Top Google result for Skype could be Malware

Trying to download Skype this morning I found a very strange link at the top of the Google listings.

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Clicking on the link brought me to this suspicious looking page, with a URL ending in skype.php, but nothing further.

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And the bottom of the page

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Clicking on the download link (either), brought me to a page that didn't even mention Skype at all (either in the URL or on the page), and wants me to input my email.

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Pretty sure this is some form of malware, adware or just collecting emails for spam purposes. Otherwise, there would be a little bit more of Skype on the detail pages.

However, getting to the actual Skype client isn't much easier. I tried to download the actual Official Skype client, and spent about 15 pages getting to the download.

RSpec/Textmate puts for better debugging printouts

I loved this awesome tip by Rick DeNatale on how to get Textmate to properly print out "puts" when running rspec tests. But I had a problem. When I'd run the code outside of rspec, the use of rputs would cause an exception because the method was undefined. So I've changed the code a little bit so it works in all instances. Add the following code as the very last lines of spec/spec_helper.rb:

module Kernel
  if ENV.keys.find {|env_var| env_var.match(/^TM_/)}
    def puts_with_html(*args)
      puts_without_html( *["<pre>", args.collect {|a| CGI.escapeHTML(a.to_s)}, "</pre>"])
    end
    alias_method_chain :puts, :html
  end
end

RubyAMP installation for ruby 1.9 and rspec 2

Update: My change has been pulled into RubyAmp and can be installed as follows:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Textmate/Bundles
git clone https://github.com/timcharper/rubyamp.git RubyAMP.tmbundle
gem install rb-appscript
osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'

Original post:

This is a forked version of the bundle which supports the new RSpec.tmbundle which supports rails 3 and ruby 1.9.x. Once the pull request has been accepted, you should be able to use the main version.

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Textmate/Bundles
git clone git://github.com/lukaso/rubyamp.git RubyAMP.tmbundle 
gem install rb-appscript
osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'

If you need the RSpec.tmbundle, here are the installation instructions from: https://github.com/rspec/rspec-tmbundle

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
git clone git://github.com/rspec/rspec-tmbundle.git RSpec.tmbundle
osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'

Getting RVM, Textmate, Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 and Rails 3 to play nice

It's taken a while of fighting though various blog posts to get to a mac with a stable Textmate, RVM, two versions of Ruby (1.8.7, 1.9.2) and two versions of Rails (2.3.8 and 3.0.x).

Without further ado, here are the hard steps I've worked through to get it all working:

RVM

use .rvmrc to set your projects to the right ruby/gemset (create a gemset as well):

cd myproject
rvm 1.9.2@myproject

Build textmate wrapper following the rvm instructions, then replace contents of textmate_ruby file:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
cd .
exec ruby "$@"

RSpec Bundle

Update this to a very recent version. (from github)

Also set RUBYOPT to rubygems in Shell Variables under the Advanced tab in TextMate setttings.

RSpec

gem install rspec-rails

Follow instructions here:

http://github.com/rspec/rspec-rails

Plist fix for textmate

Shut down textmate:

Make sure you are using ruby 1.9.2

rvm use 1.9.2

Then:

git clone git://github.com/kballard/osx-plist.git
cd osx-plist/ext/plist
rm plist.o
ruby extconf.rb && make
mv /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/osx/plist.bundle /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/osx/plist.bundle.old
cp plist.bundle /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/osx/

Restart textmate

http://altentee.com/2007/installing-the-cvs-bundle-for-textmate-for-mac-osx/

Git.tmbundle

mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
git clone http://github.com/jcf/git-tmbundle.git Git.tmbundle

Ruby on Rails.tmbundle

The Ruby on Rails bundle will need to be reinstalled as well to avoid the following error

Ruby on Rails.tmbundle/Support/bin/intelligent_migration_snippet.rb:71:in /bin/bash:
-c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `'' /bin/bash: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of fileto_a' for "\n\n def self.down\n    drop_table :tags\n  end\nend\n":String (NoMethodError) from Ruby on Rails.tmbundle/Support/bin/intelligent_migration_snippet.rb:96:in

Find the update and install instructions at http://github.com/drnic/ruby-on-rails-tmbundle

British Car Insurance is Insane

I witnessed an accident in central London while having lunch just over a year and a week ago. I only saw the aftermath, a porsche rolling slowly onto the sidewalk, and a man limping out of a pickup truck. My back was turned at the time, and I swivelled my head only on hearing the two cars smash. I did deliberately check the state of one of the traffic lights, probably very relevant to who was responsible, but which light escapes me now.

I gave one of the drivers my card, in case a witness was needed. I thought it was the civic thing to do, especially as the police didn't arrive during the 20 minutes I was at the scene.

Aside: Funny thing the police. Two minutes after the accident, a police siren came howling towards us. I remember being impressed by how quickly they arrived (especially because the Met Police are largely invisible unless George Bush is in town, when suddenly they crowd everyone else off the streets). The police car slowed into the intersection, swerved deftly around the airbag littered vehicles and continued on. Clearly they had better things to do, such as fill out paperwork (see below).

I imagine the British car insurance industry got involved shortly thereafter, and they are the insane ones. Since that accident, I've filled out one witness statement for the insurance of the Porsche, another for the insurance of the Nissan pickup. Additionally, the Met Police needed a statement. These were all required in the first month.

Four months later, an investigator came to see me at work (she was from one of the insurers, I haven't a clue which) and took a verbal version of the statement I'd already given. And now today, a year and a week after the accident, apparently the company that provided the hire (rental) car to one of the insurees, can't do their work without their very own version of a witness statement.

I don't understand why they couldn't all share one of the previous four statements.

I'm seeing this process from the other side as well. My own car had a poorly secured construction fence dent a side panel. Five months later, the claim against the company with the fence is sitting with the lead solicitor of complex cases at some nameless legal firm. I've even sent them photos.

It's no wonder negotiations in Northern Ireland need a few centuries, when a bog standard traffic accident takes several years.

Mac Office 2008 SP2 Can't Open Some Files

Microsoft has finally acknowledged that Mac Office 2008 SP2 doesn't work, and that a fix will be released 'in August'.

The problem is that .xlsx, .pptx, .docx, etc files, do not work in some instances (quite many instances in my experience). This is extremely annoying since Office doesn't come with a roll-back feature. Not only that, but this is supposed to be a stability release, not the exact opposite.

Here's their mea culpa.

I've used another work around than the ones they list: Numbers from iWork 09.

Mozy Backup - Getting Lost In the Cloud - A Bad Experience

I've been an enthusiastic supporter of using cloud based backup services, and specifically of Mozy for some time. All of my computers at home are backed up using Mozy, and briefly we used it at work as well.

The service worked pretty well backing up, though it suffered from frequent failures (timeouts, machine in sleep mode, etc) and quite pokey upload performance. But I figured, better backed up than sorry.

One of my computers has a drive which had 900GB of data on it, of which 365GB were backed up by Mozy. This monster drive failed, and nothing I did could get the data back.

I've replaced the drive (a month ago) and have been trying to get my data out of Mozy ever since.

First of all, I have no doubt that my data is in their data center somewhere, eager to be restored, and I have no doubt that someday, I'll have it all back, but the trip from here to there has been long, and is still far from over.

Here is my story (stretched over a month):

• Drive failed. 
  
• Started a restore, but struggled to find which part of the archive was up to date.
  
• Picked the wrong part of the archive and started restoring (through the client), which takes forever to get ready (365GB)
  
• Realized I picked the wrong part of the archive, and canceled the restore.
  
• Started a restore on the correct part of the archive, though this part of the archive was still significantly out of date, so I would be losing some recently saved files. (365GB)
  
• Restore kept stopping and not continuing, so I contacted support. (Download speed varied from 400 mega-bits/sec to 1.2 mega-bits/sec on my 24 mega-bit line. Same as the upload speed, even though I have ADSL).
  
• Their recommendation was to cancel the client restore (which was now at about 13% done) because a web restore would be much faster. I questioned the support persons reasoning about 20 times, but eventually gave in.
  
• So I canceled and requested a web restore. This turned out to require some waiting. Actually, a lot of waiting while the download files were generated. In my case, it required about 3-4 days. Thankfully, they sent me an email when it was done.
  
• In the mean time, the client restore which I had canceled, inexplicably started up again, but now listed the restore size as 600GB (with 3-4 weeks to get it all back) and started from the beginning.
  
• With the web restore setup completed, I found 145 .exe files to download, named 1 through 145! I started downloading the first file, and the transfer speed was just as slow as client restore. Given the massive amount of work it would require, I gave up on web restore, especially because I couldn't stop the client restores anyway.
  
• Backups also were starting up during the restore, which slowed things down. So I disabled scheduled backups.
  
• At the same time, my Avira Anti-virus identified some viruses in restore, so that gummed up the works, while a dialog hung open asking for my input. I couldn't sit there for the next 3 weeks, so I disabled the anti-virus.
  
• Even after disabling, scheduled backups continued to run for several days, regardless of what I had requested in the interface, much like the phantom restores.
  
• Eventually I had to reboot the machine because it had lost network connection, one of many reasons a Vista box seems to need frequent restores. This should not have been a problem. But...
  
• After reboot, the client restore had to start from the very beginning again, not remembering where it was (even though most data had apparently been restored)
  
• Am now waiting for restore to complete. It's back at about 3% complete after 3 days.
  

As you can imagine, I am no longer a big fan of Mozy. I think their software quite frankly sucks, and their customer service, though friendly and prompt, led me down a bad path, and hasn't been able to help me whatsoever.

Be curious if anyone else has had a similar experience. Well, at least one person did. Here's some other ideas about how to do this.