After booting up Windows XP I encountered an automatic update notification. During the progress I noticed an update named something like “…kill-bit ActiveX…” which I could not identify what was for and therefore looked it up.
The Kill-Bit appears to be something as simple as a registry entry to disable vulnerable ActiveX controls or COM objects so they can no longer be loaded in Internet Explorer or other applications based on the MSHTML rendering engine.
I have been using Virtualmin for several years which is one of the greatest modules for Webmin allowing simple set-up and management of virtual hosts. Inside the “Scheduled Backup” feature I came across the “Do strftime-style time substitutions on file or directory name” check box but never actually properly made use of it:
I came across a project which required very frequent backups and to distinguish each backup from another I decided to give it a shot. The strftime function uses standard POSIX conversion specifications which very easily lets you build powerful combinations of date and time.
As an example you can use the following string:
/backup_%Y_%m_%d_%H.%M
which would leave a directory with the following name:
Now each backup will be created with a different name instead of simply overwriting the previous one.
After upgrading to the latest version of the free anti virus application from AVG I encountered constant crashes of Firefox. It seems that AVG 8 includes a utility called LinkScanner which marks whether a website is supposedly a threat or safe upon using a search engine:
I am not the biggest fan of these utilities as many false positives arise plus the user ends up losing his own
criteria and relies solely on the utility’s advice instead of thinking and evaluating each site by himself. Nevertheless it may be suitable for complete beginners as a helping hand.
Firefox did start to behave erratically after the AVG upgrade from version 7.5 to 8 so there was no real doubt about why it was happening, so I immediately disabled the LinkScanner component within the AVG user interface. This seemed to be the only part that could affect the browsers somehow:
Firefox stopped crashing and all was fine again. There was just a little thing that kept nagging me. The little red exclamation mark by the clock in the traybar kept displaying now. It was not possible to know whether there was an update waiting or any other issue as the exclamation sign was on constantly. I ended up turning LinkScanner on again just to remove the exclamation.
Back to Firefox crashing…!
Until today when I again got so tired of the continuous crashes that I finally searched for the problem and located a very simple solution to it.
Simply leave the LinkScanner component running so you do not get the annoying exclamation mark. Now launch Firefox and go to Tools > Add-ons and disable the AVG add-on. This would disable the AVG 8 LinkScanner component without interfering with anything else on your PC.