Chicken McNuggets made in gross fashion

That picture shows mechanically separated chicken. Since it's crawling with bacteria, it's washed with ammonia. The result tastes gross and so it's artificially flavoured. The pink colour isn't appealing either and so it's dyed.

Computer corruption

During the past few days I've been plagued by problems with the computers on my network, including a MacBook (which is mostly immune from Viruses).

The primary machines on my network are

1. A Win XP laptop. This machine got it itself thoroughly compromised by an inexperienced user (not me!) and I took it off line for a while, and subsequently did a fresh restore of WinXP from the restore CD. In addition, the hard disk has a bad sector and I needed to do a format.

2. A MacBook running Snow Leopard (OS/X 10.6)

3. A new Win 7/64 box, barely used at all

4. A 10-year old SONY Vaio tower running WinXP SP3

Machines #1 and 4 were supposedly protected by McAfee Anti-Virus. The entire network is gated to the internet by a router with wireless.

Machine #3 was the greatest concern: I was wondering how a machine that had (almost) never been used, despite the lack of an anti-virus solution on it, could show signs of a virus.

On Friday night, I worked with a paid anti-virus expert (Nick Lockhard: see www.nicklockard.com) to examine Machine #3 in detail. During this process we discussed various types of active anti-virus systems (like McAfee) and periodic malware scanners (like Search and Destroy which I have used in the past). For the problem at hand, various web postings had noted that a malware scanner called Malwarebytes was capable of removing my problem.

Therefore attention turned to getting this program onto my Win7 machine (Machine #3) and doing a scan. Before involving Nick I had done so. The next step was to update the database of problems (the rule-set), but I found that this part of the program did not work. This is why I involved Nick. As a re-seller of this product, he had the latest rule-set available on his equipment. He uploaded it to my machine. Before doing this, he ran various tools to clean out my registry -- and found numerous problems -- remarkable for a "fresh" install!.

After doing all this we ran a scan but nothing was found -- possibly the earlier tools (making it possible for Malwarebytes to run properly!) had helped.

After this, on his recommendation I installed the free edition of AVG anti-virus and ran scan using that tools. That tool, unlike Malwarebytes, is active. I then tried some more network activity and then AVG reported that the same problem that had bothered me to begin with (on 3 machines) was blocked.

This was an improvement of course, but didn't reveal the complete story of what the real problem was. In other words, Machine #3 was now protected. I did the same for Machine 4. I installed Malwarebytes on it. However, as with Machine 3, Malwarebytes at first could not work properly. But I copied the rulesets by hand from Machine 3 and then all was well.

Running Malwarebytes on Machine 4 turned up two registry problems: security was turned off! This took all night (Machine 1 has 300,000 files).

On Saturday, I turned my attention to machine 1. I installed Win XP from the restore CD. However, I could not get the network to work correctly. Finally, after after much fighting Microsoft's obscure network controls, I logged into my home router, for no other reason than to find out the correct DNS settings.

I use a static IP address. This address and fixed DNS values are programmed into my router. I discovered that the values in the router were compromised. I called Shaw (my service provider), and got the correct value, put them in the router, and then changed the password on my router!.

In hindsight, it seems clear that a virus on Machine 1 (the WinXP laptop) had compromised the router, and everything else flowed from there. In particular, that explained how the Macbook could be experiencing the same problem.

Tuning pianos, harpsichords, etc

I visited Alex yesterday. He has a harpsichord which is badly out of tune. We spent some time tuning it (I have some knowledge of how to do that). We got the "home octave" (starting at middle C) reasonably in tune, and the octave below that somewhat in tune, with some doubtful notes (the usual suspects, F#, B natural)

Then we talked about bringing my Macbook over to tune it properly with tuning software.

This turns out to be not necessary. It can be done with a $4 app for my iPhone!.