A friend introduced me to the CoolIris (formerly known as Piclens) plugin for Firefox and like a giddy nit I downloaded it and plugged it into my spanking new Firefox 3.0.1 installation on this spanking new laptop.

Turned out it was one of the culprits that, with Norton 360 installed, caused programs to turn into zombies in Task Manager after I had closed them. Imagine having five instances of Firefox lined up in the Task Manager Processes list each consuming a minimum of 50,000K and you’ll feel the chill. Add to that other instances of programs that you have already closed, still sitting in Task Manager as running programs, eating up resources that they should have spit out a few seconds after they were closed. Feel your spine tingling now? Mine did, even with 2GB of RAM on this Intel Centrino vPro.

Googling around gave me two solutions. Disable the CoolIris plugin and unregister buShell.dll which is part of Norton 360’s backup component.

For a few minutes I couldn’t uninstall CoolIris through the Addons window in Firefox. Every click on Disable or Uninstall and Restart Firefox I made ended up with the plugin still there and enabled. I had to go into my Firefox Profile folder and delete the darned folders just to get rid of it.

But after the buShell.dll unregistration and the removal of CoolIris, I must report all is well on this installation. According to my research the same effect is caused by the Skype plugin for Firefox as well so if anyone out there is experiencing the problems stated above, look into both CoolIris and the Skype plugin on your Firefox browser.

Been very, no really, very busy at work the past few weeks. One guy quit which left only two of us to handle an increasing amount of work. Today the other guy called in sick so I had to come in and do his work too. Just for today, I hope. So for today the office got a bargain, a person doing the work of two (three when you actually look at it) for the price of one.

Schedules like this do not allow me to go to the movies to unwind, which is tough because I happen to like the movies and popcorn and a cold dark place to hang out every once in a while. But even movies these days don’t come cheap in the Philippines, after tickets for two, bucket of popcorn, liter of root beer, there’s not going to be much left out of my PHP500 (roughly US$10-12).

So I go for the next best thing. Movies at home. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I do torrents, and that for me uTorrent must be the best ever software installed on my computer. uTorrent 1.8 is even spiffier than the previous version, with everything laid out in tabs giving you more control over the way you download whatever it is you download.

One problem I had run into is how browsing seemed to stop while I had uTorrent running. Quick google told me to look at the Bandwidth settings on Preferences, and to change a couple of settings from the default:

In Global maximum number of connections, bring it down to 100 from the default 200. And in Maximum number of connected peers per torrent, put in 30 instead of the default 50. That should bring your browsing back while you download whatever it is you download in torrents. Worked like a dream for me.

I’ve downloaded quite a few movies to start an eclectic collection of flicks that would have cost me hundreds of pesos, and with a program called ConvertXtoDVD I can even burn them into disks that I can play on a DVD player that will play home made DVDs.

With this system I don’t even need Quiapo.

I got this in my office email today, which made me raise an eyebrow. As head of web development for the company I work for I have subscribed to almost every feature that google has offered EXCEPT for adwords. But in my senility I thought maybe I did sign up for one sometime ago so what the heck I’d check it out anyway.

The good thing was I never click on a link in my email — I copy the entire URL and paste it on my browser instead. This was something I learned to do after the Metrobank phishing scam.

So instead of ending up at the REAL phishing url (see highlighted section above) that was masked by the URL in the email address, I ended up on the real Google Adwords login screen, which of course told me that I did not have an adwords account.

I googled for the first line of the email and sure enough, I found out that it IS a scam. Fortunately, though, the phishing destination URL is no longer active.

seopulse has more to say on the matter.