So, for the first time in my career today, I had to remove the Sony DRM Rootkit. It hides any files, folders, or registry keys starting in $sys$. Nasty. Here is how you remove it. Quick Fix:
All clean.
Recently, I came across a cache of Fraggle Rock episodes. I watched a few and I remember how much I loved them as a kid. I never got to watch them at home, as we didn’t have cable, but I saw them on the weekends at the babysitter’s house. I absolutely loved them then, and I’m falling in love with them again. Who woulda’ thunk that a geek would like some ancient muppets show. Go figure.
I want a couple of these solid-state flash-based storage devices for my computer. Goodbye load times, hello fast-as-hell rig. I would also love to have one of these 19″ LCD monitors. The reviews are friggin’ awesome, and my monitor is starting to get a little faded at the corners.
Alas, they are not to be, because I have to make my house look pretty so I can sell it and get out from under it before it falls on me .. . and then I’ll really have to get out from under it. The house repairs are much more important and will be worth it later on. I just hope the housing market collapse doesn’t bite me in the ass when I need to get out of here…
Once upon a time, a long time ago, my co-workers and I submitted Leaded Mario Brothers to ocremix.org twice, and both times were rejected. They said it was too much like the original, the production was bad, and that we should get a real drummer. All I can say is:
Everyone I have had listen to the song loves it, including a guy who
plays in a band professionally. The ocremix.org people are stupid.
So, I was bailing out two of my technicians, because a computer they both worked on came back for Blue Screen Of Death and Firefox crashing issues. (To their credit, the suggestions I gave them based on the information they gave me didn’t help them fix it. :oP) After some digging, and a very lucky crash while trying to convert the filesystem from FAT32 to NTFS, I found out it was a rootkit infection! So, if your Windows 2K/XP/2003 machine is giving a STOP 0x0000008e on boot,.reboot, or during lots of filesystem access -or- STOP 0×00000044 while surfing the net, especially in Firefox, -or- you get a STOP error message with the module lzx32.sys, you probably have a Backdoor.Rustock.B infection. Quick Fix: Boot your machine to a Recovery Console using your Windows Install CD, type DISABLE pe386 (this disables the rootkit), eject CD, Boot into normal mode, and run rustbfix.exe. Thanks to Symantec and the guy who made the rootkit killer.