One of the less enjoyable parts of working as a support technician, is virus and spyware removal. It takes time, demands unflinching accuracy, and even when you do everything right, there is no guaranteee that you get everything. The important thing is to understand time management, and make sure to cut your losses before you have spent too much time.
Loss aversion is a basic principle in economic theory. It refers to the tendency of preferring avoidance of loss to acquisition of gains. This relates to the topic at hand because of the sunk cost fallacy, another piece of economic theory, where the subject says “I have too much invested in this, I can’t walk away. I have passed the point of no return.” although the opposite may very well be true. To continue, you may end up wasting even more time before deciding to try another tack, throwing good money after bad, as it were.
As computer technicians, the tools at our disposal for virus and spyware removal are limited, and often rely on the infection being benign enough to be removed fairly simply. Now, your mileage may vary, but I have found a good rule of thumb to be that I spend no more than half the time it would take me to reinstall the computer on attempting manual and automated removal of virii and spyware. Beyond that, I have found that it doesn’t make sense for me to spend more time working on it.
Blog
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Virus removal and the sunk cost fallacy
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Your logical fallacy is…
Perhaps one of the most useful tools for someone who engages in arguments online (I know, I really shouldn’t feed the troll, but it is funny!), your logical fallacy has a list of twenty-four more or less common logical fallacies found in public discourse, with clear, logical and convincing definitions and examples.
This is a great tool for two purposes. One is identifying when others commit them, and may be a good way of pointing it out (though you may want to see that you don’t use it as a suppression technique). The other, to me more useful, purpose, is to use it as a guide to things to avoid, in order to better your own part in public discourse.
Whichever way you choose to use it; enjoy! -
Quick and simple PDF comparison
Imagine the following: You have two versions of a PDF, and want to know which of them is current, and what the differences are. Now, you could do the job manually, comparing page by page, running the risk that you might overlook something. If you have a full version of Adobe Acrobat, you can use the compare functionality built into it. There is another option though, and it’s free. It’s called DiffPDF. It does what you need it to – compares the PDFs and shows you the differences (or tells you that there are none) – simply, quickly, and for free. As in freedom, AND as in beer:
It’s available for download from RubyPDF Technologies. -
Cookie notification bar
Last week, I wrote about why I now have a cookie notification bar in the top of the blog. What I didn’t tell you was how I did it.
One of the things I really like about WordPress, is the fact that there are a myriad of plugins to do just about anything. So, too with this. In fact, a search at WordPress.org/plugins for “Cookie” returns over four hundred results. Out of all of these, I chose one called UK Cookie Consent. The reason I chose that one, is that I found it unobtrusive and user friendly, while remaining compliant with the current legislation.
When it is installed, the plugin automatically creates a page called Cookie Policy on your WordPress blog. If you, like me, don’t want it displayed in the top bar, you can make it a child page of just about any other page you want. The plugin updates the link to point correctly. You can of course also edit the page, and add information, like the information I have added about external cookies. -
Cookies!
Over the course of the last few weeks, you may have come across this message when visiting the site:
If you wonder why, there are two reasons. The first is that I want to be open and honest about most things, and this site is one of those things. The second, which is why it happened now, rather than at some point down the line, is that the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications took effect for Norway, as a signatory to the EEA agreement. If you click the link in the picture, you will be taken to the cookie policy page of my site, which tells you about the external cookies, as well as shows you where to find the privacy policies of the external cookies used. -
A new outlook on life
Having played with the idea for some time now, I finally decided it was time to switch out my old theme for this one. Though there was nothing wrong with the old theme, per se, I had grown tired of it, and opted to swap to this one. The old theme, NewBlue by Blog Design Studio has served me well since I first started using it. That, however, is almost four years ago, and I wanted the site to look differently.
For now, I will use Twenty Twelve, by the WordPress team. If anyone has any suggestions for a new theme that might suit the site, feel free to drop me a line or two in the comments. -
Did you know that the FotoStation Dialog Builder displays field numbers?
When using the Dialog Builder, FotoStation now shows you the IPTC field numbers of the fields placed in the editor:
This can be particularly useful when creating a dialog for a heavily customized metadata configuration, with many custom fields.
Caveat lector: I used to work with support at FotoWare. This blog is my own space, I am not paid to write it. I write about FotoWare and FotoWare products because I believe in them. -
Practice what you preach
A while back, I wrote a post centred around how authors can control the destinies of their own work. Noone is less shielded from their work being stolen than those who publish their things online. Bloggers create huge amounts of text, all of which is covered by copyright law. However, they put the text online, which often makes people say “Hey, it’s free, I can use it as I want.”
Not so. First off, if nothing else is declared, then copyright law rules supreme. Within that, there are “fair use” provisions, or its counterpart in Norwegian copyright law; the right to quotation. Beyond that, if the author does not define a license, it is covered by copyright.
That said, I honestly believe that the world would be a better place if more authors had the guts to do what Cory Doctorow has done, and make their stuff freely available online. His books are available for free, under a Creative Commons license. I love what he’s done, and he’s gained somewhat of a following internationally, most of all because the way he does it, is pretty much the embodiment of Wheaton’s law.
When I took over control of this blog for myself, I decided to do pretty much the same thing. That’s why all of my posts are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike license, which means that you can use my posts as you want, provided you credit me, and publish your posts under the same license or a similar one. -
Set default calendar on iOS
I have been a very happy user of iPhone for a long time now. It works great, and it syncs my appointments with my Google Calendar. Lately, though, I’ve needed to put appointments into my calendar while on the go. For some reason, they were not showing up in my Google Calendar. It turned out, that my iPhone was set up to create appointments in the iCloud calendar, not the Google Calendar. Luckily, that is easily remedied. Here’s how:
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