For the past few months, I have seen the WinAntivirus and SystemDoctor popup from the IE browser (only on IE) indicating that I have virus on my computer and require to download the software to clean the virus. I have done some research on the Internet. There are many web sites and antivirus forums that shows the solutions. People claim that they made the winantivirus dot com and SystemDoctor dot com popup go away by cleaning system registry and download some software to do post-cleaning. It turns out that those software are also a spyware or so-called grayware. I guess those people post the fake solutions are somehow related to the spyware and grayware. They just kept posting those miss-leading solutions in order to get search engine’s attention.

On my computer, I have trendmicro.com’s PC-cillin Internet Security installed. The version number is 8.000.1001 (build 3.537.00). I have check my system with the antivirus and could not find any spyware or grayware. The interesting thing is that I went to trendmicro.com’s free online tools House Call (http://housecall.trendmicro.com/) web site and run the check. It does found the ADWARE_XLOCATOR and other cookies. The version number shown at the bottom of the house call screen are the same as my PC-cillin antivirus software. How weird is that? PC-cillin did not capture what the house call detect?

After cleaning my system with the free house call online scanning, I have not seen the winantivirus and systemdoctor popup in IE. I usually check the system with trendmicro.com’s free house call online scanning tools to clean any possible virus every months. It gives me an extra protection.

PS. I did research on the other antivirus software, they don’t seem to provide a good and simple solution for removing the spyware and grayware. It’s your common sense not to download any un-trust software even it claims to clean your PC. Yes. I said “clean you PC“. It will clean your data as well. Just be careful what you are doing to your computer.

Blogged from TerenceChang.com

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Google has just released the newly available Checkout process. A so-called GBuy service. This service is meant to save consumer and merchant’s time on simplify the shopping process. Google will take care the credit card and payment gateway for both side. Regardless what Google has to offer for merchant and consumer, Google claim not to reveal any customer information such as credit card number and email address to the merchant. All communication are handled by Google Checkout.

Think about this. Did you ever received junk email with related ad after you shopping on the internet? Most of online store, they do NOT 100% protect your privacy. Even you use your Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover card, those companies track your shopping behaviors as well. That is how those companies knows when fraud or stolen credit card was used.

Do you think Google will protect your privacy? Google may not reveal your identity, but I believe they will collect your online shopping behaviors for business purpose. As more people using Google’s free services such as Toolbar for browser, Google Map, Google Earth, Google Base, Google Video search, Google Take and Google Desktop. They are collecting your information since the first day you install their software. It’s possible that you will see the ad of your favorite items on your desk that you have wanted for a long time.

In my computer consulting experience, I know the existence of data mining projects that collects consumer shopping behavior for large retail store like WalMart and credit card company like Visa and MasterCard. They use these collected information to provide merchant more accurate and complete ways to attract consumers for next time shopping. It also gives the merchant knowledge regarding to the hot item for each consumer. Google’s business is driven by a huge database. Now Google will be able to display different ad on their search result page based on the consumer’s shopping behaviors. Because of the accuracy, it will generate more traffic to their merchant’s web site. Eventually, it will drive the business to Google’s bank account.

What a smart move. Google have successfully invade your computer’s desktop and your life, since it starts the search engine. Now it’s time to think. Do you trust it?

Popularity: 5%

After few days trying of Yahoo Photos Beta, I can tell that Yahoo Photos Beta are simply the best. It’s just my personal opinions. There are few issues that I ran into, but they are all minor issues. The foundation of Yahoo Photos Beta with AJAX are no way to be match by other online photo album service. Especially, there is no free photo album service like Yahoo Photos Beta does.

Here are some of the issues I ran into. For photo album owner:

1. You have to use their built-in browser extension (FireFox) to upload photos. The sorting order of the uploaded photos are based on the upload date and time. It’s not based on the original file created/modified date and time.
2. There is no way to change the number of photos displayed per page. It’s default to 100 photos
3. There is no easy to download the whole album in the high resolutions images. You can only download one image at a time.
4. There are only limited editing features. As a photographer, I pretty much modify my higher resolution images before upload them.
5. There is no easy way to sort the image by name or date time. You have to drag and drop the photos between other photos.
6. I can’t search the image by image name or description. I can only search the tag.
7. After upload the image, you have choice to edit all image’s name, description and tag. However it loads all uploaded images. I have one album with 400 images. It takes forever to load the page. Once you finished modifying the images, it take forever to save the album. There are a pop with three hamsters dancing to indicate the slowness of the process. It sometimes takes forever to process 400 images in one album. It finally timeout.

1. You have to login into to sort the image. The image is sorted based on the upload date and time. Not the original files date and time.
2. The album is not sorted alphabetically
3. The first page you see is a list of albums with thumbnail images. Once you enter the albums, there is not way to go back the album with thumbnails page.

Since it’s just a beta, I hope Yahoo Photos will make this service much better in the future. Even it’s so easy, it sometimes is very slow due to the amount of image to be load in the album. The AJAX is kind of slow, but neat.

Popularity: 5%

I have been waiting for a long time to try the new Yahoo Photos Beta. I finally got in the beta site this morning. My first impression is CLEAN and WELL ORGANIZED. I am not a fan of AJAX application, but Yahoo has done a good job to impress me.

After I log in the first time, It displays the last three photos in the home page. However, there are not actually my last three photo uploaded. I don’t know how Yahoo sort the photos. I can tell they are not sorted by file name. It does , however, tell you how much disk space your photos have used. You can click on each album and rename the album, change the description. You can also drag and drop the images and create a new album or smart album. I have not tried the smart album yet, because I will have to tag each photos before make them into smart album.
Uploading photos is one of the the best part of the new Yahoo Photos. It allows me to upload a full size photos with the original resolutions. I used Nikon D70S fine + Large size JPEG format. The file size is at least 2.5MB. Although it take a while to upload 20 images (50MB), but I can download the original size image later. The only thing that I can tell for now is that I can only download the image one at a time. There should be a way to download the whole album in high resolutions.

Once photos are uploaded, I can modify the file name, description and add tags. You can also drag and drop the photos into the upper section to do whatever you want. One neat thing is that the browser won’t load the image outside of your browser viewing area. I bet it’s some sort of AJAX features. I was not impressed by the loading speed. I guess is that the thumb nail image is actually in pretty good compress quality. It doesn’t look blurry.

You can share photos in an album or in a smart album. I hope Yahoo can add the “Friends only” features back so I can share photos to those friends with Yahoo ID or Email address.

Well. For the people who look at my album, they will see the similar screen. It allows use to click on the album list and view pictures in slide mode or one at a time. The only weird things I found is that the album was not sorted correctly on the left side. No big deal.

I can download the full size pictures (original resolutions) later. This is import for me. I am going to travel for months, I need some place that I can upload and backup my photos. I like yahoo, because they provide FREE, unlimited space photos album, sharing services. I can even print the photos to Target.com and have my friends to pickup from the store near by. Even Yahoo put the advertisement on the page, I don’t care. What do you expect the free service? There is no free lunch.

After all, I can view the photos in slide show which give me not much flexibility to change the slide show features. It’s not a big deal. The photos in the slide show is in good compression quality. I like it.

Overall, I give this new Yahoo Photos two thumbs up! Very nice and well done photo services. I only hope Yahoo improve the speed. I don’t know how Flick.com does. They are fast. How about the Google’s new Picasa web Album? No way, There is no way Picasa web album can compare with Yahoo Photos. They are orange and apple. Picasa web album does have their own strength, but it just doesn’t fit my need. Free / Unlimited space is what I want first.

Popularity: 5%

After all this hassle, physical suffering and mental torture, my wilfe still have the bad crown. The dental doctor and the office manager finally agree to return our money. So we can go to see different doctors. We have to sign an agreement saying that we want to see different doctor because we insist. But not because they did something wrong.

Well. I can’t say anything more about their services, but I won’t go back again. We, now, have settle the travel plan and ready to leave on July 6th 2006. We will be seeing a good dentist in Taiwan.

For those who need a dentist, please make sure not to do any major dental work before you know the quality. That’s all I can say.

Popularity: 4%

Have you ever been tricked and treated badly by your dentist? Recently we planned to take a long vacation to Taiwan, Hong Kong and China for about 6 months. So we decided to get our teeth done before the long trip to Asia.

I am just trying to tell the truth. I am not here to against either the Dr. nor the chained dental network. I will not reveal their names.

Well. We went to the dental clinic located in Mesa AZ. We just realized that our old dentist retired. Now, there is a much younger dentist who is a good looking guy. He is very nice to us. The doctor moved to the current location from their office in Phoenix, AZ. The Dr. took over the clinic and become the primary doctor.

We have had good experience with the previous dentist for years, so we thought the new dentist should be as good as the other. Well. We are wrong. My wife and I both have our dental work done there. Now the doctor asked her to get root canal done before putting the new crown on. Dr. also told me that I need a new crown on one of the teeth he claim to be broken soon. So we did what Dr. suggested. My wife got the root canal done with new crown and I got a new crown while no root canal.

What now? I got a crown which is too short. So the teeth did touch the teeth above. I asked doctor not to glue it on permanently. He said he have to. Now, I can’t take it off. I felt the cold and hot on that teeth for weeks and still felt the pain for a month now. Dr. , then, told me that I will need to take the crown off and do a root canal work if I still felt the pain. Why don’t Dr. tell me earlier. Dr. ’s excuses is this.

The crown should always be shorter. So you won’t bite on it and it will last longer

What a excuses? And Dr. said:

That is how they were taught and learned in the school

What about my wife? She got her root canal done and crown made. When Dr. put it on, it’s too short too. We tried the crown with temporary glue on (we asked for it) for few days. Due to the shortness of the crown, it caused the teeth on the other side to press harder. So the jar hurts. We ask Dr. to take the crown off and asked the lab to add layer of porcelain on one side of the crown. Dr. finally agree with us and told us to come back a week and half later. We did. The crown look and feel the same. I guess he never send the crown back to the lab. What the heck!

Now we will be asking Dr. to send the crown back to the lab again. If I have to postpone my travel plan again, I will. But I will make it clear that Dr. need to do his duty to make his patient feel being treated fairly.

I am not going to recommend anyone I know to see this doctor. I will keep post what happen when she meet with the Dr. this Tuesday. I want to tell the world that Dr. is a very nice doctor, but the way he treat patient is not what we expect. People might disagree with us. Until you experience with Dr. service. You will know.

Popularity: 5%

As all my friends might know already, I am kind of person like to use the most up-to-date technology. I have found that making an international call to my home town Taiwan has been easier than ever before by using Yahoo! Messenter with voice. I used to use pincity.com’s phone card service. It’s cheap, but it’s quality is poor. I have also tried the Skype phone out service. It only works OK and is only free of charge for US and Canada calls. The following chart shows the call I made to Hong Kong and Taiwan. For 154 minutes international call to Hong Kong, I only pay US$2.31. Although, the quality of the call on Yahoo voice is not as good as analog phone call, but it is good enough for me. It sometimes has latency, so I can hear my own voice from the other end. The user on the other end will just hear a little bid noise. It is still better than the Skype and Pincity.com. Thanks to the Awesome Yahoo! Messenger with Voice service, which I used for day to day IM service as well.

I don’t if this is true. Yahoo voice and Skype are using the same voice feature provider as the back-end. I remember I’ve seen the news on either news.com or internetnews.com. I could not find the news anywhere any more. Since the voice over IP war started few years ago, I believe the comsumers are the biggest winners.

Popularity: 7%

Just got the invitation of Google Picasa Web Album from Google. I was a little bit exciting, but I am a little bit disappoint after testing it. As a royal Google user, I have to believe that this Picasa web album will provide a better service later. Picasa is popular photo manage software.

When a user sees the shared/public photo album on Picasa Web Album, they see the list of albums. However, the empty album are there as well. This is annoying. I guess the user should upload the photos before they make the album public.

The icons on the top right corner allows user to list the photos in different thumb nail size. However, it’s not always working. I guess Picasa web album pre-render the thumb nail images and cache them in the proxy server. The photos are not showing up even 10 minutes after I uploaded and shared the photos. There are some sort of the delay.

I can choose the small thumb nail image for preview.

Or I can pick the large one. If the image is ready, it actually loads fast. That make me believe Picasa Web album are using Proxy server.

When user view the image, there is a chance the image is larger than the screen size. So it allows user to zoom in the image and pan the image by draging it. It’s a nice features.

If the user don’t have Picasa photo album software running on their computer, they can still upload 5 images at one time. It allows user to uplod up to 250MB (1000 images). The user have choice to upgrade to 6GB unlimited bandwidth for US$25 per year.

Once nice feature is to allow user drag and drop the photo(s) to re-arrange the order of the image. It’s fast, but not as robust as Flickr.

Overall, Picasa web album continue Google’s quality works. However, I personally prefer Yahoo’s photo service. I am currenlty waiting Yahoo’s new photo service which includes umlimited disk space, original downloadable high resolution image, easy share photo features, AJAX GUI interface and other features. I can’t wait to see it in few days.

Popularity: 7%