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An Embarrassment of Riches

Jan 22nd, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

I’m hard at the rewrite of my assembly book, and in going over the chapters closely I realize that I have a lot to do, significantly more than I thought going in. Parts of this book date back to 1988, and the work as a whole was not organized back then the way I would organize it today. So I’m doing more to it than I thought I would, and although that will make for a better book, it’s also eating more of my time. (Expect a few fewer Contra posts over coming months, and perhaps shorter ones.)

I’ve also been using Ubuntu a lot more than I ordinarily do, since the rewrite finally exiles DOS from the discussion except as a historical footnote. I find myself surfacing for a breath now and then, and realizing, I haven’t been in Windows for almost six hours! Crossover Linux has made this possible, since I have Office 2000 and Visio 2000 installed under Ubuntu now, and don’t have to be bouncing between two machines or two partitions to write code and then write about the code.

In the process, I’ve been using Ubuntu more and at more depth than I ever have before. One thing I’m beginning to appreciate is just how easy it is to get software and keep it current, and just how good the software that’s out there really is. That’s changed in ten years. Back in 1999, in order to run NASM under Red Hat I had to download a tar file full of source, unzip it somewhere, and then recompile the whole damned thing. I had no intention of changing the assembler and would have been more than happy with binaries.

It’s different now. With Ubuntu (and I assume most modern distros) you go up to a software repository through a package manager utility, cruise an enormous list of free packages that are available, and check off the stuff you want. Then you click Apply and stand back: The package manager downloads the package and anything that the package depends on, checking first to see if you’ve got any of the prerequisites installed already. Only the stuff you need comes down, and when the smoke clears you have new apps on your app menu, or new libraries tucked in where they’re supposed to go. (Or both.) Wow.

Ubuntu periodically checks to see if updates are available for anything you have installed, and a couple of clicks brings them down and installs them.

I’m sure that not everything that exists is up there, but what’s up there is extremely impressive. If I allowed myself to get distracted, I’d be playing with Gambas and Boa Constructor rather than writing. The Nemiver debugger front end didn’t exist ten years ago, and it will star in the new edition of Assembly Language Step By Step. Most of all, I want to play with Lazarus (the GUI IDE for Free Pascal) and have to slap my hands periodically, or I’d get nothing else done.

The primary barrier to the adoption of the Linux Desktop is unlearning old habits, followed as a distant second by conversion of existing Windows-centric files. There may have been a third barrier somewhere, but I’ve forgotten what it was. There is certainly no shortage of software to get the jobs done.

Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad Gets Real

Jan 19th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

crunchpadb.jpg

I read about Michael Arrington’s concept for a low-cost Web tablet back last summer, and was intrigued. Web is useful, but the resolution on this gadget (1024 X 768) would make it ideal for reading PDF ebooks, particularly textbooks and scientific/technical nonfiction with lots of illustrations. Not every type of book can be read on a cellphone, and the sorts of ebooks that require larger displays are getting precious little respect in the gadget world.

But I learned today that the Crunchpad (as the TechCrunch crowd is now informally calling it) has reached the prototype stage. They sound like they’re aimed in the right direction, but remarkably, I see no discussion at all of the device’s usefulness as an ebook reader. (I added a comment to the entry to this effect.) It looks like it can work in portrait mode, and has an accelerometer to sense when it’s been “spun.” Ebook reader utilities are not cycle-hogs, and would add little to the burden on the CPU or SSD storage.

I’m a little queasy about on-screen touch keyboards; I would use the USB port for a “real” keyboard when one is needed. I would also add an externally-accessible SDHC card slot for loading content without waiting for the inevitably slow Wi-Fi link. But beyond that, if the thing can render PDF and CHM ebooks well, I’d buy one like a shot, and pay $300 for it without regret. This is one to keep an eye on.

Remote Lecturing with Skype and Mikogo

Jan 10th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

First on my do-it list this morning was to deliver a lecture at Miami University at Middletown, Ohio. I’m still here in Colorado (though, alas, Carol is in Chicago again and I’m batching it until the 26th) but it worked out well, and the lecture was my first “production” use of Skype and the Mikogo plug-in for Skype for remote presentation.

Jay Slough K4ZLE of the Southwest Ohio Digital and Technical Symposium asked me to do an hour-long presentation on Carl & Jerry well over a year ago, but our schedules didn’t mesh in January 2008, and we had to wait a year for another chance. In a way that was good, because in my view, Mikogo plows NetMeeting (which we had intended to use last year) right into the soil.

Mikogo adds presentation capability to any participant in a Skype conference call running the plug-in. Whatever is displayed on the screen of the chat participant deemed the presenter is echoed on all other participant screens. The presenter can change at any point, so people can take turns presenting to the group. Mikogo defaults to screen echo only, but it has an option for remote control, a la VNC. Mikogo also allows the presenter to draw nondestructively on the echoed screen, whiteboard-style, though I didn’t need this feature for today’s session.

I’m a seasoned lecturer and have done presentations to groups as large as a thousand people, but there was a critical difference this time: I couldn’t see the audience, and could hear them only faintly. The other end of the Skype/Mikogo connection was Jay’s laptop driving a big-screen VGA projector in a university classroom, with Jay at the controls wearing a headset. I sat here in my chair in front of the screen in my office, talking into my headset between Powerpoint slide changes and trying to remember not to wave my hands. I missed not being able to play off the audience, and couldn’t tell if they were laughing at my jokes. During the Q&A in the last five minutes, Jay had to relay all questions to me, which was awkward even if necessary.

Technologically it went well, though it took a couple of minutes longer than we planned to get the two systems talking to each other. During the presentation, Thunderbird popped up an email notifier box in the lower right corner of the screen, and until I could shoot the box it became part of the screen echo. The symposium gang out in Ohio apparently loved it, and it was a great opportunity to popularize Carl & Jerry to people I would probably never have connected with otherwise.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but I’d like to add some refinements, which I think Skype could support:

  • I want a cam aimed at the audience, with a mic that will pick up general sound from the same direction. Video from the cam would have to go on a second display, but displays are cheap. Audience feedback is important, whether you’re a stand-up geek comedian like me or not.
  • Less necessary, but it might help the general tenor of the presentation: Somehow display a borderless video window in the lower left corner of the presentation screen, so that the audience can see me. (I’d leave a hole in my slides sized to match the video window.) How well this would work is obscure but readily testable. My webcam is four years old and I probably should get a new one. Logitech sells high-res units that automatically integrate with Skype.

Other applications of this system suggest themselves: Real-time manuscript workshopping, with workshop participants taking turns echoing their screens while displaying their manuscripts. Tech support. And (as Pete Albrecht and I intend to try in the next few days) remote control of his big Meade telescope and imager.

Skype is a fine thing. Pete is in a Skype window right now, telling me about the new Skype competitor, Oovoo, which adds session recording to videoconferencing. Skype lacks that feature, and it would be handy for people (like me!) who couldn’t make it all the way to Ohio for the Symposium. More when (or if) I try it.

Odd Lots

Jan 6th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments
  • Quick reminder: If I’m on your blogroll, or if you have a link to Contra on any of your pages, please check to see that the new URL is in place. Thanks!
  • Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a fantastic technical animation that “assembles” the Space Station one module at a time, while displaying a timeline on the right indicating when each part was orbited and attached. I knew roughly how the thing went together, but this is almost like Cliff Notes. Takes just a couple of minutes to watch. Don’t miss it!
  • Again from Pete is a site with more information on steam turbine locomotives. I had heard of the Jawn Henry (That’s how the Norfolk & Western spelled it) but had not seen a photo until I followed the link in the article. The main problem with coal-fired turbine electrics appears to have been coal dust in the electric motors. Makes sense, but I would never have thought of it.
  • Henry Law weighed in from the UK on the merits of Marmite, the original beer yeast leftovers toast spread, as far superior to those of Vegemite. (See my entry for January 4, 2009.) I may have to let Henry duke it out with Eric the Fruit Bat over this, as I have not tasted either but will try some as soon as I don’t have to buy a whole jar. Sam’l Bassett suggests that its flavor is heavy on the umami, which makes me a little nervous. I don’t taste MSG at all–flavor enhancer is not a word I’d use for it–but it makes me feel almighty strange, even in very small amounts.
  • The Boston Globe, of all things, published a piece stating strongly that cities are really, really really bad places to live from the standpoint of health and clear thinking. I learned that twenty years ago; nice to see that the mainstream media is giving the idea some air. Alas, their answer–more parks–is treating the symptoms, not the disease. The disease is overcrowding, and the answer is to revitalize small towns. But that’s just me, and what do I know about quality of life?
  • I had long known there are “large” Lego blocks called Duplo, but it wasn’t until Katie Beth got a set for this past Christmas that I had ever seen Mega Bloks, a sort of “house-brand” Lego and widely despised as a cheap imitation. However, even though Mega has both a Lego and a Duplo clone, they also have Maxi Bloks, which are larger than Duplo and so large, in fact, that no adult human being is likely to be able to swallow them, much less a two-year-old. This was a good idea. I want Katie to be comfortable with the idea of building things, and Maxi Bloks make it unnecessary to wait any longer.
  • The February Sky & Telescope has a very defensive editorial from Robert Naeye, countering a tidal wave of accusations that S&T has gone the way of Scientific American and has been “dumbed down” in terms of scientific content. I don’t have a link to the editorial online, but its core point is so silly I groaned. Naeye basically said that “We’re not getting dumber–you’re getting smarter!” Um…no. You’re getting dumber. I had been a subscriber for 25 years or so with just a few gaps. I think I have a sense for where it was when I came to it, versus where it is now.
  • I’m editing this with Zoundry Raven, as I have since I stumbled on it a couple of weeks ago. I’ve used Raven enough now so that I can recommend it without significant hesitation. The Zoundry business model is interesting (albeit difficult to describe) but it’s also optional–you don’t need to participate to use the software.
  • Hey. I didn’t get this for Christmas. Neither did you. But boy, the 12-year-old in me ached a little when I saw it…
  • I’m amazed that I never knew this, but the Anglican term for the Feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28) is “Childermas.” He doesn’t use the word, but arguably the best song James Taylor ever wrote is about the Three Kings, Herod, and the Holy Innocents. “Steer clear of royal welcomes / Avoid the big to-do. / A king who would slaughter the innocents / Will not cut a deal for you.” Indeed. Avoid all kings. Keep them in chains when you can–even the ones we believe that we elect.

Mission of Gravatar

Jan 2nd, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

One thing I didn’t quite figure out with WordPress before New Year’s Day was how to upload a userpic for myself. It’s not a critical issue, and I kept bumping it to the back of the “look into this” list–until this morning, when I realized that a commenter had a userpic. This is not LiveJournal, where thousands of people have their accounts all on one server and userpics are stored centrally. This is my own private instance of WordPress, installed on my own hosting service, with no blogs on it but mine. So wherethehell did that userpic come from? Shortly thereafter, Julian Bucknall showed up in a comment, with his own userpic. At this point, I quit gnashing my teeth at Ubuntu for being atavistic (why isn’t there a dialog in the admin menu tree somewhere for setting a search path? Huh? Huh? Why?) and did some digging.

Of course, something interesting is going on here. There’s a Web service called Gravatar, which maintains small images (either photos or drawn art) intended to be used as personal avatars on blog comments and discussion forums. Each image is keyed by an MD5 hash of the image owner’s email address. Blog or forum software (anything, actually) simply makes a request to gravatar.com with the hash, and it gets back an 80X80 image.

This works great–when it works, which is most but not all of the time.

I’m still scratching my head here. I can see my gravatar image on Contra from every browser in the house except the instance of Firefox 2 here on my main machine. IE6 on this box shows it. FF2 and all IEs V6 and after show it. But FF2 on this box won’t–except in the “Recent Comments” pane of the dashboard. Then, sure. Gotta make it complicated.

This does not compute. It’s the same damned version of FF I have running everywhere in the house. (2.0.0.20) I’m not big on plug-ins, and there’s nothing peculiar about this install of XP. I do not see why viewing WordPress on this instance of FireFox would be any different from viewing WordPress with any other instance of Firefox–and it does see other people’s gravatars over their comments. Just not mine.

Still stumped, and I’m posting this to see if any of you do not see my picture in the avatar block of any of my comments here on WordPress. Suggestions, of course, are welcome. I won’t croak if I can’t see my own gravatar as long as everybody else can, but things like this give cloud computing a bad name.

One final note, which boggles this old mind: Gravatar has a rating system. You can have G, PG, R, and X-rated gravatars. You heard me: X-rated gravatars. In an 80-pixel by 80-pixel block. Damn. I can’t have a GUI dialog to set the Linux search path, and you can have an X-rated gravatar. Somebody’s getting ripped here. Deciding who I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Mikogo Over Skype

Dec 16th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Yesterday I discovered Mikogo, a Net meeting/remote desktop technology that would be a lot like VNC and the others I’ve played with, except that it can be configured to piggyback on Skype. There is a Mikogo Skype “extra” (what Skype calls its plug-ins) and I will be using it to give a remote lecture on Carl & Jerry to the Southwest Ohio Digital and Technical Symposium on January 10, with the help of Jay Slough K4ZLE.

Jay and I gave it a spin yesterday to make sure we could connect during the Symposium in January, and in addition to working well, Mikogo was mighty cool. You install the extra from the Skype Extras menu, and it comes down the same way that other Skype extras do. Once installed, you can create a 1-to-1 or 1-to-many connection with anybody else who has the Mikogo Skype extra running. Skype handles the audio, and where the connection is between two machines, the “presenter” (the machine that provides a screen echo to the other) can be switched back and forth at any time. Mikogo has a simple whiteboard feature that allows the presenter to draw lines in various thicknesses, colors, and shapes on the screen. It also has the option of remote control, so that the non-presenter can use the mouse and keyboard on the presenter’s machine. Pete Albrecht and I plan to try using Mikogo over Skype to allow me to control Pete’s big Meade telescope from here in Colorado, at least when it stops raining in Orange County.

I don’t have a great deal of experience with the Mikogo system yet, but after an hour or so of solid connections with Jay and with Pete, I can say that it’s well worth trying if you have any use for that sort of thing.

Odd Lots

Dec 10th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet
  • Carol and I just finished the bulk of our Christmas cards. The cards we bought this year had little sparkles glued (badly) to them, and as we processed the 70-odd cards going out, the cards began shedding, and sparkles are now showing up…everywhere. I’m looking down at my shirt cuffs right now, and they’re blazing like a disco ball. Next year: No sparkles!
  • Illinois’ illustrious governor will soon (we hope) be matriculating to the Governors’ Wing at the Joliet Correctional Center, and I am displeased to announce that he went to my high school. In fact, he was a freshman when I was a senior, and his sneaky little face is in the Lane Tech 1970 yearbook. Pete Albrecht was also a freshman that year, and narrowly missed out on the cooties inherent in having a future felon governor in your homeroom. Pete tells the story at greater length (with scans from the yearbook) over at InfoBunker. (Scroll down to the December 9, 2008 entry.)
  • David Beers passed along a link to what might be the absolute worst idea of 2008: Google Code’s research project aimed at allowing x86 native code to run in a browser. Hoo-boy. My question: If the Cloud is so great, why risk being pwned at native-code speeds? (And isn’t this what Java is for?)
  • Google Books has very recently posted back issues for a number of venerable magazines, including Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, CIO, Ebony, Jet, New York, Vegetarian Times, American Cowboy, and who knows what else. (I don’t see a master list of magazines.) The PM collection runs from 1905 to 2000, and isn’t just a scattering of issues, but damned near all of them. So what was PM’s cover story the month you were born? (Mine? “Mermaid Theater.” Wow.)
  • Alas, you can look at the Google Books magazine back issues, but you can’t save them to disk or print them out. Or can you? (I haven’t tried this yet.)
  • The wonderfully named Nevada Lightning Laboratory has managed to transmit 800 watts of power across five meters’ distance, besting the previous record of 60 watts across two meters, set by MIT. The technique is not new, and was patented by our boy Nikola Tesla 100 years ago. Very cool, but are my wire-frame glasses going to melt when I step into the field with my Tesla-powered laptop?
  • This Friday’s full Moon happens only four hours from Lunar perigee, and is the biggest of the year, 14% greater in angular diameter (not especially noticeable) and 30% brighter (way noticeable!) than the apogee Moon we saw earlier this year. That’s bright, it’s high, and if you’ve got snow all over the place, midnight will be knee-deep in moonshine. (Not that kind.)
  • 200,000 inflatable breasts got lost on their way from China (where there is evidently an inflatable breast factory) to Australia (where they were to be polybagged with a men’s magazine) and have only recently been found in Melbourne. Just thought you’d like to know.

Coming -Clean About Eclipse

Nov 24th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

I got the NASM plug-in installed into Eclipse yesterday, after a tip from Bishop Sam'l Bassett of the Old Catholic Church, who had spotted a forum comment that I hadn't. (The real skill in using the Internet is crafting your search terms.) Eclipse has a plug-in cache, and sometimes you have to empty the cache to get it to refresh its list of plug-ins. I intuit that this function is usually served by exiting and restarting Eclipse, but in my case that wasn't enough.

I got the cache cleared by rebooting the system, and suddenly, there was the plug-in. The forum comment in question also mentioned that you can start Eclipse with the -clean command-line parameter, and Eclipse will start “clean” with an empty plug-in cache. I didn't have to do this, but it's worth knowing.

Otherwise, I had done all the right things. Eclipse doesn't really “install” plug-ins in the sense that we install things in Windows. Unzipping a plug-in archive under the Eclipse plugins directory is all that installation requires, assuming that the archive contains all of a plug-in's necessary elements.

There's still work to be done in configuring Eclipse to develop with NASM (setting paths for the assembler and gcc, and a bunch of other things) but that's straightforward and should be done long since by tonight. I'm going up to SoftPro Books in Denver tomorrow with Jim Strickland, and we'll see what they might have that could be useful getting up to speed with Eclipse. A quick scan of pertinent titles on Amazon indicates that most books are about developing Java apps with Eclipse, but some discussion of the IDE in general terms would be very useful about now.

I have a gripe about Ubuntu that I might as well air at this point. The folders in which you unpack Eclipse plug-ins are owned by root, and unless you're running as root you can't unpack files into those folders. Fair enough. I had hoped that Ubuntu and Gnome would have evolved sufficiently since I last did this sort of thing to just pop up a sudo dialog when the user (and we're all users on this bus; Ubuntu does not really have a root account in the strict sense of the word) attempts to do something that violates permissions. But no; it throws up a fairly useless message and glares at you. To get the job done you have to bring up a terminal or the graphical command line dialog and run “gksudo nautilus” to run Nautilus as root. Installer systems like apt-get don't throw tantrums like that on you; when they need permission to install files in folders owned by root they just ask for your password. Nautilus needs to do that.

After all, I'm the Visual Developer Magazine guy, and I have a fetish: Command lines should never be compulsory. Never. It's 2008. We're supposedly all OS grown-ups now. Fundamental things like file management should be 100% point-and-click.

Crossover Linux

Nov 9th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

Crossover Linux has been on my list for a long time, and I might not yet have bought it except for a peculiarly ascerbic but brilliant promotion that the notoriously eccentric company did prior to the recent election. I downloaded the 25 MB shell script installer, got the serial number by registering at their site, and finally last night I brought up Intrepid Ibex and and gave it a shot.

I boggle. This is Unix? No, this is not Unix, and it's not Kansas either. I had the shell script on a thumb drive. I inserted the thumb drive, waited for Ubuntu to toss up a window with the script file visible, then right-clicked on the script and selected “Run in Terminal.” It ran. It unpacked itself, installed, integrated itself with the menus, and then brought up the installation wizard to install Windows apps. That's when the real amazement began.

Crossover Linux is a commercial implemention of WINE, and both Crossover and WINE are Windows API emulation wrappers within which software written specifically for Windows will run unaltered as though it were native. It sounds like a virtual machine mechanism but it's not. It's a clean-room implementation of the Win32 API set as defined in ECMA-234, plus other odds and ends that Windows apps need to run. Codeweavers has written a lot of the emulation code itself, and it sells the package (for $40—hardly a fortune) but it also contributes heavily to the free WINE project, and the consensus among everybody but a few grouches is that we all win.

What Codeweavers does is important: They single out a selection of the most-wanted Windows apps, and they work specifically on their implementation to fully support those apps. They offer tech support to registered customers for those apps they list as “supported.” (These include Microsoft Office and numerous other Microsoft apps, Adobe Photoshop, Acrobat 5, Indesign CS2, Lotus Notes, Quicken, Framemaker, and some odds and ends that I'm not familiar with.) Other Windows apps may be installed under Crossover (and WINE) but they are not guaranteed to work.

I didn't have a lot of time last night to spend on it, but I'll summarize what I did. I first wanted to see what Crossover could do at its best. So I began by installing Microsoft Office 2000, figuring that that was probably the most-requested and intensely debugged of all the supported Crossover apps. And it was a boggler: The installation Wizard spun the Office CD, then lurked in the background while the MS installer did its thing, popping up only occasionally to ask me for guidance, such as what bottle the software should go in. (More on that shortly.) Eventually it sticks an icon on the desktop and calls the job done.

It was uncanny. Office works perfectly under Crossover, and I spent half an hour loading various documents and trying various things, with nary a glitch or a hesitation. Wow. Just wow. I then went for a tougher supported install: Visio 2000. Visio does all kinds of weird stuff and reboots Windows twice during the install, but zoom! It cooked along, and twice I noticed a small Crossover window in the corner of the screen informing me that it was emulating a Windows reboot. Heh. But once all the kafeuthering was over, Visio had an icon on the Ubuntu desktop, and I was drawing a regenerative receiver with my jaw hanging open. Double wow.

Office and Visio going in without a glitch made a believer out of me. So I then went for the wild side, and selected an unsupported app: The SureThing CD Labeler 4 , which is a fine and venerable utility that I've been using under Windows for seven or eight years now. The app is listed as “untested” in the Codeweavers database, so it was the perfect choice. And it went it just fine, though I put it in its own bottle, as Crossover recommends. Alas, although it runs, when you create a new label file and click the Finish button in the create wizard, the entire app just goes poof and vanishes. So not everything works, even relatively simple apps that have been around for awhile. Emulating the Windows morass is not a simple nor easy thing to do.

Now, bottles. A “bottle” in WINE/Crossover talk is an independent set of configurable Windows parameters upon which one or more Windows apps draw when installed under Crossover. It allows an unruly app to have carnal knowledge of Windows internals without messing up other installed apps. You can install multiple apps in the same bottle, but when you install an unsupported and untested app, it's best to give it its own playground and put a high fence around it.

I'n not done testing Crossover by any means. Next up is Indesign 2, which is not a supported app but gets an “honorable mention,” which probably means it shows up when called and after that, we'll see. Family Tree Maker is another Honorable Mention, and QuickView Plus (which I use to open ancient word processing files like Wordstar and WordPerfect) isn't even listed. I'll let you know how it goes.

However, I was poleaxed by how well Office and Visio worked, given that Microsoft isn't well-known for respecting its own APIs. You can give up Windows and not give up Office, and as time goes on and the Crossover and WINE gang sort the glitches out, you will have to give up less and less. Highly recommended.

Malware from SourceForge?

Nov 8th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

I've been chasing something very odd here recently. For about a year nowI have used a FOSS utility called MozBackup to both archive and move my 1.7 GB mailbase around. It has always worked beautifully, but when I used it to restore my mailbase onto my new quad-core machine last week, the mailbase did not come back intact. I was getting weird error messages about the inbox not truncating when messages were moved into the junk folder, etc. which made me wonder what was going on.

Ok. This is a quad-core machine running XP SP3. I deliberately set it up so that AVG 8 runs during the day and not at 2 ayem, because I want to observe what effect multiple tasks in multiple cores has on overall system response. So every day at 1 PM, AVG 8 runs a full scan. It ran a full scan on all drives yesterday, and came up with nothing except warnings about a couple of revenant tracking cookies.

Late yesterday afternoon, I copied the current MozBackup installer file from my installers archive on D: to my “installed installers” folder (where I put installers for software installed on the machine) on C:. Instantly, AVG 8 set up a howl that it had found a trojan in MozBackup-1.4.8-EN.exe, the installer for the instance of MozBackup that I have had installed on the quad-core since June. The trojan was called Generic12.HTC.

That's odd in itself: On all the bazillion-squared pages that Google indexes, there was not a single mention of “Generic12.HTC” yesterday . Nor is there any entry by that name in AVG's virus encyclopedia. This morning, however, I suddenly see five or six mentions indexed during the night. It looks like a false positive, but I'm still a little nervous.

As a test, I went back to SourceForge and downloaded another copy of the file. As soon as it was complete in a temp folder, wham! AVG's “resident shield” utility called it out as Generic12.HTC. Now, I'm not used to thinking that SourceForge downloads can be malware sources, though there's no reason that it's impossible. However, the MozBackup-1.4.8-EN.exe file has been on my hard drive since June, and has passed muster every afternoon that the machine has been powered up. The file's time stamp has not changed. I can only assume that during yesterday's daily update, AVG brought down a signature that matched something inside the file—and that would be a mighty freaky coincidence if true.

The other freaky thing is that after I deleted MozBackup 1.4.8 and installed the previous version 1.4.7 (which is in use on three of my other machines, including my X41 tablet) the mailbase restore worked perfectly. So are there two problems here or one?

The handul of reports surfacing this morning seem to indicate that it's a false positive, which would make sense, given that it's been on this system since June without AVG making noise. So maybe I don't need to warn you against the 1.4.8 version. However, it does look like 1.4.8 doesn't necessarily import an archive created with 1.4.7. Yes, a coincidence, and a weird one.

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