MacBook Pro abuse

I hate to say it, but I was obliged to resort to using a hammer to fix a MacBook Pro today.  A friend of mine dropped theirs and inflicted a very bad dent in the base plate.  So I took the plate off and beat it back into shape with my trusty hammer.

Too bad the hard drive wasn't as easy to fix.  Complete data loss, due to drive being running during the accident.

Go!

Well, I have begun to learn Google's Go programming language with an eye toward building Google App Engine applications.  The last language I set out to learn was C# about three years ago (I can't remember how long I relied on VB prior to that...).  This feels fairly similar upfront, though I've only been working with it for an hour.

I downloaded the Go App Engine SDK from Google and began to wrestle with Python (another language I've ignored at my own peril for some time) on OS X.  That was fun.  When I started with Macintoshes (indeed before having officially been shortened to "Mac"), there was no such thing as a command line interface.  Now one has to all but be a Unix geek to navigate around some of the structures of OS X.  But I've gotten over that.  The dev_appserver.py is humming along on http://localhost:8080/ and "hello world!" is peeking out through it.

So I went from having only heard of Go to having a reasonable clue as to how to use in inside of an hour and a half.

Windows cannot find regedit or taskmgr

Today I ran my standard gamut of tricks for cleaning up an infected Win7 laptop.  HDD out of the patient, into the cradle, and scanned/cleaned with a clean and well updated machine.  Easy enough; HDD back into the patient, then back on the bench to make sure that all the [i]s were dotted and [t]s were crossed.


Not so easy.  IE ran just fine, downloaded and installed Microsoft Security Essentials and rebooted, per expectation.  But on reboot, I found that MSE just would not load...  So I downloaded Malwarebytes.  Malwarebytes just would not load.  OK, let's look at regedit.  Win+R "regedit".


"Windows cannot find c:\windows\regedit.exe..."


Long story short:  I took the HDD out of the patient and put in back into the cradle to look at the registry (the "Load Hive" trick, if you're wondering) with my clean machine.  While fumbling around, I found a feature of Windows called "Image File Execution Options".


The VXer had inserted a registry key with every conceivable tool used to combat viruses into the {HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\} key so that every time the desired executable started to run Windows tried to debug it or shunt it's operation to a malware file.  So I just deleted every key under that key and put the laptop back together.


Voilà!  Problem solved.

The Birth of a Blog

I found a new VXer trick today, and as I have told myself I would do so many times in the past, I'd thought I'd share it with the world so that others would be spared the frustration of having to figure it out themselves.  So I created a blog.