Viva Emptiness - Matt’s Blog

Someone once said (apparently) that the World is divided into two groups of people - those that have read The Lord of the Rings and those that are going to read The Lord of the Rings.

I think the same thing can he said about watching Firefly.

Joss Whedon’s superb scifi was released in 2001 one and was cancelled by Fox (henceforth referred to as ‘Morons’) before the year was out. The list of crimes committed by the ‘Morons’ is lengthy:

1. They expected another Buffy or Angel. Both good entertainment, but neither is going to change the world.
2. They didn’t start with the 2 hour pilot ‘Serenity’ which explained the backstory, introduced the characters, etc.
3. They showed the episodes at different times every week, out of order.
4. They didn’t air every episode that was made before pulling it.

Surely one of the ‘Morons’ must have hated Joss Whedon.

In what has become a perfect example of the power of fandom, Firefly didn’t die. It lived on the in hearts and minds of the thousands of fans (The ‘Browncoats’) whose lives had been touched by this amazing show. They petitioned, they wrote letters, they championed the cause. The bought the DVD (the first and only way to actually see every episode in order) in thousands.
The end result of this was Universal Studios being convinced that Firefly deserved a chance and in 2004 they announced the release of ‘Serenity’ the movie.

I’ve seen a number of different series over the years, but none are as good as Firefly. You can keep your Star Treks, your Andromedas and your Stargates. Firefly beats them all. If you’ve not watched it you need to. Seriously, it really is that good.

Shiny!

My recent virus problem, everlasting love of Linux especially with the release of Beryl, and decision that I hardly play PC games any more is making the case for me to make my main OS Linux.

I’m very close to making the jump away from Windows completely - I’m on XP at the moment and see no point in moving to Vista or the latest version of office. Right now the reasons for me keeping Windows are:

Games - esp Steam/Counter strike
Photoshop
iTunes/iPod support
Programs my wife uses (OU software that uses Windows)
Looks like the best thing for me to attempt is a dual-boot system, with Linux as the default. We’ll see how I get one.

ARGH!

I got hit with an MSN malware virus on Sunday and it’s taken me two days to clear the fucking thing off my system. All because I accepted something off a friend on MSN.

If you accept it, it writes to your registry (registering a COM object) and places files in your %system% folder. It’s a pig to remove.

I now believe that:

1. Microsoft are stupid cunts

2. Virus writers are just cunts

(Actually thinking about it, I already knew both of those things..)

You’ll know you have it because it launches MSN and sends the virus to all your online contacts - great way to make yourself popular.
So, how does one remove the virus?

Firstly it’s worth noting that Mcafee won’t find it, and from what I can tell neither will AVG. In fact the only AV vendor (at time of rant) that knows about it is Sophos and they have reported on their site.

The easiest way that I can find to remove the virus is to do it yourself:

1. Get Hijackthis from:
http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/threat_analytics/hijackthis.php

2. Run it and check the results, you’ll see:

O21 - *blah blah class stuff* followed by “sysprinters.dll (file missing)
This is the registry entry with pointing to the offending file. Check this in Hijackthis and click “Fix Checked” - accept the message.

3. Reboot and remove the following files:
c:\documents and settings\*your id*\new.txt
c:\windows\myalbum2007.zip
c:\windows\sysprinters.dll
c:\install - with a couple of files in there including credits.bat

4. Done! Now go and apologise to all your friends…
Obviously finish with another check on Hijackthis and run a full AV scan.

Update

I ran through http://www.virustotal.com with the following results.

My own AV software (Mcafee) still doesn’t detect it! Greaaat…

Food for thought next time you consider buying a new AV tool…