There are two contending authoritative sources known for reviewing anti-malware products.

One source is av-test.org (Their most recent data is here).

The other source is av-comparatives. They have two reports, one that has results for tests of the on-demand abilities of anti-malware products, and the other that has results for tests of the retrospective/proactive properties of anti-malware products.

Right off the bat, it is interesting to see that there are places where there are large differences between the two testers.

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I recently purchased an SSD drive to see how well it performed against my WD Raptor drive. Looking around, I found this drive:

OCZ Technology 64GB Core Series SATA II 2.5″ Solid State Drive
Read: 120-140MB/s
Write: 80-93MB/s

Firing it up in HD Stat and testing the drive while it was still empty showed really solid numbers:
110.6 MB/s Minimum
149.2 MB/s Max
133.1 MB/s Average

0.2ms Access Time
151.7 MB/s Burst
14% CPU

Comparing this to my WD drive that was in-use as the C: drive with these specs:
35.4 MB/s Minimum
84.8 MB/s Max
71.3 MB/s Average

8.4ms Access Time
111.7 MB/s Burst
4.1% CPU

I was exciting to see how much faster my system would be.

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When I’ve got my administrator hat on at work, one of my duties is to update software on workstations and servers.  As I do not like to repeat the same job more than once, I always look for ways to automate my tasks.  Not only does this save time, it also helps protect against user error issues like forgetting to update a workstation, or forgetting to flip a configuration switch during one of the updates.  Having computers that are in sync with each other helps when one wants to troubleshoot a problem that is occurring on one computer but not another.  There is a lot one can rule out.  For Microsoft machines, the easiest way to deploy software is through group policies.  In a policy, one can configure things like the deployment of software and automatically push it out to computers without user intervention and without special user privileges.  Of course, there is one major problem with using group policies: the installer needs to be an MSI file.  Herein lies the first problem.

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Just for fun, I thought I’d kick the tires of the latest version of NetBeans IDE (Version 6.5 as of 11/20/2008).  In it I wanted to write a simple Java GUI Desktop Application.  I fired up the IDE, stepped through the wizard, placed my controls on the form, wrote the appropriate event handler code, compiled and ran my program.  I immediately ran into a problem where I couldn’t see all of the controls in the application.  They were cut off even though in the editor everything looked perfectly fine.  I then noticed that the editor had a “Preview Design” button which I assumed meant that I couldn’t trust the IDE’s view and should use THAT to verify what the application will look like without having to compile and run constantly.

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I finished processing the pictures I took while down in Ontario, CA last weekend.  Lighting conditions were pretty terrible for picture taking without a flash.  Thankfully I had a nice noise reducing plugin for Aperture made by Nik Software called Dfine which did a very good job of cleaning things up while retaining what details were possible to retain.  It was a huge time saver.

Album

A while back I was debugging some PHP code that a friend of mine wrote.  It would slowly eat up all available ram in the system, start for the swap space and then Bad Things^TM would happen on the server as all other processes suffered from memory starvation.  The problem was eventually discovered and fixed, but in the process I discovered a few disconcerting things about PHP.

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In one of the assignments in a Java course I took recently, we were asked to make a mortgage calculator program.  While reading to see if Java handles floats and doubles any differently than other languages, I stumbled on a recommended class called BigDecimal which is able to retain numerical values to a much higher precision than with what float and double can do.  The recommendation also mentioned a specific case for BigDecimal:  Currency calculations (See here, here, and here for the sources of that advice).  Seems like a perfect match, so I adopted it for my code.

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The honeymoon quickly ended for Apple’s latest version of OS X after running into a repeating problem where the system would seemingly run out of resources and become unresponsive to spawning new processes.  The mouse and keyboard would still work, and some of the running applications would continue to work, but others would not close, and I could never reboot the machine without having to hold down the power button.  This made troubleshooting the system in it’s current state impossible as I could not gain access to a shell, or fire up the system monitor app.

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