I had an interesting task today, my manager came in in a blind panic telling me that all of her files on her computer have been deleted and the hard drive has broken, is there anything I can do? Well ok, let me have a look…she boots up the machine into Windows, which was the first odd thing, and when she signs in a program pops up called Windows Recovery looking fairly official and there are a ton of “Critical Errors” popping up from the system tray, the desktop background is blank and every file on the computer is gone. I can see why she’s panicing. For a moment I’m confused as this laptop is always run on a secure network so I thought it unlikely to be malware, but it’s obvious that the hard drive isn’t busted, it’s booted into windows so malware is the only logical conclusion.
So how can it be fixed? Interestingly as soon as I tried doing anything slightly complicated such as opening a CMD window it restarts the computer which resets it going through the myriad of “error” windows. So I need to quit this application before I can do anything at all, the task manager won’t open so I need to find another application to do it for me. A quick google and I find iExplore (Download) that successfully killed the application. Nice.
Next is to get all of the offending programs deleted, would be easy if our network wasn’t blocking every useful site under the sun, ok I’ll tether my mac with the iphone and dl it that way. A quick USB switch later and it’s on the affected laptop. Spybot should get it done but just in case I’ll aso put on the free version of Malwarebytes. Install both of those and run the scans. They take a while but it’s best to be thorough. They find quite a lot, get rid of the malware and restart to complete.
Great, but on restart all of the files are still missing…crap. I doubt that the software deleted the files and an obvious ‘show hidden files’ isn’t going to cut it and I’m not going to go through every individual file and show the hidden files even if it did. Need another way. Another quick google comes up with this little gem: unhide.exe. Download (once again through the tethered mac) and run, it took a while giving me reason to think that it wouldn’t run at all, but eventually all of the files pop back up on the window and a quick check shows that all of the files have been restored.
So a lot of work to undo something that loos like it was downloaded by clicking through a link on a dodgy website. Moral? On the web, if you don’t know if it’s real don’t go near it. However the manager was delighted as she thought the whole computer was a lost call…sometimes it pays to know about computers
So I have finally been tempted by the processors in the new line of macbook pros, I mean a 4 threaded beast in a 13″ laptop, it’s pretty impressive. I even managed to scrounge a student discount off the guy in the apple store – so 15% off! It seems that it may become a tradition that I update my mac when they put in a new processor architecture since my last one was on the Core 2 Due update (almost 5 years ago!!)
I have been using it for a couple of days now and it is super quick on everything from Photoshop to Call of Duty! If anyone is thinking of updating I would say don’t hesitate.
So it has recently come to my attention that Google are ending development for their inspired Google Wave. While it doesn’t surprise me in the least it does make me sad, as even though it did have functionality problems, usability problems and the titanic foe of email, it also had some epic brilliance.
For those of you who don’t know what Google Wave is, I wrote a fairly short wiki entry on it for a university project which should get you up to speed.
So what was the problem with Wave? Having pushed the technology time and time again at University as a medium to use while writing projects in a group, I see myself as somewhat of a Wave Crusader…but it was very rarely used in a significant way. I attributed this down to people wanting to stick to what they know, and that is Microsoft Office, but it was very successful as a way of combining notes on the layout of a project and for assigning tasks once the layout was finished.
In fact, looking down my list of waves, the majority of them are lists and I have never used the extra functionality they have on there such as photos, maps, polls and games. While the idea behind all of these are good, without some functionality that everyone one would use in a collaborative setting there is just no point in having these ‘gimmicky’ functions. By functionality that everyone would use I mean spreadsheets, presentation software along with the word processing, and then being able to have them all in one wave.
But wouldn’t Wave then start competing with Google Docs? I think that is exactly the problem. Wave tried to pass itself off as email reinvented but came to sit between a messaging app and a word processing environment, neither of which people really need, and that confused everyone. At university I had to do a presentation on Google Wave to show everyone what it actually was, and it wasn’t an easy task. I came from the angle of ‘email replacement’, but having used it I don’t feel that it is. The best way I can describe it now is instant messaging but with added functionality such as inserting images and it keeps all the conversation in a well organised and readable manner.
The best we can now hope for is that some of what Google has learned with Wave will come through in Docs, because it is in dire need of an update. Welcome additions would be some sort of easy to use commenting system, easy embedding and better controls for document manipulation, not to mention more compatibility between spreadsheets, presentations and word processing.
Wave was a brilliant idea, and if it was a bit more polished with a few more useful bits of functionality it could have stood a real chance of becoming successful, so it makes me a bit sad to say goodbye, but I really hope something useful can be brought to Google’s future products.
A good friend of mine, Sam Gardener, is in the process of writing a play called Mylar Baggs. The play is a murder mystery based around heroes and villains, comic book style. There are songs and all, we have even recorded one of them:
This is only an evening’s work, but gives an impression of how far Sam has come with the show.
I really enjoy photography, and since investing in a DSLR (Canon naturally), a decent lense, and a tripod I have tried to improve my eye for it. You can view some of my selected images here, but I also make selected albums available to view on my MobileMe server.
These days I have been tending to focus (excuse the pun) on HDR landscapes, creating one image from several variably exposed images to give depth and contrast to the colour, here are a couple of examples:
Welcome to my website! I am a web developer recently out of university where I gained a degree in Web Design. I took a winding path around the world before ending up here, living in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai, France and eventually the South West of England, where I attended secondary school at Kelly College in Devon.
I first got interested in digital design when living with several graphic designers. Learning tips from them and combining them with my general love for tech I fell into learning some XHTML and CSS. This led me to creating my own website, the first version of jordanneenan.com. With the realisation that the accounting degree I was studying for at the time was making me miserable, I decided to point my future in the direction of building things on the web by changing to a Web Design degree. Since then I have never looked back, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my degree. The launching of this fourth version of my site coincides with me looking for a job. My ideal job would be a Front-end Web Developer position in a happening design agency.
