I just finished helping a friend remove some pretty bad spyware from his system. In addition to the usual removal tools - AdAware, and Spybot I found the Autoruns utility from Sysinternals to be very useful.

It is a comprehensive piece of software that will allow you to see every possible startup program in one place. It beats searching through the registry by hand.

Best of all it is totally free, and can be downloaded from Microsoft here:

http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Autoruns.zip

More info about the utility can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/Autoruns.mspx

• Michael Dell: Vista will win out in two years
  Dell says what many of us know, Vista uptake is slow, but will come around quickly once businesses have time to test it, and hardware is compatible.
  (tags: PR )
• Vista ReadyDrive and hybrid hard drives (HHD) bring no power savings for laptops
  You’ll need a solid state drive (SDD) to see any significant power savings.
  (tags: Power ReadyDrive HHD )

About phpDesigner 2007 Professional 5.5.2

phpDesigner 2007 Professional 5.5.2
- The PHP IDE/editor for PHP development now featuring remote FTP editing and support for PHP frameworks!

Everything you need for developing high performance web solutions!
Popular award-winning PHP IDE/ PHP editor featuring everything you need for editing, analyzing and publishing applications/websites powered by PHP with full support for PHP 5.2 and PHP 4.4, HTML and CSS!

Wine configuration

This is with a clean configuration directory and running in a 1024×768 virtual desktop.

$ winecfg

Once the .wine directory is built the configuration tool will start and you can set a virtul desktop in the graphics tab if you wish. You will also want to set richedit20.dll & richedit32.dll as navite (Windows)

Now install the richedit30 update, make sure you go to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 and rename richedit20.dll and richedit32.dll to *.bak or the richedit update wont work.

tom@tom:~$ wine richedit30.exe
fixme:midi:OSS_MidiInit Synthesizer supports MIDI in. Not yet supported.
tom@tom:~$

You will also need native showdoc.dll and mshtml.dll from windows in your system32 directory. And set the dlls to native (Windows) in winecfg.

Installing phpDesigner 2007

Download phpDesigner 2007 from here.

tom@tom:~$ wine phpdesigner2007_setup.exe
fixme:reg:GetNativeSystemInfo (0×34fea0) using GetSystemInfo()
fixme:process:IsWow64Process (0xffffffff 0×34fe9c) stub!

phpDesigner 2007 first run

Feel free to comment about this post at the wine-forum.

1&1, popular website hosting service and domain name registrar, have a very serious problem with their nameserver configuration web interface.

We’re hosting our own domains with 1and1 (pointing to our dedicated servers hosted with the excellent and much-recommended Lunarpages), and were attempting to reconfigure our nameservers to point to a different IP address. We went into the 1&1 admin interface and attempted to re-configure the neosmart.net nameservers to point to the new IP - a week later, the DNS hadn’t yet propogated and we couldn’t find a good explanation.

This was how we had originally set up our nameserver entries in the 1and1 web administration center:

Businessweek reports that Apple may indeed be launching an official software development kit at this January’s Macworld Expo.

According to “sources familiar with the company’s plans”:
Apple will release a software-development kit for the iPhone in early 2008, enabling programmers to create games, business-productivity tools, and countless other applications for the device.

This is the latest iteration of rumors that Apple will or will not be introducing an official software development kit for the iPhone. At present, Apple’s official stance is that applications for the iPhone should be written using web-technologies (HTML/Javascript) to be accessible through the iPhone’s Safari.

A number of conflicting reports have expressed beliefs that Apple would further expand these Web tools or invite specific developers to produce true applications on the iPhone.

Read more here

Available 26th Oct.

Read more here