I’m not sure if I mentioned this already, but my wife went for a week-long holiday with friends last Friday therefore I’m quite busy babysitting this week, taking care of the kids and household, and, not surprisingly, running out of steam. That is my excuse for just having a very short post today.  But back to the subject:

Do you know what is the ultimate irony in the life of a virus analyst?

This is when he needs some books about coding (actually, a book on subject “language of math”) and the special online shop that deals with this kind of literature is itself infected…   The bug name is “VBS:Obfuscated-gen” and because the site is still infected, I won’t disclose its name. Who knows.  You might get tempted to go look around the site for some math or coding literature.

… and Michal (the victim) thank you for the tip

The first company I worked at was called “CPC”.  Our product portfolio was excellent and the CPC acronym had some historical meaning but we all knew the real meaning was “Charts Producing Company”.  We were making presentations and preparing for presentations all the time.  As I said, the company portfolio was excellent so I didn’t really mind.  Plus it was the first job.  And, I can also say that I have learned something useful there too:  If you present to any audience, it greatly helps if the audience is not sleeping.  I know this is not a profound bit of wisdom, but it really works!

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“AVAST virus database has been updated” is probably the most recognizable part of avast! antivirus for most users.  It is common knowledge that having up-to-date security is important.  Actually having any software up-to-date is important.  Installing the updates and patches can prevent new vulnerability exploits from happening and is as important as having good antivirus installed.   Obvious, isn’t it?  Well, not quite as this statistic shows.

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I was trying to make a point yesterday about the correlation between snow levels and internet banking usage.  As many of you correctly pointed out, the fact the Northern Europeans love to bank online has more to do with the availability of internet than with 3 meters of snow outside.   And sure, there are differences in internet availability between the EU countries.

But I guess it has even more to do with the willingness of people to use the internet as such.  In Norway, 90% of inhabitants use the internet every week.  And only 5% say they have never used it.  I have to admit, before I downloaded these stats from Eurostat, I would have said that pretty much everybody has done something with the internet at least once in their life.  But that’s not quite so. Read more…

It has been raining a little over the last 3 days in Prague but the weather for weekend should improve.  Sunny skies and temperature around 12 °C (about 54F) are expected.  In general, the weather in Central Europe is mild and comfortable.  Nothing extreme and this is what we are used to.  That also means when we do have 3 centimeters of snowfall in Prague,  it is a ‘calamity’ with a traffic jam throughout the whole city and everything stops working.  I guess the winters in northern parts of Europe are much more harsh and unless there are 3 meters of snow nobody really bothers to call it unusual.  And I also would imagine that it is the weather, lots of snow and 20-hour long winter nights, which drive internet usage up there. Read more…

In late 2003, I was offered a job in France. After about a 5-second-long debate with my family, the yes decision was reached and we were ready to go. Living in France was an excellent experience especially after I understood that beer is not la bière but “un demi” and asking for coffee is useless (and it’s absolutely useless trying to say it with different accent) because what you really need to say is “grand crème”. The only thing which I never managed to do was to understand the bank teller who spoke excellent French but neither English nor Czech. And on my side, my French vocabulary never really got much beyond “un demi et grand crème s’il vous plaît“ and so making money transfers or paying bills directly was simply not possible.  The time had arrived for me to learn how to use online banking. Read more…

Last Monday, the TV signal coming going into our TV disappeared. “No signal” was the error message displayed quite prominently on the TV screen. Well, since there is no Ice Hockey World Championships at the moment, I thought that fixing the antenna was not an issue of vital importance – a decision that my family disagreed with. So to keep the domestic peace, I called the service, they came the next day, fixed it in about 30 minutes, and all was fine until yesterday.  That is when the invoice for the service arrived.  Note, I don’t mind the cost of fixing the antenna, but I DO mind a lot the cost the repair service charged for COMING to our house. The distance is only 17 km (10 miles) but they charged 50% more than a taxi would! And, taxis in Prague are darn expensive. Which brings me to the benefits of free delivery. Read more…

I would have never imagined that it could happen, but a couple of weeks back we received the “Export Company of 2010” award from DHL.  That really surprised me because in my mind anything organized by DHL means they will tend to award it to someone who actually uses DHL to ship something in the first place.  But we ship ones and zeros through servers and cables.  Lots of ones and zeros, that is true, but certainly nothing that would need the attention of DHL or FedEx.

But that is not the subject of this post actually. The subject is that I got a call from a journalist who was covering the story with a request to get her some pictures that would go with the story.  Such as the picture of our AVAST Virus Lab. Read more…

The Barcelona VB Conference is nearing the end and the last presentations are being delivered. You can clearly see that the last 3 days have been very intensive as many faces show signs of sleep deprivation. Clearly it has been a success (and we can always sleep later). I’m glad AVAST was able to help sponsor the good mood (just yesterday evening, we had sponsored the distribution of 1,857 free beers to all participants) and I hope they will remember this particular conference more than previous ones.  But, I just gave a good example of an oxymoron … with so much beer, it will be a small miracle if anyone remembers anything. Read more…