I feel like a complete idiot. I have always preached to the world, "Use an anti-virus solution, even if you don't do much on the computer." Well, now I can pridefully call myself a hypocrite.

I rarely use my laptop, and it just sits there on the charger for days. About the only time I'll fire it up is when I want to sit on the porch and work, or I am traveling and need to be able to work while I'm away. One such example was this weekend; I came to my parents' and needed to be able to follow up on a few things.

My Dad had told me about something weird he's been seeing on his computer. He said that it would be working just fine, then reboot for no reason. I told him it was probably a virus, and that I would take a look at it while I was here. When it happened to him last night, he told me, so I fired up VNC and logged into his computer from upstairs. Almost as soon as I did, my laptop started getting all kinds of popups, fake blue screens, the task manager was disabled, and all kinds of other stupid crap. Why? Because I didn't install an anti-virus on it.

I set it aside for a couple hours, because I was so frustrated, but I got it back out after that and tried to clean it up. The first thing I ran into was resource consumption. Since the task manager was disabled though, I had to do all my work at the shell, using the tasklist and taskkill commands. After I finally got all the rogue processes killed off, I was able to get AVG installed, but then the resources were sapped up again. I gave the computer a hard power cycle, and AVG fired up when Windows came back up. It found several DLL files that it identified as "threats", so I told it just to nuke 'em.

Finally I was able to start a full system scan, but it was taking so long that I just went to bed. When I woke up this morning though, the power was off and the charging indicator was flashing orange. According to the owner's manual for the laptop, this means that the batter was low. It makes no sense though, because it's not even trying to charge. That aside, I was able to get back into Windows, but everything is still a wreck. Luckily I have nothing of major importance on here, so I'll be doing a full OS reload tonight. I may give up and put Ubuntu back on, but we shall see...

I've come to the conclusion that "The Learning Channel" needs to be re-badged. Every time I've turned to the channel, I have been greeted by shows like "Flip That House", or "What Not To Wear". While these may be informative and educational programs, nearly all of the shows on this channel are design or fashion related.

I really think that the content of TLC needs to be diversified again, or the channel needs a new name.

I may be throwing away my million dollar idea here, but I need to share it and get some feedback.

Having arthritis and limited motion in my hands, I've wondered if there would be any sort of external prosthetic assist that may help out. Then one day, I saw an article somewhere about a revolutionary helicopter design that used piezoelectric fibers to twist and bend the rotor blades. After pondering it for a little bit, I wondered if it would be able to make some sort of thin and lightweight gloves, using some sort of sensors and microcontrollers to determine what movements were attempted, then make use of specially placed highly flexible piezoelectric fibers to provide assist on the the appendage needing the assist.

Now, what if such a thing could be expanded to something less complicated? What about people who have trouble moving their leg, due to muscle and nerve damage? Could a non-surgical product be developed in the form of say, tight pants, to apply this concept to help that person walk again?

I now remember why college was so stressful.

For a couple projects at work, I've had to re-learn Microsoft .Net, and it's been a rather harrowing experience. The language is so bloated and inflexible, and the documentation is too abstract to actually mean anything.

I don't know what people are thinking, but the claims that the .Net development community has generated more documentation resources than the PHP community are absolutely ridiculous.

I think I may see if I can get some books through work so I can learn C++ at a more advanced level than I previously knew, and just say to heck with .Net.

I am getting rather tired of making these entries, but I guess it's what I get from having old hardware.

At any rate, the machine I replaced my old computer with is now on the fritz. I was in the middle of watching a movie tonight after work, and the stupid thing rebooted out of nowhere. After it power cycled and came to the POST screen, it said "CPU is unworkable or has changed", which leads me to believe that the pile of crap Pentium 4 has kicked the bucket.

After shuffling through the spare parts I had laying around from the old computer, I found that I have nothing to replace it with now, and that I must limp by with this stupid thing rebooting all the time. Yes, I could use my laptop, but if you've ever worked on a laptop much you know how inconvenient that is. The lack of screen size is an added inconvenience.

I have to say, I have been rather displeased with this Pentium machine. It's the second one I've used and I find it to be incredibly slow and unreliable. I will never purchase another Intel system again.

But as with last time, if you're interested in helping me out at all, PayPal donations are more than accepted. Or if you have a newer machine laying around with an AMD processor greater than 1.5GHz in speed, let me know. I may be interested in purchasing it from you.

I've been looking into working with some PHP website frameworks, such as CodeIgniter and PHP On Trax, but these all are horrible and nearly impossible to use. They require so much server-side configuration, which the typical shared hosting customer wouldn't be able to run, and nearly everything you would need to author for an application has to be authored anyhow.

I don't get what draws so many people to these horrible frameworks. The lack of documentation, the false promises of "ease of use", and the bloated file structure are just about as ugly as you can get.

Maybe one of these days I'll publish my framework that I have developed over the last few years. It may not be object oriented or have any sort of Ajax support yet, but it gets the job done easily.

I decided this last weekend to pick C++ up again. I haven't touched the stuff since I graduated from college, and things have vanished from my brain. However, I'm doing quite well at re-learning everything.

I just got the basis of a MySQL interface class to compile without error, and everything I did was pretty well straightforward. Overall, I'm very pleased with myself, and I hope that I'll do better with it all once I get my C++ book back from my parents' place.

As you are probably aware, I've been having issues with my project servers for the last couple weeks. It seems really odd that they're all doing the same thing on different hardware at different locations, and that they all started acting up at the same time.

So tonight, I checked on one of them and found that it had been up for almost 11 days. Cool. I decided that while my clothes were in the washer, I would reload the OS on the other. Just as I had finished the installation and rebooted, the stupid thing decided to freeze on me. I was frustrated, so I shut it down and went to the grocery store.

When I got back, I was sitting at my desktop (my primary computer), watching a movie. A little ways into the movie, I heard a "beep!" I looked around to see what it was, and it was the one project server powering itself back on! I raised an eyebrow at it, and shortly thereafter the other one locked up. Nice...

After a review of my power distribution, I found that all my computers were sharing the same surge protector, and decided that was the likely cause for this headache. I went ahead and moved the one server to another power strip and powered both back up. Cool, it worked for about 10 minutes, then the one with the fresh OS on it locked up.

I just now realized that the one that locked up is on the same surge protector that both were earlier, and that the other had not locked up yet.

At any rate, this is a very odd situation, especially where the third project server is on the other side of the state and is experiencing the same issues.

Kamchatkans and Venezuelans beware. A 20-million-tonne asteroid could be heading your way. Californians have even more reason to worry - the asteroid is more likely to hit the Pacific Ocean, triggering a tsunami that could devastate the west coast of North America.

Elsewhere in the article:

If the asteroid Apophis hits Earth in 2036, it could slam into the Pacific Ocean, generating a tsunami that could devastate the west coast of North America (Illustration: Don Davis/NASA)

The picture that the above text surrounds shows a mass, sized about like the moon, smashing into Earth. I'm sorry, but if something this large hit the planet, I don't think tsunamis would be the primary concern.

One thing I see a lot of on some programming forums I visit is, "How do I create a 'bad words' system? How do I filter out bad words from a user input string?"

Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat, but here's how I would do it (All code is in PHP unless otherwise specified):

Step 1: Establish an array of "bad words".
$badwords = array('word1', 'word2', 'word3');

Or, to make it a little easier to add to later:
$badwords[] = 'word1';
$badwords[] = 'word2';
$badwords[] = 'word3';

Step 2: Compare your input string to the bad words list.
Okay, there's a couple ways of doing this... I'll do it the verbose way:

$words = preg_split('/s+/', $input, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

foreach($words as $word) {
if(in_array($word, $badwords)) die($word.' cannot be in this field);
}

That's it!