The Conficker Worm, aka Downadup Worm is on a rampage.  Panda Security found it in January and it has been taking a real chunk out of the Windows desktop space.  I read this in the March 2009 issue of CSO Magazine, and thought you would like a little more detail.  (technorati code mbk5hqf7xd) (more…)

Not long ago, I told you the unfolding story of the FBI helping a set of Nigerian scammers who were upset that their identities were being stolen by some other set of Nigerian scammers.

Now Mr Robert Mueller III, who is apparently the Director of the FBI, says I haven’t fulfilled my financial obligations to get my payment.  Now remember, I don’t have any payment coming from Nigeria. (more…)

I updated one of our machines from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 about a week ago and an error appeared.. The mouse and keyboard input were ignored at the log-in screen. I found a work-around, which was to go into TTY1 (straight command line terminal emulator screen – like starting Windows in Command-line-only mode) by hitting [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F1] keys, logging in as a standard user, then using the command ps -a to find the PID (process ID) for xorg (the GUI X-server). Then sudo kill -9 [PID# for xorg]. After that I could type in startx (which restarts the Xserver) and since I was already logged in, the GUI session could continue normally. (more…)

I have updated the info on OpenOffice.org Templates onhttp://wolfhalton.info/openofficeorg-templates/

The template-delivery system has gotten much better!  The joy of Open Source is that the community has a way of solving your problems while solving their own.

Easter Eggs in programming are undocumented features.  These are usually passed down by word of mouth.  Here are three

Free the Fish

This is a GUI Egg..

Hit [Alt] + [F2] – This opens the command-line dialog which is similar to the Windows “Start| Run..” sequence.  In the dialog box, type “free the fish”  without the quotes, and a little graphical fish will swim in from the lower left of your screen.  The fish does not appear to be for doing anything, but it is entertaining.  If you click on the fish, it escapes off the screen and does not reappear.    This worked in Fedora8 when I tested it – even on the Live disc of Fedora8, also on Ubuntu 8.10 (more…)

This was very interesting.  You probably go to a lot of sites and you may sign up at a lot of sites, or for email courses.  Confirmation emails are quite common in my test inbox, just as they may be common for you.  Here is an example of a phishing email dressed up as a Confirmation.   (more…)

Discovered by researcher Gean Huston last week.  The keyboard shortcut “(Alt)/” = “ls -a”  without the color-coding.

Gean was doing a standard Command-line exercise when his finger slipped.  Much to his surprise, the display in the terminal window filled with text.  Upon closer inspection, he discovered that the text was the content of the current directory location.  With careful back-tracking of possible keystroke combinations, he discovered this undocumented shortcut.   (more…)

Adding a printed Watermark into an OpenOffice.org Document takes two steps. First you have to design your watermark in a graphics application and then add it to the document.

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