The work computer is now completely dedicated for work, which is good for productivity. Another good thing for productivity is my new eyeglasses. These are my first glasses so there is quite a learning ahead to get used to them. When using computer, the poor sight was making my eyes tired fast, which was affecting my concentration. My loss of far sight is due to long hours in from of a monitor. So if you use computer a lot and have good vision, try to keep it that way. It’s a good practice to focus your eyes to some distant spot every 30-45 minutes.

Anyway, there was some good progress with CE this week. The settings engine and options dialog are both up and running. Next week I’ll start adding more settings into the options dialog. Also I’ll do some cleaning of the code as it’s quite a mess right now. Here’s a SVN snapshot of the current progress:

CubicExplorer 0.90.0.982 (SVN Snapshot)
Installer (1.6MB)
Zip (1.5MB)

When I clicked OK, the computer rebooted. I thought that maybe my hard drive is has corrupted some files so I ran SpinRite. First I ran it in recovery mode (2) and there was one unrecoverable block. Other than that, everything seemed fine. I rebooted the computer and the error was still there.

So I booted UBCD4Win and made backups of all files. Also I checked that the system files are in place and everything looked fine. It’s possible that this type of error is caused by Sasser or other worm but I don’t think that was the case. Or maybe it was, who knows. I don’t run any anti-virus software actively but I do have pretty thick firewall. Maybe once in a month I’ll do a scan of viruses and spyware. I have had only one virus back in windows 95 days but it doesn’t mean that a malicious software couldn’t get into the system from some unknown hole.

Anyway, I decided to reinstall Windows just to be sure. If it was a virus then the system was already compromised. Also it has been pretty long time since last install and things started to be a bit messy. Unfortunately I had to use the same hard drive (no money to buy new) . I did analyze it with SpinRite and everything looked to be OK, hopefully it stays that way.