. For those who want to pray, this video is for them. Juggy D's Akheer, a devotional song in Punjabi

If all goes well, and it will, I'll make my next post once I wake up, unless as usual I'm too lazy for it.

Yahoo Steals Photo From Flickr (?)

Flickr has been heaven for copyright violaters and photography thieves for quite some time now.. There are numerous stories on how someone's pic got stolen and was used by all the way from I-cant-shoot-good-but-I-cant-steal-and-show-off-online type of guys, to ad agencies and newspapers of national and international repute.. But who would have guessed something like this happening, or did someone? Yesterday, when I into the Yahoo mail ID, I saw a pic of a pug in one of the advertisement links.. After seeing the loads of dog pics day in and day out from the CUPA dog show that Bangalore Weekend Shoots/BWS (online Flickr group) attended recently, I thought I must be mistaken but that photo looked too familiar.. So thought would check it out starting with the BWS group pool itself then if I dont find it maybe check out individual pools of the photogs who attended the shoot that day. Anyway, I didnt have to search far.. A couple of pages down in the group pool, and I found the photo here http://www.flickr.com/photos/muttly/2663009361/

Click here to see the screenshot of the Yahoo page that I uploaded to Zooomr. The ad link directed to Yahoo Music site.

Can you believe Yahoo stealing directly from its own website (Flickr)? Do note that the photograph is copyrighted and tagged All Rights Reserved so Yahoo has no right of using the photograph anywhere. Even if Flickr is a Yahoo Co., the Copyright still belongs to the photographer. Yahoo does use Flickr images on its Flickr sign-in page but those are under Creative Commons licence. And yes, I did check with the photographer, Prabhu, who happens to be my friend, and he denied having given usage rights of this photo to anyone.. So, there you have it.. Wonder what explanation Yahoo can give for this one..

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I wrote the above entry in my blog yesterday.. I did login to my mail again today and though I F5'd a couple of times, I couldn't see the ad again today.. Today, as an afterthought, what baffles me is the quality of the pic in the ad was such low quality but the Flickr photo is of high quality.. Plus no mention of Yahoo Music anywhere on the photo despite the fact that the link pointed to that site. What sort of ad has a totally unrelated picture with no mention of the site its pointing to? Freak technical accident? Perhaps and quite possible but how?

FireFox v3.0

So the much awaited update for FireFox is out. Mozilla is trying to achieve a Guiness Record for the maximum number of downloads for a software in 24 hours. So take my word and go ahead download it first from here http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/. You can get fully localised browser versions also from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html. I have hardly used it for 15 minutes now and it already rocks. For starters, its faster than the previous version. Honestly, I didnt like the previous one much. I have had some issues but my loyality doesnt permit me to speak out against FF. Anyway, thats history now I guess. The only temporary downside I have noticed until now is that about half of my add-ons are yet to release v3 compatible updates but that will not be long.

Twitter

I just created an account in Twitter -(username: Shreelesh). I have no much idea how it works and even lesser idea about how its going to help. Though I do know some people who are twitters.

When Virus Attacks - Virtumonde

A while back I had this bad infection by, what I found out later to be an AdWare called, Virtumonde. There were 2 infected .dll files in my system32 folder what I believe 2 different strains of Virtumonde. ZoneAlarm successfully detected both the infected files but it could neither rename, delete, quarantine or do anything with it despite repeated attempts over many days. I tried scanning the system with AVG and Avast antivirus but neither detected the virus. Now, since it was an AdWare as it proclaimed itself as, I tried using AdWare and SpyBot to no avail. Then somewhere in the www I found its a Trojan! And I started downloading Trojan/Malware removers. Tried a lot of them but none seemed to even detect it. I tried to unhook the .dll from its process using Unlocker but the moment I unhook it the system used to restart. After some a dozen odd softwares failed to fix it, something just struck and I scheduled a boot-time scan on my Avast antivirus and THAT finally got rid of the virus and I haven't had any problems with it after that.

Now, there is a lot of stuff on many forums on how to remove it but none of those methods worked either for me nor for the people who had posted for help. It is such a damned persistent virus that it keeps coming back and infecting the system sometimes by even residing and hiding in memory. Besides, all those process were too long. It is an old virus so I am surprised why I couldn't find any credible cures on the net. Anyway, thats one lesson learnt for me.

Gtalk and Winamp 5.5 Incompatibility

Now this is one stuff I never expected. Two of the most loved (and free) apps incompatible with each other. I have not been using Winamp for a while now - ever since I lost all my songs in a HD crash. Anyway, just downloaded Winamp 5.5 yesterday, started playing Shanghai Breezes by John Denver and clicked on "Show current music track" in Gtalk and forgot about it. A while later, I noticed Gtalk has frozen. Initially, I thought it has something to do with Azureus. I mean who would think Winamp would cause a problem! (?) Finally figured that out. I knew the old versions worked like a breeze so the first option was to install an older one but why give up so easy. Googled for it came across Winamp Forum. I'll leave out the technical stuff and come to the point. To fix the problem you can either use the old version or if you want to use v5.5, open notepad and save it with the name "winamp.m3u" in the winamp directory.

Of course, there's a roundabout way of installing an old version and then just upgrading to v5.5 but what that does is still the same I guess - retain the .m3u file in the directory.