At last, the allotment results were published today morning, relieving the tensions of many students. As I hoped, I got a seat in MES Engineering Collage, Kuttippuram for Computer Science Engineering. My best friend Krishnaraj has also got a seat there for the same course. Some other students from our school has also got seats there. The collage is just 40mts journey by bus from my home and another plus point is that I know many of the students studying there.

Today, in the shop, Reliance broadband connection was fully configured. The service person said that we could start using it from tomorrow or day after tomorrow. The connection is so easy that plugging a wire to the LAN port, we can access net. The connection is similar to a prepaid mobile as we must recharge it using recharge cards. Also, a phone was provided with it, for free from which all calls to the Reliance broadband users in our area are free and there will be incoming facility until the broadband connection is in use.

Another crazy thing that happened today was that I got some server error from Google. Their popular services including Search, GMail, Orkut, Adsense, etc were not accessible today evening. Its the first time I came before such an error from Google.

The date for the publishing of 2^nd allotment for engineering and medical courses in the official website were scheduled today, 5PM. From 5PM onwards, I tried to know about my result. Every time I got the same page saying “The site is Withdrawn for Reallotment”. At last after 6PM, I got the page saying allotment is postponed for tomorrow. What a model for punctuality from the government…! There are many such instances. If its not ready, why can’t they say it a little bit early? I am not the only person who suffer this. More than thousands of students, wasting more than an hour of “the valuable” time and money…

Today was a great day for me. I configured my internal modem in linux at last. My modem chipset is from “Conexant” ans is a HSF softmodem. I got a free driver of it from Linuxant. The free driver provides only 14kbps but, still its good. Thanks for the support from all my friends who gave me the instructions.

What I did was that I downloaded the latest version of ScanModemtool from limodems.org and used it to get the details of my modem. It generated some files and by reading them, I got the idea of where to get a free driver. I went to Linuxant and downloaded a debian package of my free driver(about 1.3MB) and installed it using the package manager. During the installation, I was asked to provide some paths and I did so and it worked…

Also, today installed the Lalitha keymap for Malayalam developed by the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing group. Its nice, similar to the keyman in windows and working perfectly.

Today, from Fastech Systems, Valanchery, I caught a virus which blocks usage of Mozilla and display a message while Orkut or YouTube is opened and makes the window close automatically. The virus affects only windows and works by deceiving the users by the name svchost, which is a system process run by the network or system. Where as this virus program is run under user and can be found in the task manager.

Here are the messages which come when Mozilla is opened and when Orkut is typed in the address bar of Internet Explorer.

Use Internet Explorer you Dope - Virus

Orkut is blocked - Virus

A similar message is displayed when YouTube is opened and a laughing sound is played with all the messages. Most of the antivirus programs were not able to find this virus(heard that the latest updated version of avast can heal it).

It can be easily removed manually.

First stop the two svchost processes from the processes tab, run by the user from the task manager. Don’t remove any other svchost processes as they are important for the system. While removing, a message will appear telling you its very important and all. Press “yes”. Now, you can use Mozilla, Orkut and YouTube. But, the virus is not removed completely. It ‘ll get reinstalled the next time when you restart the computer. To remove it completely, open “My Computer” and type “C:\heap41a\” and press enter. Now, you will be in “C:\heap41a\”, a hidden directory which cannot be accessed directly from windows explorer. Now delete all the files inside the directory. Then, type “regedit” in the “Run” option accessible from start menu or by pressing “windows + r” key combination. Find for “heap41a”. You will find some strings with the word “heap41a”. Delete them all. Use the shortcut key, “F3” to search for the next one. After deleting all, restart the computer. Now you can use Mozilla, access Orkut and YouTube.

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Added on: 18-09-2007

Today, I heard that some people working in shops are in much angry with their boss as they couldn’t access Orkut from the computers. Every time they open Orkut, the browser get closed and a window saying “ORKUT IS BANNED” is coming. They thought that their boss blocked Orkut…! They don’t know that its just a crazy little VIRUS!

Today is the Free Software Day. The Swathanthra Malayalam Computing group had arranged a program in Trichur corresponding to it. Its for the first time, I am attending for such a function. Thanks for Shyam for telling me about SMC group, by joining which, I had the opportunity to attend this function. My friend Krishnaraj was also with me.

It was an informative one. I could know more about the history of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing and about the ASCII and Unicode fonts. There was also an exhibition of Swathanthra Malayalam softwares, for studying Malayalam typing, Spell Checking, and many more. Shyam also had a project related to speech recognition.

I was glad to hear that about 80% of words in Linux has been translated to Malayalam. I do installed the latest version of IT @ School GNU/Linux last day and thought it would be better if I can change the interface to Malayalam.

May be some day I can also contribute to them…

For photos of the function at Trichur, visit: http://picasaweb.google.com/santhosh00/SMCSFD07

Project Site: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/smc

Wiki: http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC

Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/smc-discuss