The Conficker Worm is back and scheduled to attack Windows based computer systems on tomorrow April 1st! Microsoft is so desperate that they are offering $250,000 to anyone who can stop the spread of this virus. If the worm infects your computer it creates a “zombie computer” which can be controlled by the virus’s creator. Once the virus is on your computer it supposedly will prevent your computer from being able to access websites that provide security updates such as Windows Update. Rick Ferguson, Senior advisor at Trend Micro, when asked if this computer virus might be a prank said, “The people behind this worm are very skilled programmers and very well informed, these are very skilled cyber criminals.”

Recently I was having a discussion with a fellow web developer on what is becoming a classic argument, as a web designer/coder is it taboo to use Adobe Dreamweaver? The guy that I was discussing this with is one of those, “I’m a web designer who codes from scratch with amazing standards and breaths awesomeness from my nostrils, blah blah” type person. You know the type of person who was hit with some magic wand and now knows everything about web design, past, present, and future. My biggest concern came when a family friend who is still in college (studying information systems) sat with us listening to our whole debate.
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A few years ago I found out about a Windows based file compression tool called Alzip back in 2007. Alzip is a zip utility that handles almost every compression file format known to man. After downloading an installing Alzip I was allowed to say good bye to popular zip tools like WinZip, WinRar, and yes “Stuffit”. In my experience Alzip has also made the compression size for Zip files smaller than that of WinZip or even Microsoft Windows’ built in utility. But wait, the magic of Alzip doesn’t stop there you can also compress and decompress files that are in disk image formats such as .iso and .bin.

Recently Altools, the company responcible for developing Alzip has dropped AlZip 7.0 beta which offers built in anti virus detection especially for zipped files, password recovery for zip files, and a tool that will allow users to automate repetitive zipping task.

If you haven’t done so already, be sure to download Alzip from its website or download.com today, trust me you’ll thank me later

VLC Media Player

There is nothing more annoying then downloading a video or audio file from the internet only to find out that your default media player (ie Windows Media Player, Quick Time etc.) will not play the file. Often times we get errors like, “Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The player may not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to suppress the file.” In other words the excuse is a bunch of “computerese” that novices might not understand. There is an excellent media player that some of you may not have heard of that will make video/audio file opening a breeze, its name is VLC.

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