Mohamed Salem Korayem's Blog

I do a lot of technical reading and studying through PDF e-books. The problem is that, most of the time, the book doesn't contain an index (a.k.a. Bookmarks in Adobe Reader) with direct links to chapters so you can easily browse to your favorite destination. I usually had to do a search for, say, "Chapter 5" till I find it in the text! That's why I love CHM based ebooks over PDF, but that's another story.

But the real hassle is that whenever I close that specific book and re-open it later, I have to go through the same process again to pick up from where I've left. I sometimes try to remember the pdf page number I was last at, but in vain.

I said "why don't Adobe Reader remember that for me!? there must be a way, right?" Well, luckily there is. It's a hidden gem that is unfortunately disabled by default :(.

More...

The folks at mashable have compiled a comprehensive  list of good .net resource websites. Sadl, they didnt include great websites like dotnetkicks and dotnetslackers.

Quote:

"Microsoft is going to be letting developers take a look at the source code for .NET, but for those of you still in the trenches, coding away, we’ve gathered 25+ tools to help you with your daily tasks."

read more | digg story |

The worst thing in having a 4GB USB key is that you become the celebrity of the floor who people always come to ask for his generous USB storage space. Of course I dont mind at all, as 'kolo besawabo bardo'.

A Strange Behavior..

But I noticed the past couple of days that whenever I use the USB key, the corporate anti-virus finds a virus AdobeR.exe at the root directory and auto-cleans it. The virus even alters the auto.ini file located on my USB.

Searching for the source

At first I doubeted my own laptop so I ran Autoruns, that shows all startup entries in all known locations, and searched for AdobeR, but no result. I searched my whole Hard Drive for any AdobeR file, but no results matched. I finally searced the registry for AdobeR, and found it in the following locations:

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2206468240-3580893765-635856568-500\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Explorer Bars\{C4EE31F3-4768-11D2-BE5C-00A0C9A83DA1}

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2206468240-3580893765-635856568-500\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MountPoints2\{d15edb93-c19c-11db-9f6a-000fb398886c}

Through my desperate google searches seeking an answer, I stumbled upon a nice Malware Cleaning video by the Mark Russinovich, creator of sysinternals.com (which was acquired by Microsoft for it's quality tools and indispensible). The video will teach you how to use the Sysinternals tools to identify malware infestations, from standard spyware to kernel-mode rootkits, and clean them off your systems. It's just awesome!!  It's 72 minutes long, so I watched it on the bus on my way home.

I used all the tips and methods stated, but my ThinkPad T42 was perfectly clean and health!

Then who was it?

 At this point, I started doubting my friends PCs since this occurs usually after using the USB with another laptop. It may be even my other Dell laptop.I checked with my friend and it turned out, just like I expected, that he had the AdobeR.exe file running in the background, sitting in C:\Windows folder and autostarting in the startup list waiting for it's next victim.

 Turns out that our IS team forgot to install our corporate anti-virus on his machine!!