Sony has a promotion running at the moment to coincide with the new Bond movie shortly coming out. Purchasing Sony stuff gives you entries into this competition with some pretty good prizes.

I entered yesterday and received multiple entries due to the cost of my TV, though I was not eligible for a free learning remote like I initially thought. This morning i received an email from Sony advising that I had won a prize! Cool! I like prizes.

Checking my email, I saw the prize was a ticket to see the new Bond movie.

One ticket.

I can’t think of a worse prize I could be offered, what the hell kind of prize is that? If I want to use it I either have to be a pathetic loner, or spend money to get my prize! Not only that, I have to post Sony a proof-of-purchase to claim the prize, they won’t simply send it out.

Offering one ticket as a prize is more insulting to me than no prizes. I know people shouldn’t look gift-horses in the mouth but why would I even want one ticket?

Well, for the third day in a row we’ve been trying to rid our servers of this stupid virus. McAfee came back to me advising the type of virus it was, and told me to make sure their scanner is up-to-date. A new update had come out overnight so I installed it, and the scanner was now able to find and delete the virus.

However, they only find it when the scan is run, not when the application runs. Since you can’t scan a machine every minute for viruses, it’s kind of useless. There is still very little information available on the web so it’s hard to know what we’re up against.

What I have seen though, is that it tries to connect to a website (not possible due to our network configuration) and download something, what I don’t know. Most likely a trojan of some kind which will allow a punk kid to take control of the computer for the purposes of sending out spam or taking down servers they don’t like.

So, we’re lucky that the virus isn’t actually doing anything other than being a nuisance, but it is a damned nuisance. Still, at least the past three days at work have gone by extremely quickly.

We spent all day working against this stupid virus and still didn’t really get anywhere. Late in the day I found out you can submit suspect files to McAfee and they’ll check them out for you, which could be the answer we’re after.

If you want to do it in the future, you can submit the files at www.webimmune.net and have them checked out there. Very useful if it’s a new thing that’s just been found.

And now I’m knackered.

Yesterday at work, all the shares on one of our servers disappeared — I know this because I received a call, not because I was working — and thus were not available. I found the problem in about five minutes and thought about it a little, but not until this morning.

It had happened on another of our servers (the “Server” service had stopped for some reason) and many of our servers had a file named u.exe in the root directory of their boot drive; this file was being run many times on some, bogging them down.

To cut a long story short, we still haven’t found the exact problem (there are numerous other files called wgeax.exe which appear in the “Temporary Internet Files” folder on each of the servers; after being deleted they reappear a while after.

For now, we are rejecting connections on our servers from any computer outside of our Division (with a couple of exceptions, which could become entry ways to it happening again, but they need to be available) to try and play it safe.

Googling for information on both of these files turns up very little (u.exe appears to either be spyware, a keylogger, or trojan, though the symptoms I’ve found don’t seem to match this at all) and to be honest I’m quite puzzled.

Due to our network setup, we can’t just have one firewall box protecting everything, and need to configure each machine. So, tomorrow we will be configuring Windows security policies to reject any unwanted connections — we’ve never done this in the past because the network has previously been well-secured by the central IT department. Obviously we can no longer rely on them.

If anyone has any information on these files I’d love to know more. It seems as though the computers are either downloading or being sent the wgeax.exe file and creating u.exe and then running it multiple times. There was a recent Internet Explorer update but installing this on one of our test machines didn’t fix the problem at all.

Justine says our new TV is “huge” and that we need to move our couch back even further. We sit around 3m (10 feet) away from the screen. According to THX recommendations, we should be sitting just over 6 feet (1.8m) with a 55″ screen. So, if anything, we should be sitting closer!

According to the Viewing Distance Calculator, we need a 90″ screen to meet the THX recommendation, or a 70″ if we want to scrape into the specifications (though it’s not the recommended size). The largest TV I have ever seen in person for sale is a 70″ unit but I know an 80″ one was on sale a few years back. Screens above 60″ are almost all projection screens (at least commercially available ones) — either front (a “regular” projector) or rear projection. Even 60″ plasmas or LCDs are hideously expensive and uncommon. A screen meeting the THX specification would most likely totally fit your view which is, I suppose, one of the aims of the specification.

I agree that going from a 68cm to a 140cm screen is a big jump (boy is it ever, playing video games on it is a blast), but I expect in a few weeks we’ll barely even notice. Of course, the TV might not be in it’s final position as I’m still waiting on a new stand which will hopefully arrive by next weekend (if I’m lucky).

Tip: If Harvey Norman doesn’t have something in stock, buy it elsewhere.

A while ago, I posted my thoughts about buying a new TV. Defeated, I gave up on buying a new unit as the sort of unit I wanted simply cost too much. Recently, the lure of getting a new TV hit me again when I saw a large, LCD rear projection with 720p resolution for a pretty decent price.

I went through some numbers and decided that even though rear projection isn’t my ideal television, I don’t think there’s any such thing right now, so I ordered a new one last Friday.

Today, the new unit arrived! The box barely fit through the door since it was so big, but once the unit was out of the box it seemed a lot smaller. Since the stand I ordered (before the TV) won’t arrive for another week or so we first put it on the floor, but later in the afternoon bodgied up a stand for it which should last for the next week.

The TV isn’t perfect, but neither was our old one, and I’m pretty happy with it regardless. For those interested, the screen size is 55″ (139.7cm) diagonal which is almost as big as you would want from where we sit — the maximum would be a 70″ unit, but there are not even 60″ units that even approach the price for the one we bought.

Here’s hoping it will last for the next 4-5 years.

I don’t often get sick, and when I do it’s not particularly bad. That’s why I was surprised when I woke up with a sore throat on Tuesday.

Wednesday morning my sore throat hurt but only for 20 minutes or so — it was OK after my shower. Except that now I had a headache and my sinuses hurt.

Thursday I decided to give up and spent the day at home. Wasn’t much of a “sick day” though, since I ended up writing a report, and taking 4 calls from people at work, as well as sending and receiving a bunch of emails. It still counts as a sick day, what a gyp.

Today I figured that I may as well go to work, and ended up feeling worse than I did yesterday. The whole day was spent in a cloudy state where I was sort of feeling half asleep, though I was wide awake. My sinuses weren’t running but I did have a headache for much of the day.

Looks like the weekend is going to be a quiet one.