The videos:
http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/
The Speakers:
Sam Altman
Founder, Loopt
Marc Andreessen
Founder, Ning, Opsware, Netscape; Creator of Mosaic
Michael Arrington
Editor, TechCrunch
Jeff Bezos
Founder, Amazon.com
Paul Buchheit
Founder, FriendFeed; Creator of GMail
Paul Graham
Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb
David Heinemeier Hansson
Creator of Rails; Partner, 37Signals
David Lawee
Vice President of Corporate Development, Google; Founder, Xfire
Jack Sheridan
Partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Greg McAdoo
Partner, Sequoia Capital
Peter Norvig
Director of Research, Google
few hours ago I wrote a blog post about google's chrome browser, now it has been released and I've spent a couple of hours toying around with it a bit.
You can read about the technical specs of the new browser here.
First impressions
The good
It's slick, the user interface is bare bones. No menu's to speak off no title bar, it starts with tabs and there are some browsing essential buttons (refresh, back, forward) the usual.
It's fast, loading pages feels fast, browsing through the pages also feels fast.
It includes its own taskmanager, this is ideal for flash ads slowing things down, when you have a lot of pages open with flash ads things tend to get slow, just kill it with the task manager and you've got speed back.
Autocompletion in the Javascript console
Best popupblocker implementation I've seen in a while.
Nice unintrusive downloadmanager.
If you need to use webmail, use this browser, thats basicly because the javascript engine is FAST.
Hotmail doesn't yet work with this browser or at least the advanced mode doesn't yet work with this browser,, but google's own gmail flies with it.
One of the early benchmarks for Chrome can be found here.
The bad
F1 = for help - not so in chrome.
View Source = right click + somewhere in the popup list - not so in chrome
The middle mouse button scroller is gone.
Memory usage is quite hefty, probably the biggest user of memory of current browsers. Firefox 2, might have used more.
I don't understand the autocompletion in the Javascript console.
Noooo, not another browser I need to test :(
My thoughts
The timing is right for this release, the most impressive thing about this browser is the Javascript engine which is currently the king of the round in terms of speed.
Problem for google is that Firefox is working on a new Javascript engine which will be a lot faster.
Safari, same thing.
Also the target market for this browser seems to be the people which aren't very technical, It has simplified browsing written all over it and that is a good thing :)
Google's browser will be launched tomorrow but there is already a lot known about the browser.
- It will use webkit which is already in use by: Safari, Konquerer, Google's Android, Nokia browser and some others.
- It will use a custom javascript engine named: v8 which is a VM based engine.
- Each tab will have it's own process, so when it crashes it only brings down the tab not the whole browser.
- There will be a task / process manager keeping track of all the processes and things happening with them including plugins used on a tab by tab base.
- An intelligent addressbar, same thing which is happening with IE8 / FF3
- New tabs will open an opera quickstart kind of page with 9 quick select slots and most used search terms
- No auto popups, popups will be confined to their own tabs (I smell problems here)
- Google Gears included
- Fully open source
My expectations are that this browser will become a very populair choice and will be eating away at Firefox market share in a pretty short time.
This also means that the webkit engine is one to be tested for with so many backers this engine will only continue to grow, and for me safari for windows seems pretty fast, which means that this browser will probably be even faster.
A while back I created a little utility to upload files to MediaFire which is a file hosting service. MediaFire supports uploading of files up to 100 MB in a free account with unlimited storage, and is in my opinion one of the best free online storage possibilities out there.
It has galleries for pictures, nag free FAST downloads, sharing options, file manager the works.
It now also has a paid option which has additional features.
The news is that they added in a Flash uploader which makes it possible to smoothly upload a lot of files through there web interface which makes my previous upload utility obsolete, or at least I think so.
If you would like to see the utility updated or think it still has a right to be here, please let me know but for me the itch is probably scratched for now :)
Prelude
When your getting ready to start doing the tasks at hand you will have to start organizing the different tasks and prioritizing these tasks.
The easiest way of doing this is by using a Todolist application, there are a lot of different strategies of getting more productive but most of these ways and ideas are to get organized by using todo lists.
The main advantages of Todolists
- Support: Getting Things Done (GTD)
- Making it possible to plan things in a simple fashion
- Centralizing information and tracking of progress
- Organize tasks into projects and break down tasks into manageable chunks
Getting things done
Getting things done is a famous book and is also very much something you will want to study as a developer.
It makes heavy use of lists to organize the things you need to do.
Getting to stress-free productivity, from wikipedia:
The notion of stress-free productivity starts with off-loading what needs to get done from one's head, capturing everything that is necessary to track, remember, or act on in what Allen calls a bucket: a physical inbox, an email inbox, a tape recorder, a notebook, a PDA, or any combination of these. The idea is to get everything out of one's head and into a collection device, ready for processing. All buckets should be emptied (processed) at least once per week.
A developers view of this methodology:
The Joy of Freeing Up Mental RAM
10 Practical Tips on Freeing up Mental RAM
Getting started with GTD
and finally:
How to get yourself to actually do the things on the list.
The different options in Todo lists
Offline todo lists
Use Visual Studio's task list option, you can also utilize it through your code.
The Outlook task list option this one has it's own blog there is even a sidebar gadget.
If you practicly live in one of those applications it's nice to be able to use them as your todo list tool of choice.
Abstract spoon has made a very nice todo list application you can download the source code and read a codeproject page about it.
Online todo lists
Simple shareable lists
Tadalist: You can't get any simpler, the application which caused
Blablalist: My current choice of todolist
More advanced lists
Todoist: Todo lists on steroids with repeating items, scheduling reminders, keyboard accelerators etc.
Remember the milk: meta data, integration into a lot of different things, twitter, Google agenda and more.
Voo2do: mixing simple time tracking and todo lists.
Conclusion
With an organized overview of tasks and source control set up we are totally ready to start with development.
Well ok you do actually have to set up your development environment.
If you want help or direction in other things getting started please leave a comment and perhaps I can write another article about that.
Prelude
This will hopefully be the start of a series of posts / articles about the basic information/skills needed for different software development.
Source Control
Source control is one of the things you need to set up before starting to do the actual development.
Before creating things of value it's wise to make sure that your investment is guarded.
Source control is there for this need.
Not only can it be used to keep your source code and files safe but it will also allow you to keep different revisions of files available so you can revert to any other version of the files.
This can be great for going back to the way things worked in version x or the way things looked in version y.
More information on Source control / Revision control.
Source Control: Tutorials / Lingo
Since this is very nicely explained by others I will just link to some tutorials by others:
Different Source Control providers
There are a lot of different source control system a brief overview:
- Visual Sourcesafe: free solution by Microsoft, this one is not really recommended by most people
- Sourcegear Vault: commercial solution created by Sourcegear to be Sourcesafe done right.
- SVN: Free open source source control and the default Source Control solution nowadays
- Git: The new source control kid on the block
For me the most interesting source control solutions at the moment are:
SVN / Git
So I will go into these options some more but first lets have a look at a comparison between SVN and Git.
SVN
How to set it up on windows.
How to use it on a daily basis.
A free book about SVN.
Git
Daily usage of Git.
Git commit policies.
Source control hosting options
If you want to get started with source control but you don't want to take ages to set up a server and things like that there is also the option, for going for a hosted option.
There are a lot of different hosting options for SVN, there are also a lot of options coming up for Git hosting.
Some are free others aren't the ones I've tried:
Unfuddle
Assembla
Springloops
And all looked well.
Here is also a comparsion list of different Source control hosters.
Conclusion
Source Control should be the first thing you think of before starting to develop, with this article I hope to have given the readers a head start on how to go about actually using it in a correct way and getting started.
Highlights of new functionality included
- JScript debugger .
- Webslices (sort of widget extractor for websites)
- Activities (extend your right click with custom menus)
- HTML View (think firebug /
Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar)
Other important changes
- Connections per host increased
this was 2 connections and will go up to 6 when a highspeed connection is detected.
- Increased Javascript speed
- It will break the visuals from quite a few sites and some sites (windows update amongst others)
More information:
Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit website Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Whitepapers More information can be found in the release notes
How to test
For this Microsoft supplies VPC images, this will be your best bet to test since you probably won't easily be able to run the IE instances side by side.
Internet Explorer Test VPC Images
The download links
IE8 for different windows versions
Microsoft Expression Web Beta
Also out, is something I missed, Microsoft Expression Web Beta
This is Microsofts answer to Dreamweaver.
Most important new features:
- PHP support (intellicense / previews)
- Media support extended (Silverlight + Windows Media enhancements)
- Photoshop integration (import with live update)
- FTP enhancements
- Support for new ASP.NET functionality (3.5 / MS AJAX)
Introduction
What is MVC
MVC stands for:
Model (database)
Controller (business logic)
View (what you see + view logic)
It is used to separate the logic from a web application and other types of applications into these 3 logical parts.
There are a lot of people who think this makes development easier and more maintainable. For more information on MVC click here.
What is Ruby On Rails
Ruby On Rails, ROR for short is the framework which took the world by storm.
Or it just caused a storm, one or the other, but I guess it made the whole MVC idea a whole lot more famous.
Ruby is the language on which this framework is built, the characteristics of Ruby as it stands now is that the language is very powerful and expressive but runs pretty slow
What is ASP.NET (Webforms)
ASP.NET is currently set up in a way that it tries to mimic windows programming as much as possible.
This means that it is event driven and supports concepts which make it more like a statefull windows program.
This means that you can for instance drag a button on a webform and double click this button to add an action to it.
Double click the form, to type in an action which is done when the page is loaded.
This means that this form of programming is a form of event driven programming.
What is ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC is the Microsoft implementation of MVC.
It does away with the event driven programming and it doesn't try to be statefull. With these choices it gains a few things and loses a few others.
Differences Between them in a feature chart
I think the best way to highlight some of the differences between the platforms is to highlight these difference in some charts. So without further ado let's have a look at the differences:
Webforms vs MVC
| | Webforms | MVC |
| URL's | through pagenames / URL rewriting.
Standard:
pagename.aspx | through routing
programmaticly set up the url's by default this works through REST like interfaces.
Standard: controller/action/param |
| Event driven | Yes | No |
| Statefull | Yes (Viewstate) | No |
| Easily unit tested | No | Yes |
| Easily View tested | same | same |
| Can use designer easily | Yes | No (I think) |
| Double Click to get action | Yes | No |
| Different view engines supported | No | Yes |
| Support AJAX easily | Yes | Yes |
| Support ASP.NET Request / Response objects | Yes | Yes |
| Supports Dynamic Languages | Yes | Yes |
| Can play well with the other | Yes | Yes |
| Abstraction from html | Yes | No |
| Exact control over html | No | Yes |
| Support ORM | Yes | Yes |
| Will be able to use library of third party controls for ASP.NET | Yes | Partial (no state / postback controls only) |
| Works on Linux / Mono | Yes (Partial) | No |
ASP.NET MVC vs Ruby On Rails
| | ASP.NET MVC | Rails |
| Compiled | Yes | No |
| Intellisence | Mostly | Depending on editor |
| Has free IDE | Yes | Yes |
| Can be easily deployed on shared hosting | Yes | not really |
| Can be easily deployed on windows | Yes | No |
| Can be deployed on Linux | No (Maybe if mono picks it up) | Yes |
| Has a built in ORM | No (not yet) | Yes
|
| Has out of the box for multiple Databases | No | Yes
|
| Is resource efficient | Yes | No |
| Extensive caching options | Yes | Yes |
| All URL available | Yes | Yes |
| REST possible | Yes | Yes |
| .Net Framework available | Yes | No |
| Ruby Runtime available | Through interop / CLR implementations | Yes |
| Has an active community around it | Yes | Yes |
I'm missing feature X from this chart
Could be, it's not a complete list of features.
It's just a list of things which seemed nice to compare if you want you can always comment about your favorite pet difference between one of these frameworks / development methods.
Generalisations / when to use which option
The charts above will mostly tell you when you can't use one of the options in the list.
All the platforms will keep evolving but each has it's own strengths and weaknesses at the moment.
ROR is great for when your working on a non windows platform and want to write as few lines as possible and want to work in Ruby.
Webforms is great for when you want quick results with nice building blocks from 3rd party developers and you don't need exact control over your html.
ASP.NET MVC is great for when you want complete control over your html and url's and want unit testing like there is no tomorrow.
Personal preference
My webdevelopment method of choice for now remains to be Webforms this is mainly because of a lot of nice development speed enhancements which are present in this platform.
It's something which makes the easy things pretty fast to do and makes the harder things quite hard and complicated.
I might be going over to some other platform / framework based on what lies ahead in terms of websites / applications to create.
Only time will tell, but for now I remain satisfied with Webforms for a RAD platform.
But what about testing ?
There are a lot of people who like setting up unit tests along with their regular development.
I think my opinion on this is a subject for a whole other posting so I won't go into it any further at this time :)
Conclusion
We are living in a golden age for Internet development there are a lot of options in the web development world, and the possibility's are still growing and evolving at a brake neck pace.
All the choices above will probably be used to amaze us with things that are possible and all will probably still have a place in developers hearts for quite some years to come.
The question is what will the new players bring 5 years from now, and how will these technologies stand up to each other then.
Introduction
UPDATE:
The kind folks of Ucertify.com have offered people who read this blog post with a discount you can get a 10% discount for this product using the following code:
MISKRO
You can download this product at:
http://www.ucertify.com/exams/Microsoft/70-305.html
Company
Founded in 1996, uCertify is a leading provider of exam preparation solutions for certification exams of all the major IT vendors. uCertify products provide certification candidates a complete coverage of exam objectives with extremely realistic practice tests, comprehensive study notes and guides, and other value added features to help them to excel in the exams.
Prepkit 70-305
This kit is supposed to help you train and pass the MCSD exam:
Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
Which is quite the mouthfull
Microsoft has the complete description here
Why would you need such a thing
Possibility's are:
- To prepare for a MCSD exam
- To train yourself without taking any exams
- To use it as an interviewing tool
Allthough when taking into account it's price, I think the only thing this should realisticly be used for is as a study guide for the exam.
What do you get in a Prepkit
You get the ucertify prep engine which is the quiz engine used to ask you the questions get the answers and give you extra information when you review the questions.
Next to the quiz / review part there are also some other helpers to get you to where you want to go:
- Exam Objectives - What are you studying for
- Study Notes - A whole lot of what is x ? questions
- Articles - Background information on things (.Net / Framework etc)
- How To's - Illustrated walktroughs
- Study tips - Where do you need to lay your focus
Look and feel
The look and feel is quite solid and modern. "
You can see that there was quite a bit of polish has gone into the looks of the application.
Content
The amount of questions, notes, articles etc. seems good to me.
There are quite a few practise tests and the quality of information looks to be very good.
If you want to get a look and feel of how the application works and what the questions are like you can download a free sample from the internet which includes the application. The only thing is that a lot of the content on it is locked.
This means you get a pretty good idea of what you get when you get the whole thing.
The competition
Ucertify has quite a bit of competition in the testing / exam preperation field some of it's competitors are:
Testking
Exam Collection
Braindumps.com
Ucertify seems to be at the top end of the market in terms of features / price.
Ucertify vs the Competition
Testking - Seems to be cheaper all round but only offers a question / answer engine. It is a more familiar brand but I'm not sure it actually offers better value for money.
Braindumps - Is free and seems to offer actual tests + community answers it feels more like cheating then like a preperation tool.
Exam Collection - Offers questions / answers only which seem to be community supplied. Price is very low as well.
Ucertify vs a course or book
A course will definitely take more time and probably more money I think this prep kit for me would be more effective then assignments with teacher corrections.
A book, this defininately beats a book by having the information organised in a way that it's very fast to access and offcourse being able to do tests to monitor progress beats a book hands down :)
Verdict
I think that if you want to get certified this is a product that you can use to save a lot of time without making you feel like you cheated.
It also comes with a money back guarantee, which means that you can get your money back when you don't pass the exam.
For me personally I think this prepkit could easily be the only thing I would need to pass the exam (together with some practice with all the things inluded in the exam).
That to me justifies it's current price of euro: 41,20.
Nokia and it's software a .Net developers take on things.
First off I would like to say that I started this quest with a good amount of confidence that I would be pleased about things on the software side of things. But each time when I look further it starts to look even worse.
So let's begin my little review of the state of the modern phone + it's pc software.
I set out this little quest to copy about 200 name / phone number pairs to my mobile phone.
My mobile phone is a Nokia N73 which runs on the S60 3rd Edition platform based on Symbian OS v9.1.
This means that it supports Java, Python and Symbian C++ as programming languages. Which seems to me like it should be easy to do what I want with it.
I mean I only want to copy a couple of addresses in there and I'm willing to whip something up to get there.
The existing program which can be downloaded for free from Nokia to do the communication work is: Nokia PC Suite.
It's quite a big program, and the parts I'm interested in work quite slowly and with a horrible interface.
There is another version coming up in a while which looks to be even worse. (total install size around 440 MB) 70 MB for an updater.
At those sizes it really doesn't look like something I want to install on my PC.
At first I was overjoyed to see that Nokia developed an SDK to help developers out with programming what is needed for the things I wanted to do, i was even getting some nice ideas in my head of applications which would work like a sort of msn like interface with your phone contacts list and a chat / message history of what you sent / received to the currently selected person on your contact list. Which would mean that I would finally be able to Text message as fast as my friends, well actually quite a bit faster :)
After registering on the Nokia forum (this registration process could use some work) I was able to download the SDK, there were even examples in VB.Net and C#, how good can it get :)
My happy feelings about this unfortunately ended there, that SDK didn't contain all the possibility's of the Suite instead it only contained some file operations.
So for my cause this seemed absolutely hopeless, since the bar had been raised a bit I figured I would be better of using someone else his work this also didn't go as smoothly as planned. It seems that there is an API out there which Nokia supplies, you just have to become a member of a Pro Network and fork over $4000 this might be excluding the membership fee of $800 a year.
Since the cost of entering is quite high this also means that the applications for things like updating your addressbook aren't available for free.
That is barring the standard Nokia PC Suite.
Or at least that's what it looks like after spending quite a few hours googling and otherwise scouring the internet for applications which would make this possible.
The salvation seems to be in the fact that the Nokia PC Suite does have a synching option with MS Outlook. So the contacts will be added to my phone with with Outlook as the middle man.
Still this whole adventure does feel like Nokia is trying to make a buck from the developers instead of really trying to provide the best service and getting the best platform out there. Too bad, because if they openened up their API Í'm sure better alternatives for their own software would arrive and that might be a big selling point for the people who are turned off by their current software offering.
Conclusion
State of the PC interface software: Not very good from my point of view
State of the API's surrounding it: Very limited or pay up
In other words don't try this at home and if you want to do anything just work with the standard software no matter how much it pains you :(
What others have tried / done
A guy wanting to write his own importer as a midlet
An effort for a thunderbird contacts sync program
There is a new video out which is talking about combining images taken by everyone in the whole world and determening their origin and bringing them together to get visions of certain things, which is pretty breath taking by itself.
But imagine a new technology for browsing and combining images.
Combined with, the multiple ways we have for navigating the world we already have.
And then you will have a very cool way of navigating where you want to go :)
And what you will see.
What you want to see when your there, or maybe even a reason not to go.
The future is very exciting in terms of technology and the more we advance the more we will be amazed.
I think there are a lot of revolutions waiting to happen.
This will most likely be one of them.
This software can even be installed on your pc there is a release candidate available here.
UPDATE: this program can't be used anymore for more info check out the new blog post
Mediafire is a very nice free file hosting service with unlimited storage, unlimited time availability, the posibility to work with folders and fairly advanced sharing possibilities. It even has an optional login. So even if you don't have an account you can still share files with your friends / co workers
With all that in mind I decided I wanted to try and use it and also found out some other things:
- It has a really slick interface
- It has a very speedy upload functionality
- It supports download managers
- It has very nice image gallery options
- It has fast downloads
It almost sounds too good to be true, but there are a couple of small drawbacks:
- it doesn't support FTP uploading or another fast and easy file upload interface
- It doesn't support files larger than 100 MB
- It doesn't allow hotlinking of images
I did want to upload my holiday pictures to it when I thought to myself that simply typing in all those names or browse selecting then just wouldn't do for say 100 files :P
So I decided to do what any lazy programmer would do, write a program to do upload the files for him :)
Since there is no API that I know of and no upload helpers available that I could find in a quick google it was time to write my own.
I used WatiN in combination with a .Net command line program to do the job and the result can be downloaded here.
Usage of the program is simple just supply the directoryname of which you want to upload the files.
It then submits all the files in this directory to the upload form of Mediafire.
Anyway if anyone actually uses this little program please let me know :)
In my opinion the future of games and other interfaces will be one where motion detection will be a key element.
What we are seeing at the moment is that the Nintendo WII is outselling the competition, why is this?
Well for one it makes for quite a good party machine meaning that a lot of non standard gamers are picking it up to go out and play with it.
I've actually bought one myself a while back and I must say it's quite entertaining to wave your hands and see stuff happening and it's a lot more engaging then hitting keys on your keyboard.
The tapping of a whole new public also means I can occasionally play computer games with for instance my dad, which would definitely stay clear of any other type of active computer games. By that I mean things which require fast responses and the like.
It means that the playing field is leveled for the first time in a while, because everyone can make natural movements to do stuff.
This means a revolution in gaming, people will love the new thing, the hardcore gamers because of the newness of it, everyone else for the leveled playing field and the rewarding experience. The whole thing isn't limited to motion sensing controllers but can also be done by webcam.
A very high percentage of laptops for instance are shipped with a webcam at the moment which means that the webcam has more penetration now than it used to have :)
I think that the penetration will be around 30% amongst students / IT enthusiasts etc it will be even higher.
Everything is pointing to this fact, the WII is the revolution and everything else will probably be more evolutionary, the WII controller is already usable on PC's through a .Net library and a C++ library. There are also some applications out there using this controller like a WII mote drum kit and a few other applications, there will probably be more and more out there soon.
For webcams there is now a bit of support for flash which should mean that there will be quite a few games popping up using that in a while.
After that there will probably be a surge in applications using the motion detection theme from the webcams to do other things.
Time will tell what all the applications for these newly mainstreamed technologies will be.
PS. There is also a lot going on with multi touch interfaces like Microsoft Surface.
This also has a lot of promise but, I like the odds of motion sencing better.
What do you think ?
Viruses and Spyware are annoying to deal with that’s why the following is a bit of a guide to make sure you don’t have to deal with them and if you do need to battle them what the right way to do so is.
A bit of advice to help out with not having to deal with this in the first place.
When you’re doing things like surfing the web you can make use of a lower privileged account to make sure that the websites / web ads can’t install any stuff on your computer that you don’t like. This also goes for programs and utilities which you run which can in turn install other programs which you don’t want.
How to create a limited account, this is the easy part :)
Windows XP
Goto:
start -> settings -> control panel -> users
Create New user:
Give the new user a name -> select next
Select limited user -> create account
In Vista
Goto:
control panel -> user accounts -> manage another user account -> create a new account
Give it a user name and select standard user then hit create account.
The hard part is actually using these accounts when doing your computer work.
There are a few programs which won’t work these programs can be run through using “run as” which is available when you use a right click on whatever program you want to start being in the start menu or in through an explorer interface.
There is also something more powerful to do the job namely which is called Make me Admin, more information about that tool can be found here.
Ok now that we got that out of the way, next point of attention: Virus scanners are performance killers, I would go so far as they are just a little step better then the viruses which they protect you from. Mr Atwood was so kind as to give his opinions on the matter here.
When looking at this article you can see that the top 2 virus scanners in use today are also the ones which suck the most performance out of your system.
Namely using 20% of your CPU and slowing your hard drive down 20 fold. The review of the Symantec NIS 2007 version was supplied by Symantec before it was available in the shops so that’s why I’m quoting the numbers for the 2006 release (not sure if the 2007 version was a special sample).
So first step in combating stuff you don’t want running on your computer, know your taskman
Ok now you know, how to do the task switching stuff in the standard windows way, now your ready for the next step which is a better task manager for even more powerful features called process explorer.
This does the same as task manager from windows only it allows you to do a lot more.
You can use this when you want to delve a little deeper into what is happening in your computer. So what about when you do get infected by nasty little viruses and other things, you can use a combination of autoruns and process explorer to clean everything up.
The how to for this can be found here . Some added notes. Determining which files are spyware / viruses can be helped by taking into account the following:
- They usually doesn’t contain an icon
- They are often packed (outlined in purple) to avoid detection by anti spyware / virus
- You can look at the strings in the files to see if they contain suspicious text like: www.blabla-poker.com or something like it
- When files are packed look at the memory version of the strings tab to find the decoded version of strings
- Microsoft signes almost all their code so if it says it’s from Microsoft and it’s not signed then it’s probably a fake.
- When going after the software suspend all the processes first before killing them. This way they won't be protected by each other.
After you have cleaned out the normal spyware and other vermin, your next stop is Microsoft’s own rootkit revealer .
This program will help show you which viruses and malware / spyware has hidden itself from you in a way that you can’t remove it.
When you know which dll / exe it is which has hid itself it’s just a matter of writing down the names and removing the files from your hard drive using either something like a linux live disc or safe mode. All the programs mentioned are free of cost and free of spyware, they are just simple no nonsense applications which do their job :)
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