Ross Brown dot net

By now spam and viruses ought to be a thing of the past, but instead malicious software is becoming increasingly dangerous and prevelant. The creation of malware outnumbered the release of legitimate apps for the first time during the second half of 2007.

Phishing attacks are on the increase and many popular sites are being compromised and forcing malware onto unsuspecting users. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are spreading malware almost daily while dangerous rootkits can go undetected.

Spammers are able to circumvent the account signup ‘CAPTCHA’ tests and inject spam directly into Hotmail and Gmail.

If you aren’t careful, even experienced users can fall foul of malware at any time, it can be as easy as innocently clicking on an image search.

It can be scary, but following these tips should keep you out of trouble. (more…)

I’ve been waiting for the new version of BlackBerry software for what feels like forever and now it’s been delayed AGAIN. It was announced last year with a release date of ‘around Christmas’, which came and went. Then it was (more…)

Just a quick post to say we’re back in New Zealand…

I’m seriously considering buying a bike, just a cheap thing to ride around the roads of Whitby on. At this point I’m debating whether to buy a new one or get a second-hand one off New Zealand’s favourite auction site. Not as straightforward as it may sound, with the price of new ones being so low- a mate at work got a GT brand one with front shocks and disc brakes for around $400NZ.

We’re currently staying with my in-laws in the UK and I have managed to put my IT skills to good use already The dog’s food bowl was being mysteriously depleted overnight and suspicions were high that something was coming in through the cat flap and stealing his food in the middle of the night.

Armed with a laptop, a cheap webcam and an internet search engine, I came up with a plan. I even found a detailed step-by-step guide which did the trick and recommended some free software. I set everything up, positioned the laptop & webcam on the counter looking over the food bowl and we all went to bed. This morning when we woke up we had plenty of evidence!

If this is your cat, be warned this incident has been reported to Interpol

Wellington has been hit with power cuts this week. On Monday, several blocks in the CBD lost power and traffic lights were down too, causing chaos. Yesterday afternoon was a similar story, but on a smaller scale.

Our office didn’t lose power, but our ISP, Citylink went down, causing our office to lose connectivity. Apparently generators have been brought in by the electricity company to ensure it doesn’t happen again, we shall see.

Reading the Stuff.co.nz website this morning, I found an article about enjoying listening to cover versions. It’s time I came out and admitted it - I also like a good cover thought I would share some of my favourites.

I have found lots of cover versions I like, far too to mention here, but have a listen to some of the covers below and hopefully you’ll see where I’m coming from….

I’ll start off gently, here’s a cover of Oasis’s Wonderwall by Mike Flowers Pops. Yes, it’s been covered a thousand times and is every busker’s favourite, but you have to agree (more…)

Oh, hai. It’s me again. I know, I know, there’s no excuse for it really, I have been very bad at keeping this blog up to date. The trouble is, there’s almost too much to post about and I have difficulty deciding what deserves to be blogged about and what doesn’t… and then I end up not posting anything at all (because it’s easier).

But I am going to make amends. I am going to post here more, because I can and should. You should stop by every once in a while to check it out, it’s going to be fun and interesting.

Disclaimer: this post may or may not have something to do with my impending Birthday (and obligatory mid-life crisis)

It’s a weekend, this calls for a celebration! Have a happy weekend song on me:

I bought a new PC last year, it’s a pretty high spec monster with plenty of memory and a blazing fast graphics card. In fact, the only thing that’s not fast is Windows XP. It came pre-loaded with a load of trial software (which I uninstalled ASAP) but it’s never been as ’snappy’ as I would expect.

It’s got to the stage where I boot it up and go and make a cup of tea while I wait for it to finish logging on, I had had enough and decided it was time to do something about it. A couple of other factors came into play: (more…)

Skype is apparently “back to normal” following the recent 2-day outage. According to the Skype Heartbeat Blog, the outage was caused by a deficiency in Skype’s resource allocation algorithms, which couldn’t cope with the large number of Windows users who rebooted following Microsoft updates. You can read more technical details on the Skype blog.

Sure, it was inconvenient for us - we weren’t able to video chat with our families in the UK, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I’m just glad I don’t rely on it for business reasons, as I know plenty of people do.