James Wiseman

I have long been of the opinion that developers and programmers (is there any difference?) should be left alone to do what they do best, i.e. develop/write software. Moreover, they outght to be able to do so with a clear scedule and without fear of interruption.

Switching between tasks takes time. There is only a finite amount of room in your head for various programming-related paraphenalia, so the moment you switch tasks, inevitably, some of what you currently hold will have to give way

I’ve recently stumbled across two articles that bear this out for me:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2391-the-pleasure-of-an-open-schedule

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html

So who is responsible for this? Well, a number of people, and it starts at the top. The prime goal of a project manager, for me, is to remove any obstacles from the path of development.

There are still plenty of reports coming in on the Microsoft Support Telephone Scam since I wrote the original article. A good repository for people’s experiences can be found here: http://www.digitaltoast.co.uk/supportonclick-systemrecure-scam.

A number of people have been conned into letting the scammers in to control their PC. Firstly let me say that there is no shame in this whatsoever. It’s a convincing scam, playing on the fears of people, and hooking in even the most suspicious.

Secondly, don’t panic. There are a number of things you can do to safeguard yourself.

One of the respondents, Chrisalisuk gave some useful advice, which I’ll reproduce here:

For anyone who’s interested on the technical side of this – I run a small IT company and have had a couple of calls from puzzled customers who have been “caught out” by these pond lifers; mercifully, no money has changed hands, but I did have one guy who asked me to go and check security on his machine AFTER the “fix”.

I found evidence of iobit.com installation – “advanced system registry cleaner” plus a folder and a number of registry keys referring to logmein rescue. The folder was in the windows folder, called “LMI2.tmp”. Rather frighteningly, logmein rescue can now be set for reconnection WITHOUT user permission – so there is a RATHER LARGE security problem RIGHT THERE!

Some interesting stuff in the LMI2 folder! – the virtualpcdoctor registration for logmein. A quick call to logmein has blocked one small revenue stream for them at any rate! The guys there were happy to listen and help, and had prior knowledge of the scenario – they asked me to mail the relevant logs, and thanked me greatly for my time.

Chrisalisuk was also kind enough to give some advice as to what to do:

…if you look at the posting IMMEDIATELY before yours, you’ll find that I mentioned the lmi2.tmp folder nestling in the wndows folder – look for that. If you find AND DELETE it, you SHOULD be OK. If you aren’t confident doing this, I suggest that a factory reinstall is your best option “just to be sure” – unless you have a trusted local company that can have a look. Whichever way, it will probably cost you money, but you gain experience – which is priceless. Don’t feel bad – these bastards are GOOD at what they do (con and extortion). Live and learn!

Let’s look at this. A factory reinstall is quite draconian, but will fix the problem for sure. But, it’s quite simple to look for the lmi2.tmp file. Click on the Windows menu (normally this will be in the bottom-left of your screen). Under this you will see an option labelled ‘Search’ or ‘Find’. Go here and type in lmi2.tmp and perform the search.

If it finds something, click on the item and then hit the ‘Delete’ button. Gone…

Oh, and change ALL your passwords – REGARDLESS. I would also place a stop on ANY credit/debit cards you have EVER used on the internet on that machine (the companies will understand). Better that, than a negative bank balance.

One last thing – report the scums to the bizzies. It makes you feel as though you’ve done SOMETHING to get back at them, and hey – somebody just MIGHT do something about the problem if enough pieces of paper land on their desk.

Yeah, this is hassle, but I’d certainly recommend doing it. If nothing else, it will give you peace of mind.

One thing I would also add is to perform a full and comprehensive virus scan on you PC. If you have more than one virus scanner, then use both. Run any anti-spyware/malware tools you have as well. I’ve also heard good reports about Hitman Pro which seemingly downloads quickly and runs effortlessly.

Do all this, and you’ll have nothing to worry about. And, most importantly, tell everyone you know, and do it face-to-face or over the phone if you can. Some people are generally suspicious of email chains that warn of impending doom in some way.

UPDATE

The Guardian newspaper seem to be onto this. This commented was posted on the Digital Toast forum above on 29/06/2010:

If anyone has been caught by this scam, or knows someone who has, then I’d be grateful if you could tell me the name of the company *whose name appears on your credit card*. It’s clear this company uses loads of different sites and different names, but I suspect it’s the same one (or ones?) behind it. Email me please atcharles.arthur@guardian.co.uk

Charles Arthur, editor, Technology, The Guardian

Other Articles

A comment on one of Mike Duncan’s Blog Postings made me laugh:

You guys are in need of trolls. Every serious blog has trolls and annoying people in general.
I gladly lobotomize myself to fill in this vacancy

Brilliant! Though, unsurprisingly, no-one has offered to do this here!

Although this conjured up Lord-Of-The-Ring style cave-trolls, in blogging terms, a Troll is someone who posts messages with the sole intent of annoying or raising and emotional response.

I took four days leave this week (Monday-Thursday) to spend more time with my family. The only reason that I didn’t take the Friday off is that I’m short on leave. But that’s not important right now.

I had about 150 items of email in my inbox awaiting me when I returned, which I’m sure is modest compared with some out there.

My strategy for dealing with this was as follows:

1. Identify the junk and delete appropriately.
2. Start reading from the at the earliest mail
3. Mark any email required for follow-up as ‘unread’ and leave all the others as read.
4. Do not reply to anything until you have read everything, and then respond where required.
5. Respond by phone or face-to-face where possible. The time you spend walking to the other end of the office is generally less than the time it takes to word a succinct reply.

I’ve been caught out before where I’ve started responding to an email early in a thread, only to look foolish when some resolution/conclusion presented itself later on. I’ve also spent considerable time in the past crafting carefully worded and verbose emails to justify my arguments where a face-to-face meeting or a phone call would have saved a lot of time.

It took me a bit of time (I’ll not say how much) to get through everything, and get things resolved to my satisfaction. This got me into thinking – How much time must we spend on email each week/month/year.

A colleague of mine once estimated that they spent almost a quarter of time dealing with emails. Staggering! The observations of the Mythical Man Month with regard to channels of communication are still alive and kicking! Another once commented that they ignored all emails they were only CC’d into on the basis that it can’t be that important if they weren’t the primary recipient.

Personally, I’m not a fan of meetings and the design-by-committee side-effect they seem to engender, but sometimes they are better than a whole load of people tapping away their opinions on a keyboard.

So next time you find yourself looking at an inbox full of mail, it might be worth considering how much time you are actually spending, what of it is value, and how you can streamline your processes for dealing with it.

Fantastic! I’ve been grappling with WordPress’ TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor for two months now, and have grown to dread having to present code within this tool. I even took to performing the syntax highlighting myself, and that meant manually colouring text according to how it appeared in my IDE.

So, I decided to call in the help of a syntax highlighter, and settled upon across Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter.

So here is the first bit of code (in C#) that I’ve tested out. It’s fairly trivial, and does nothing meaningful. It doesn’t, of course, recognise any of the built-in C# class names, but that would be expecting a hell of a lot!

public partial class Form1 : Form
{
    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        textBox1.Focus();
        MyKeyPress mkp = new MyKeyPress();
        mkp.KeyPress();
    }
 }

Of course, if you are reading this through a feed, then you’ll not see any of this. So, Just follow the link!

If it’s not too onerous, I may revisit some of my other posts.

May 2010 was the first full month that this blog was online, so I’d thought i’d share some stats from this. This is something I hope to do each month.

The stats are from the AWStats log analyzer tool on the control panel of my hosting account.

All

Here are the stats from the most significant browser hits above 1%. MSIE is way out in the lead, but somewhat down I would suspect on where it was a couple of years ago.

MSIE

The vast majority of MSIE hit came from the three latest versions, 8, 7 and 6. It’s particularly nice to IE6 trailing off, although not as quickly as I would have liked.

And a small bit of wierdness: One hit from MSIE 2.0, which celebrates it 15th birthday in November of this year! Who still uses that?

Firefox

There are, quite simply, millions (62, actually) of different versions of Firefox that browsed this site in May 2010, ranging from 1.0.1 (2 hits) to 3.6.4 (57 hits). The largest number of hits came from version 3.6.3 and accounted for 12% of all browser hits.

If you have received a call anything like this, first Off: DON’T DO ANYTHING THEY ASK.

If you are nervous, hang up. Sometimes they stay the other end waiting, so leave the phone for 15 minutes. You can unplug your router if you are in any doubt as to whether they are conencted remotely to your machine.

Next: then go to this site: http://www.digitaltoast.co.uk/supportonclick-systemrecure-scam

This came to my attention yesterday when I was contacted by a family friend who had recieved a cold call from “Windows Technical Support” and had proceeded to claim their machine was corrupt and virus-ridden.

I’ll embellish this article a little later, but just wanted to post something initially that could show up on search engines.

In the mean time, here’s a list of things NOT to do:

1. Don’t do anything they ask.
2. Don’t go to any website they request you access
3. Don’t let them access your PC remotely (you will be prompted before this happens)
4. Don’t give them any money

You might also like to try

1. Wasting their time by playing stupid
2. Recording the conversation
3. Do a Google search for key phrases they are using
4. Report it somewhere – even if it’s just leaving comments on a web page.

Generally if you do an internet search, you will come up with tons of results confirming that THIS IS A SCAM: Here are a few more links:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/081009-windows-event-viewer-phishing-scam.html

http://www.computerhq.co.uk/content/warning-fake-tech-support-call-scam-windows-xp-service-provider

http://www.pcproblem.co.uk/?p=49

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=1424731

UPDATE

The Guardian newspaper seem to be onto this. This commented was posted on the Digital Toast forum above on 29/06/2010:

If anyone has been caught by this scam, or knows someone who has, then I’d be grateful if you could tell me the name of the company *whose name appears on your credit card*. It’s clear this company uses loads of different sites and different names, but I suspect it’s the same one (or ones?) behind it. Email me please at charles.arthur@guardian.co.uk

Charles Arthur, editor, Technology, The Guardian

Other Articles

Programmers like new toys that they can play with, be it a second monitor, a new IDE, or a new programming language. They also like to feel that they are learning new things and not getting assigned to the technological scrap-heap and so will inherently favour (for example) C#3 above VB6 even when the final solution might be suboptimal.

I found myself drifting into this mindset recently when prototyping a design for component to fit in with an existing framework of COM components.

The component needed to call out to SQL Server 2005 to start an Agent Job. My first instinct was that I had to interface with SQL 2005 Native Client components through the .NET libraries. I envisaged something something like this:

//...get the connectionString somehow...
string connectionString = "Data Source=SOMESERVER;Initial Catalog=SomeDatabase;Integrated Security=SSPI;Provider=SQLNCLI.1;";
OleDbConnection oleDbConnection = new OleDbConnection(connectionString);
ServerConnection serverConnection = new ServerConnection(oleDbConnection.DataSource);
Server oSqlServer = new Server(serverConnection);

JobServer oAgent = oSqlServer.JobServer;
Job oJob = oAgent.Jobs["Test"];
JobHistoryFilter oFilter = new JobHistoryFilter();
oFilter.JobName = "Test";
oJob.Start();

…or something similar therein.

The component would have to expose a COM Interface and be registered using REGASM, which would requrie manual intervension in the shipping process.

In addition to this, I would have neededed to organise for the SQL 2005 Client tools installed on four servers and undertake regression testing of the applications on these servers to inspire confidence that this hadn’t broken anything.

To be frank, it all seemed a little onerous and overcomplicated. Apart from simply wanting to use C#, the reason for this doing this was based on an assumption that I needed the .NET library code to hook into SQL Server and that there was no other way. Really? Have you ever heard such nonsense?

Without realising, I’d very nearly falling into the Second System Effect trap (of sorts). All I really had to do was make a call out to the SQL Server sp_start_job to achieve the same effect, and all I needed was trusty old MDAC 2.8. This meant I could write it in VB6 to fit in with existing framework components with none of the impact or complication inherent with the C#-developed component.

So, I set about writing a little test application as proof of concept. It looked something like this:

Private Sub Command1_Click()
    Dim connection As New ADODB.Connection
    Dim connectionString As String

    connectionString = "Data Source=SOMESERVER;Initial Catalog=SomeDatabase;Integrated Security=SSPI;Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;"

    Call connection.Open(connectionString)

    connection.Execute ("EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_start_job @job_name=N'Test'")

    MsgBox ("Success")
End Sub

But I really wanted to use C#! However,  in this instance it just wasn’t feasible.

So, in conclusion, don’t get blinded by shiny new toys or by a desire to improve oneself, don’t simply dive into the first solution that you come across, and remember, complication is ruination!