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Hahaha Windows worm… I wonder if thinkgeek.com sells teleporters

o/` BOA – Anna Maria o/`

Yesterday was ok. After my burst of caffeine that I had earlier in the day I quickly became to realize that I really hadn’t had much sleep the night before and I was exhausted. I spent most of the afternoon having trouble focusing on anything. I was working up the design for the #WheelOfTime website and I couldn’t even think clear enough for that! Gah… I sat around chat on xelium for a bit. Surfed the web a little, but that couldn’t keep my interest. So I just wasted away the afternoon trying to resist taking a nap.

While hanging out in #13thHour I had the “pleasure” to see one of my friend struggling with some sort of worm that was causing Windows XP to reboot at random intervals, sometimes a minute apart. Another friend began to help her out when someone else showed up in the channel with the same problems. Strange, I thought. But I am horribly inexperienced with worms, the last time I got one was in 2001 and I just reinstalled. So I sat back and chuckled. Well after watching this play out for a while I saw someone in the xelium #support channel report the same problems on his system (why he came to IRC support I still don’t know…). I informed him that it was a virus or worm. That’s when another IRCop piped up and reported that two of his friends were having similar troubles! Well I didn’t really put any effort into helping, I honestly don’t know enough windows to even know where to look for the problem. I know of at least one person who just decided to give up and reinstall his C drive and hope the other harddrives weren’t infected. Then another friend of mine ended up dropping by #13thHour last night saying she had the same problem. Bleh.

Well it turns out this was an RPC DCOM worm (Washington Post News on it). Spread rapidly all day yesterday and by late last night there were virus scanner patches and fixes out to deal with it (apparently the windows patch had been released previously?). It’s neat that I could watch this thing spreading, and laugh. The best part is that even if I had been using Windows I would have been fine, secure firewalls are good!

Damn Windows. I certainly don’t miss these problems %)

My father’s birthday is on Saturday. I am not sure how I want to approach this, maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing. I have his cellphone number, maybe I should get ahold of Heather first and see if they have plans that day… or maybe just call him up and risk the chance of catching him at a bad time. I’ll just call, ask about the weather, briefly ask how he is, and wish him a happy birthday. I don’t think I can afford to get more involved than that. Ok, this should be simple. It’s just a phone call. I can’t cop out like I did on Father’s Day.

The Philly Chix meeting is tomorrow night. Looks like Sam will show up, and “stargirl” who is a woman from the uk who is in Philly for the summer. It should be a nice time and I’m looking forward to it. I’m not really looking forward to actually getting into the city, but that’s no big surprise, trains are expensive take forever, and driving is stressful. I need a teleporter, I wonder if they sell them on thinkgeek %D

I need direction again. Last week I spent working on that perl weatherbot, and now I’m starting to feel like I don’t have anything to do again. I guess I can keep on learning about bash scripting, I’ve learned some very interesting things just after reading through parts of that scripting tutorial that I mentioned in a previous entry. You know, speaking of shell scripting, that reminds me. This morning my friend Ocean-Saurian (who is taking a required intro to linux class for college) came into #deep13 asking how to run a script. My first response was ./scriptname because that’s how I had first learned. Then I went ahead and explained the requirements for running this way (had to be executable, had to define what shell/program to run it with with #! so it didn’t make a mistake and use the wrong shell). Then
I told him about the `bash scriptname` way to run the file. That’s when he said his teacher told him that they could run it just by typing the file. Hm. I quickly explained $PATH and said that if it was in a $PATH then sure it could be executed just by typing the name. Well apparently what he actually meant was typing /full/path/to/scriptname. Right. OS came back later and told me that is teacher didn’t know about the ./ way to run a script. Um… seriously? I find that difficult to believe, where did this TEACHER learn his *nix from? Scary.

Hm today… dunno what I’ll do. It’s only 10 am now.. I’m sure I’ll figure out something. *wanders off*