www.rainydayz.org

The lead developer of Dr Solomon's Magic Bullet is Andy Ruddock. Andy brings to the large Dr Solomon's development team a deep knowledge of the way PCs work at a very low level.

A quick look at the the virus 'top twenty' shows that macro viruses don't yet have it all their own way. There are still perennial old favourites like Empire.Monkey, Parity Boot, and AntiEXE infecting customers' computer systems.

Boot sector viruses like these infect the boot sectors of floppy diskettes and typically the partition sector (MBR) of the user's hard disk. They are caught by booting (or attempting to boot) off an infected floppy disk. Ever left a floppy in your A: drive when you boot up? Ever seen the message 'Non system disk or disk error'? Then you could have been infected by a boot sector virus.

My documents are available in a number of formats for your convenience, please use the links below to download or view those documents which are of special interest.Please note that text documents are stored with UTF-8 encoding to preserve the Norwegian character set.

Curriculum Vitae
My curriculum vitae is available in a short format and a long format, the latter being a little more detailed, it can be downloaded using one of the following links :

Short Format

• Microsoft Word format (cv.doc)

Albert Einstein was one of the greatest minds ever, but still had a funny side :

• “The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
• “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.”
• “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
• “I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference!”

I've previously documented the process "Building Enigmail for SeaMonkey in Ubuntu 8.10" and the problems which I had to solve to get a working system.

I then went on to build an AMD64 build of the Enigmail plugin as I'm using the AMD64 install of Ubuntu 8.10. And, of course, I started off by following my earlier recipe to build the i686 32-bit version.

This went well, until I installed Enigmail, where I encountered an error that indicated the enigmime modules was unavailable.

I like SeaMonkey - I've used it for years (since the days of Netscape Communicator), but I also like using GnuPG signing and encryption of my mail. There's no enigmail package for Ubuntu 8.10 so I had to go and roll my own.

Here's the procedure I followed to build my own Enigmail package for Ubuntu :

• Make a directory under which you're going to build your packages. I have a src directory under which I build all my software, so I'll start by making a directory under that for SeaMonkey.
  • #cd ~/src
  • #mkdir seamonkey

I like the Mozilla suite but missed having a working EnigMail. As I'm running Debian on an AMD64 and there's no working EnigMail for i386 I figured I had a snowball's chance in hell.

I tried working from the Debian packages for IceDove and from the packages from the previous release for Mozilla-EnigMail without success.

I then found a link to a page with info on how to achieve this, so I've reproduced it here along with downloadable configuration files and an installable .XPI for Debian Etch AMD64.

I've been trying to install a PGP keyserver for some time, then found sks.
It's in the Ubuntu repositories, so actually installing it is a breeze :

# sudo apt-get install sks

However, configuring it is a little more complicated, here are the steps I took :

• Open a terminal window
• Create the database to store the keys
  

  # sudo sks build

• Start sks, then close it, to ensure that all files it requires are created correctly
  

  # sudo sks db ^C

• Set database permissions on the database used by sks to store keys
  

For those of you who are used to running "dpkg-reconfigure locales" on Debian to select and generate locales you may be a bit disappointed at the seemingly broken way it is done under Ubuntu.

When I say broken "dpkg-reconfigure locales" does not yield an interface that allows you to select and deselect locales. It simply generates the locales mentioned in "/var/lib/locales/supported.d/local" file. Therefore if you want to generate a bunch of locales you will need to add them to this file and re-run "dpkg-reconfigure locales". NOTE: One locale per line.

When using sudo to attempt to run programs it is quite common to receive the following error message :

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified

Unable to import modules.  Maybe you're not running under X?

Here's an explanation of why you get this message and what you need to do to allow the root user to run X programs when using sudo.

Everything was rather quiet in the hundred acre wood. The trees whispered to each other as the wind rustled their leaves. Under a large oak tree, there lived Pooh bear. From inside Pooh's house, there came a steady bang...bang... bang!, that was making his honey jars rattle on the sideboard. The light came through the window, and in the evening sun Pooh raised the axe once more and brought it down on the tattered remains of Christopher Robin.
"Why...won't... he...fit..." puffed Pooh to himself as the axe came down once more.