Don't Back Down

While I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds this articulated hard-shell backpack to be pretty sweet (after all, what is cooler than a mongo-sized roly-poly bug?), am I the only one who also sees it as a ready-made terrorist dream come true? I mean come on - rip out the inner lining, pack it with explosives of some sort or another, then chain the thing to a post of some kind and let it rip.

They even give a (presumably unintentional) example of such a use on their web site, with the pack wrapped securely around a column of some kind!

I have no idea just how hard the shell is, but it seems that anything designed as "anti-theft" would use a hard enough material to prevent casual removal. And if that is the case, how will well-intentioned lifesavers remove the thing? Bring in the jaws of life, so that they can dig into a wad of explosives wrapped around a telephone pole?

Not too long ago, McDonald's introduced sweet tea in their restaurants (at least here in Charlotte). I haven't had a chance to try it. Chick-Fil-A has had sweet tea for at least a few years, and it's pretty good - though as I recall it's rather pricey. Today, I found out that Aldi has started carrying sweet tea as well. I just had a glass, and it's pretty good. At $1.39 per gallon jug, the price is right too.

Read "Sweet Tea by the Gallon" »

In fighting a particularly nasty trojan, dubbed something like TROJ_DLOADER in a number of instances, I came across the need for two utilities.

The first is called StartupList, and gives you a list of everything that happens during startup. In this case, the startup of Explorer (and by extension, Internet Explorer) was the winner where an "enumerating helper object" loaded a suspicious DLL everytime a window was opened.

Once the file was found, I needed a copy of MoveOnBoot, which allows the copy/move/rename/delete of a file that is used by Windows at boot time - before the object is in use. Simply select the object found in the prior step, select to move it and/or delete it, and restart. Problem solved.

StartupList actually provides a GUID as well, which you can use to search your registry if you'd like to get rid of all traces of the Trojan. Anti-spyware software, such as that from Webroot can also help with this - though it cannot actually remove the file, so you need to have that done first.

Now this is a really cool application of Google Maps - a database of Chicago crimes mapped out visually. Whether you're looking for places to avoid, or places to hang out if you're in the market for a particular service, it's a very nice implementation.