pixies in the Wired

I took a little break from blogging for a little bit, preoccupied with my new job in Second Life as a DJ as well as a work stuff, etc, etc, but now I’m back…

…to share with you a story of tears and joy, of blood sweat and tears.  Oh the drama!

Just kidding.  But let me tell you…dealing with a trojan horse sure feels like it sometimes.   Approximately two days ago, I had caught a Trojan Horse named Vundo, or as Avast likes to call it, Win32:TratBHO [Trj].  Now normally, something like this is no big deal as the virus scanner very politely (in the sound of a police siren and something like a SWAT annoucement) declares at there is an infected file with a nicely written image that says “no need for alarm”.  (Anyone see the irony of this?  Who said developers don’t have a sense of humour?)

Unfortunately, some of the files were locked by processes that ran no matter in Safe Mode or not.  I tried several other fixes, including the one on Symantec.  But nada!  There were alot of fixes posted only but most were a little too complicated for me to be suspicious.  (Mind you, I’m comfortable mucking with Registry Keys in a minor degree, but these solutions were over even that board.)  So what did I do?  Call for help!  Lucky for me, Tank and my other aikido brother came over to fix it. How? Read his post here. The key is to discover which process is using that dll (in this case, qomlk.dll) then kill that, then delete the file.  (Drop me a comment if you need more detailed explanation.)

So why is this entry named “pixies in the Wired”?  In a way, this concept is stolen from my favourite author Charles de Lint who wrote an entire short story and later on, intersprse lots of his stories with similiar themes.

I’m a developer by trade, but even I don’t quite understand why something goes on?  I bet not even the developers at Microsoft can explain every cause behind the famous Blue Screen of Death.  So what causes those unexplainable things to occur?  Maybe to others, it is all just bytes, packets that did not order themselves properly, but maybe, just maybe, it’s because there are pixies in the wires.

What are pixies?  Or better yet, what are spirits.  One potential definition is that it is a psychic manifestation of a mind, or an environment.  Is not the online world becoming more and more of an environment, with MMORPGS coming out and Web 2.0 becoming the place of “social media”? With so much emotions, thoughts, time and caring spent to create and craft this new environment, is not possible, maybe, that we have created another “world” linked by wires, different than the natural world we live in, but still an almost separate plane of existence? Then by the same token, if spirits can exist in the natural world, can they not, by the same parallel, exist in the wires?

Not so crazy, am I? HA! (Just nod and smile.)

The theme is common amongst the recent literature, besides that of Charles de Lint.  The first media that presented this hint at this alternate consciousness online to me was the anime Serial Experiment Lain, which has a twisted, yet elaborate and sophisticated plot surrounding that consciousness can exist entirely online.  It’s an interesting anime, give it a read.  Besides that, more and more books are playing along similar themes as well, that makes you wonder.  Is it possible?

~ by darksilvercorbi on March 29, 2008.