Tech-Seeker

Until Live Messenger 2009, the messaging program did not support running multiple instances of itself. This meant you could only launch one MSN/Live Messenger app and had to logout of an account to access another one. Before this you had to rely on external third party programs such as MultiLive or MultiMSN. Since 2009 Microsoft added support for running multiple instances of Windows Live Messenger, you just had to activate it.

The support for multi-Windows-Live-Messenger is not enabled by default, but can be easily be activated safely with a simple registry edit:

1. Run Registry Editor: In the Start Menu do a Start Search for regedit, and under programs click regedit.exe.

2. Navigate through the folder structure to the following registry key:

KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Live\Messenger

2b. Note: For 64-bit Windows OS users, go to following registry key instead:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows Live\Messenger

3. In the right window pane, right click on any blank space, select New on context menu, and then click on DWORD (32-bit) Value.

4. Enter the name of the new registry value entry as MultipleInstances.

5. Double click MultipleInstances and modify its value data as: 1.

You can now start as many instances of Live Messenger as you want from Start Menu, and login to all your messenger accounts simultaneously.

Anti-Virus Software Performance

Anti-virus performance chart comprised of many sources and not official in anyway, and is just for reference when comparing anti-virus software

We all know there are a lot of Anti-virus scanners and tools out there, but which one is the right one to use? You might decide to pay a yearly subscription as an Anti-virus that costs ‘x’ amount of dollar a year has got to be the best? perhaps, but perhaps not.

There are also more factors to consider than just which AV scanner was ranked number one in any given year. Factors such as: performance and how much system resources the AV software consumes even in a passive state. many Anti-virus software will protect real-time, but whilst doing so can randomly cause CPU spikes or hog a good chunk of memory.

Some anti-viruses have high CPU usage and a low detection rate so if your anti-virus is not doing its job and your system has become somewhat bogged down soon after installing it, then this could explain it.

Other virus scanners such as Avast will periodically update themselves when a new update becomes available. Automatically downloading the latest virus definitions database and updating the core software when available.

An anti-virus isn’t an anti-spyware program as such,but it may detect, prevent and remove adware, spyware, and other forms of malware. So ideally, you want an anti-virus and an anti-malware, or the two combined.

Then there’s the most important factor of all detection and removal rate. Which anti-virus software detects and removes the most viruses. The two best anti-virus software’s that I’ve come across so far with the best definitions, detection and removal are Avast and Malware Bytes. And the best part is they both happen to be free (standard versions), have massive definitions databases, and are not resource demanding.

How Does An Anti-Virus Work?

An anti-virus program detects, prevents, and removes variants of malware such as viruses, trojan horses, worms and sometimes spyware/malware.

Signature-based anti-virus detection pertains to searching for known malicious patterns in executable code. There are a few anti-virus programs that also predict what a file will do if opened/executed by emulating it in a sandbox and analyzing it running to see if it performs any malicious actions. If it does, this may mean the file is malicious. This goes back to what was said earlier about keeping your anti-virus up-to date so that it has the latest definitions to detect viruses.

Avoiding Viruses

Despite the plentiful amount of tools available to prevent you downloading/running program that contains a virus, not all viruses are detected. Just because you have installed a decent anti-virus doesn’t mean you should download anything you want carelessly without facing the consequences. The most important thing is to know what you’re downloading. If there’s any doubt in your mind whenever, either google the name of the file you’re going to run or use an online virus-scanner where you upload the file or preferably both.

It seems like only yesterday WordPress released WP 3.2, in fact it was yesterday – just kidding! but as far as time goes in the Internet world it may as well have been.

The WP development team has released the first point update making the latest version WordPress 3.2.1. According to the developers, the maintenance update fixes a JSON related server incompatibility problem that affected some users. There are also some fixes for the new dashboard design and the Twenty Eleven theme, an update to the Twenty Ten theme, are also included.

More details about the maintenance update can be found in the news post, on the WordPress Version 3.2.1 features page. WordPress 3.2.1 is available to download from the project’s web site. Alternatively, existing users can update automatically via the Dashboard > Updates menu in the site admin area as per usual.

It’s interesting to see in chart form the obvious evolution and the de-evolution of the iPod. As you can see the classic starts off moderately large, which is expected of new technologies to begin with. Then, as one also expects; it starts to get smaller and smaller where you reach the shuffle which is very tiny. But then something unexpected happens; they begin to get larger again, much larger in fact looking at the iPad.

Of course the iPad is a different beast to the others and needs to be big to be of any use, but still the chart does make you wonder. Especially, since the evolution of technology often seems to be synonymous with size, e.g. mobile phones for example.

iPod nano vs. iPod classic

You may find that your database is too large to be imported into phpMyAdmin, because either it’s over the stated import size limit, maybe it just keeps timing out, or it just plain fails. That’s when you have to use the command line to get things done.

The first thing you have to do, if you haven’t already, is get a secure shell client such as SecureCRT or PuTTY. Then SSH login to your server account. The following assumes you have a backup of your SQL database uploaded to your server ready to be restored.

Then you need to restore you database using the following query that looks similar to:

mysql dbname -u user -ppass < /path/to/dump_file.sql

Whereby the dbname is the name of your database, user is your mysql username, pass is your password and /path/to/dump_file.sql is the path to the SQL file. As an example if you have a database called accounts, a SQL backup file named accounts_bac.sql, a username called dave, a password zero74 and the SQL file is in your public web folder, then the query would look like:

mysql accounts -u dave -pzero74 < /home/dave/public_html/accounts_bac.sql

Note: there is deliberately no space between the -p and the pass.

If you happen to be on a remote MySQL server and have to restore the database remotely, then it would be more like:

mysql accounts -h servername -u dave -pzero74 < /home/dave/public_html/accounts_bac.sql

Where servername is the name of the server your restoring the backup to. This last one isn’t as common as most people (average users) are restoring a database to the server they’re currently using.