Over the last few days I have been thinking about myself a bit. Not much but enough to make me relise how useless my life is at the moment. I am not in university at the moment because of holidays, and like most holidays and weekends and any other day I am not in university or lessons do not start till the afternoon my sleeping pattens go out the window. For the last few months I have slept in past noon the only exception was the last week of my holiday in France at LePas Opton where I was normally up by around 10 o’clock.

When I actually do get up all I do is set around my house, usually not far from my computer or television (considering they are right next to eachother it would be hard not to). Although I am skilled on a computer the last think that actually involved using my brain was probably when I build my computer which was about two months ago now. I have upgraided the memory from a gigabyte to two and installed Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2.

I think I need to get back into University and do some work, I know I am more than capable of doing anything that is asked of me and then some. It would also give me a reason to get a sleeping patter, I have not had one since I was in highschool which was over three years ago now. It would probably be a bad idea if I was self employed, I would never get the work done.

A few anti-virus firms are reporting that there is a virus spreding using the extentions feature of Firefox. The trojan has been named FormSpy and Sophos has been dubbed Troj/FireSpy-A. It captures information from the browser (like passwords and bank details) and send them to a remote computer. The trojan also comes with a file that Windows can execute that also records ICQ, POP3, IMAP and FTP passwords. The trojen pretends to be the legitimate Numberlinks extention.

You should remember this virus will only get onto your computer if you let it, it does not exploit a weekness in Firefox.

Over the last few days I have been playing Need For Speed: Underground 2, I have only completed it once before and that was last year so I hardly remember only just remember it but it is suprising how quickly I got used to the controls again. For the first few hours I kept pressing the handbrake button insted of the NOS buttion and visa-versa because I have been so used to the Gran Turismo 4 controls.

While I was in town today I also bought a game called Juiced which is on the same sort of them, street racing. As you may have noticed I like almost anything to do with cars.

I do not go on many video sites but my sister does, and ever since she saw the last episode of the latest season of Doctor Who she has been checking out all the Doctor Who videos on YouTube. I am posting this one, called Doctor Who Emperor Dalek Funny!! because dispite its tacky name it is very funny.

I have have Microsoft Windows Vista for a couple of weeks but I only got around to installing it a few days ago, although most of it was because I was on holiday for two weeks. The install process looked good but was not overly pleasent (for some reason my first two attempts failed at around 10 percent). I then tried to install drivers for my wireless network card which were not compatable with Vista and killed it so I had to re-install it.

Appart from the install there have been few other problems. My only real complain is that it can be slow, but that is mostly because it is still in Beta development and not all the code has been fully optimised yet. Vista really does look nice although it is posible to achive a simaler look in Window XP it is nice not having to break some of the security to do it. I like when I press Alt + Tab (keyboard short-cut to switch between open windows) you get a thumbnail of the window, same when you run the mouse over the tabs on the start bar at the bottom of the screen.

I am not that pleased with the performance of Vista, I have one gigabyte of memory installed and the lowest I have seen the usage is 51 percent which is about 520 megabytes. On Windows XP I would normally expect a memory usage of around 350 to 400 megabytes. However, my processor seems to be making light work of it with normal usage around ten percent. I have been thinking about upgrading to two gigabytes of memory recently so I guess now is as gooder time as any.

I am aware that it is now the July 17th but July 15th is now Firefox Day. Firefox Day is celerbrating the day that the Mozilla Foundation (the creators of Firefox) was formed by asking you to find a friend and bring them to Firefox. In return your name and your friend’s name is written into Firefox 2 and gets a place on the Firefox Friends Wall. I just need to find a friend I have not already coverted to Firefox…

Britt Systems and Technalign have come together to make pre-build computers with the base model coming in at $300 (about £160). The system itself is not that spectacular with 256MB of memory, 80GB hard disk drive and an AMD Athlon 64 2800+ processor. You might have noticed something, Windows XP really needs 512MB of memory, well it does not have Windows XP, it comes pre-installed with Frontier which is a distribution of Linux. That is why it is so cheap, I am surprised other companies have not tried this before.

Let me give you a little background information, Deepz0ne is a well know cracker and was one of the original founders of a cracking group called “Redium”. Redium was the first group to successfully crack Sound Forge 4.5 so that it could be used by anyone without paying for it (illegally of course). Sound Forge 4.5 leaves a signature like this “2000-04-06 IENG ISFT Sound Forge 4.5″ at the end of all music files telling anyone who actually views it in an editor what software was used to make it. The cracked version of Sound Forge 4.5 has the same signature but slightly altered signature like this “2000-04-06 IENG Deepz0ne ISFT Sound Forge 4.5″.

Now lets get onto the good bit, if you check out the audio files the are part of the Microsoft Windows XP Tour which can be found in “WINDOWS\Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav”. Just open one of the nine .wav files in the folder in NotePad and scroll down to the bottom of the file (and across a little) and you will see the signature of the software that created the audio files, “2000-04-06 IENG Deepz0ne ISFT Sound Forge 4.5″. I can not wait to see how Microsoft gets out of this one.