Sunday, August 10, 2008

Beware with MSN Tools

    After receiving tons of spam from friends who argue not sending it, I decided to write something in order to help prevent missuse of MSN account information.

    I've heard so much times from people arguing that someone has a virus that send links to some MSN related pages(third party ones), for example those pages which appears to tell you who is blocking you in MSN, but almost anyone knows that this is not a real virus, is even worse.

    First of all, some time ago, Microsoft changed the way that information is accessed and it cannot be accessed nowadays with just your account like before.

    Second, when you type your MSN address and your password, despite it is illegal, they can have since then access to your account, and what they do is connecting a bot to your MSN and send spam links to every of your buddies, so if you did this, or you are unsure, the best you can do is CHANGE YOUR MSN PASSWORD AND SECRET QUESTION __NOW__ and NEVER REVEAL YOUR PASSWORD TO ANY THIRD PERSON SITE OUTSIDE LIVE MSN OR HOTMAIL.

    To sum up: it is better to prevent than to cure in those cases, as they could steal your account too by changing your password if they want to... so advise anyone NOT to use that kind of fake services.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

KDE 4.1 SpeedUp and Workarrounds

    KDE 4.1 is finally here and thus, everyone can go ahead and try it (I recommend doing so) because it is really improved and it does not have that huge amount of bugs and loss of implementations KDE 4.0 had.

    If you red my last post about the KDE 4.1 MIRACLE, you'll notice I was speaking about a huge performance impact in processing some events. After much research and tests, I've discovered the cause of this huge performance impact I'll try o explain here in order to help anyone having those issues (specially Gentoo's users, since much of this is about compiling some parts with or without some special feature).

    I've discovered two possible causes:
  1. For NVIDIA users, as is listed in so many sites, read and try: KDE 4 and NVIDIA problems.
  2. For everyone (specially Gentoo's users): This is really important! Check out that your distro's maintainers or you, compiled strigi with fam and/or inotify features enabled (in Gentoo, check for fam and inotify USE flag being enabled). In my case, just enabling fam and inotify for strigi made my KDE 4.1 trunk far more stable than it was. If it is your case, just add "app-misc/strigi fam inotify" to your /etc/portage/package.use file if you are using portage, or to your /etc/paludis/use.conf if you use paludis, and recompile at least strigi.
    To finish, I only can say that now, I can say, and prove that KDE 4.1 is really a miracle for everyone's Desktop!