Guus Bosman

I don't usually give warning against virusses, but now I'd like to make an exception. Last October a friend received "BugBear", a then-famous virus. Well, now there's a new virus that's called "BugBear B", and it's a really nasty one.

Luckily enough we have good system adminstrators here at Chess. At home my virus-scanner gets updated every few hours as well, so I feel reasonably secure.

But this is a particulary tricky virus: it disables virusscanners, some firewalls, and it spreads itself quickly by e-mail. It knows how to spread itself to Eudora, Outlook and other mail clients. If an Outlook user receives a file with the virus, the attachment will be started automatically. The user doesn't even have to click on it...

My advice: update your virusscanner today. CNN has a story about the virus.

A few minutes ago a huge rainstorm came above Haarlem. A big difference compared with last Friday.

At Chess I work on the highest floor so it's very noisy now because of the rain.

Today a good friend called. His laptop behaved weird and a lot of files on the 2nd hard disk were mangled and unreadable.

Luckily enough he made a backup 2 months ago, so the damage was manageable. But it reminded me of something –- how long ago has it been since my last backup? And how long ago has it been for you, dear reader, since your last backup? What would happen if your hard disk would stop functioning all of a sudden?

My website itself is reasonably well covered; a few weeks ago I restored the whole system from the backup, which is always a good indication of the backup’s quality. But I know there are things on the desktop computer at home that are quite valuable to me, but my last backup is a couple of years old. Something to work on.