Live OneCare duh….

Recently switched to a new laptop to use while a bunch of guys tried to figure out how to get Vundo and a nasty  link redirecting virus off my beloved Toshiba. Browsing became a pain. Racked my brains for days and tried different antiviruses, deleting weird looking entries from the registry, HijackThis etc…and finally the WMD itself: VundoFix. Nothing worked.Nada!  Honestly, I admire the guy(s) who wrote this thing.  Don’t ask how i got infected; okay went down a “dark alley” online to get some prized warez.

So here i am, with this laptop running Windows Live OneCare and i get  the notification above . A security software suite whose firewall component is suspicious of its OWN aiding component. Jeez! No wonder the folks who screwed up my pc are encouraged.

Project Gutenberg: books for leisure

After watching my weekly dose of the BBC’s Click, Kate Russell as usual presented a list of interesting sites for us dumb end-users who only use Google search results to find a website. I found the Gutenberg Project  to be intriguing and resourceful depending on what an individual’s interests are. For the more literary inclined, it contained a wealth of book catalogs on various topics, in different languages and by a lot of authors; with the catalogs searchable by author and/or title. Of course my favorite author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s collection is included. For those of you who don’t know him, he’s the creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes.

Remember all those comic detectives with a magnifying glass and smoking a pipe? Yep, … all clones of Sherlock. Hercule Poirot does have a strong case but Sherlock reigns as the greatest detective ever – fiction-wise that is. At least now that I’ve got my hands on Sir Arthur’s digitized collection, after a hard day’s work of changing 1’s to 0’s and 0’s to 1’s , i  do have something other to relax with at night…

Census-Foreclosure Mashup in AIR v1.0

A few weeks back, a couple of buddies were looking to rent a cheap apartment. This got me thinking. Well, with all the foreclosures in the country why would anyone spend time looking for an apartment and eventually receive the monthly shock dosage of “RENT DUE BY….”. You get the picture.

I threw together this simple app built with with Adobe’s AIR, Java and Google Maps to allow anyone using it to view foreclosure listings and interactively checkout that listing’s area demographics. The demographic data is pulled via web services from StrikeIron.