Use the right antivirus!

I would like to share a painful experience with the Antivirus applications we trust!

Few days ago my home PC got infected with a worm (IM-Worm.Win32.Sohanad.t) that attacks the Windows OS, disables all important tools including:
Task manager, regedit, msconfig, ..even the command prompt!

It creates its copies in most drives, primarily in removable ones and creates autorun.inf to auto run itself, creates a copy of itself (exe file) for each folder in the removable drive!

So, you may ask, didn’t I have an updated antivirus? Yes, I had and that’s the point of my email. I had Norton Antivirus 2005 with the latest definitions updated. Unfortunately even after manual updates and manual scans on the infected exe files it couldn’t find any threats!

More bad news! I tried all of the following top most antivirus and anti-malware applications but they couldn’t detect the virus:

PC Cillin 2004 with updates, Adware Professional with updates, Spyware Doctor, SpyBot Search & Destroy!

So I did some googling to learn which are the current ‘top 10’ antivirus applications. I found ‘Kaspersky 6’ to be the top most one in several ‘good’ web sites. I never heard of it! Interestingly Norton, Trend Micro, McCafe are not in ‘top 5’.

I downloaded and updated Kaspersky and it could detect and clean the virus very well! I installed it in my office PC and it got 2 spywares which our default Network antivirus couldn’t find! Don’t know how long the spyware was in my PC!

Summary: I suggest all to recheck the ‘top 5’ list of antiviruses to get ‘true’ protection from latest viruses/malwares. I found Kaspersky good for my case.

Online (Comprehensive) English to Bengali Dictionary

Last week I was looking for a web based dictionary in the web. I found two sites with very poor collection of the word translation. (Details mentioned end of the article). At once I decided to give one whole night a try and create my own online dictionary. And guess what? I did.

How: After some googling, I got two good Unicode based dictionary databases. But none of them translate from English to Bengali. They were Bengali to English and Bengali to Bengali. Hmm.. they don't seem to be much useful, do they?

This is what I did: created my db schema, wrote a php code to parse and enter the entries of two dictionaries into one db table without any duplicates (Bengali and English translations strings into separate fields), wrote another php code to parse the English translation strings and do 'word indexing' and store indexes into another table. Then I created a search page. That's all, I'm done.

The search page searches in the indexed words, prioritize and sort them by their original positions in the translation strings and also categories the results. Works like a charm.

Try it now: www.ittefaq.com/dict.

I'll work on the application some more soon and will make a release. And yes, I do need to check the License types of the data sources :).

The other online dictionaries:

• www.virtualbangladesh.com/dictionary.php
• www.bangladict.org

These dictionaries are good starts but look dummy and not really useful.

I may make my dictionary open source soon.

Happy translating!

JavaScript - Yet another toggle (show/hide) combo box code

You probably already have found or used code to toggle 'select' elements (combo boxes). But some of them have prototype dependancies, some don't work for non-form based elements and some don't work with ajax based pages.

I just wrote this tiny code that seem to do the job on IE, both form and non-form based elements, both ajax and non-ajax based pages. Check it out:

/*
 * toggle select boxes by Kaisar
 */
function toggleSelectBoxes()
{
  var elems = document.getElementsByTagName("select");
  if (elems)
      for (i=0; i<elems.length; i++)
          elems[i].style.display = elems[i].style.display == 'none' ? '' : 'none';
}