simon.schönbeck.dk

  • Online malware scanner

    I am always very cautious running executables, especially under Windows. Sometimes the antivirus software installed may report supposedly false positives leaving one in a limbo as what to do next, keep installing at risk or avoid the software supposedly reputable and safe.

    The best thing is really to get a second opinion but installing a second antivirus software is time consuming and not feasible. The solution is to use an online malware scanner which uses different engines from several software providers that can shed some light on whether the file in question is really malware or simply a false positive from your installed antivirus software.

    Two online scanners I use regularly are Virustotal and Jotti’s malware scan, both using several engines to compare against each other. I must admit Virustotal is more sleek and has multi language support, plus it provides extra information about the scanned files.

  • DNSstuff alternatives

    In the past I used DNSstuff heavily, but since it went commercial I have tried to find useful free alternatives.

    I gathered this brief set of links and saved is a draft long ago, which I now have remembered to publish:

  • Virtualmin backup restore error

    During a recent process of restoring a site from a Virtualmin backup archive I encountered this discouraging error message during the upload:

    Restore failed : The specified source does not contain any domains, or is not a Virtualmin backup

    No need to say that the archive indeed contained several domains plus it was created by Virtualmin itself in the past…

    A quick search provided me with a hint that the upload and restore process may not work as desired, but instead first upload and thereafter restore the backup archive from the local server may give much better results.

    So simple that I should have tried it the first.

  • BMW option codes list

    If you ever need to know what the option codes on your BMW represent you could use this German page (English translation) containing an extensive list of them.

    There is also another list already in English which unfortunately is a bit old but probably still valid for many of the existing BMW Option Codes in use today.

  • Vim: paste indent problems

    On one of my boxes I came across this weird behaviour when pasting code into Vim at the terminal. All indentation was broken in a stepped way. Every line indented more and more creating a real mess to work with. This only happened when actually pasting content into the terminal. Typing worked as normal.

    I initially thought that it had something to do with Putty‘s way of interacting with this specific box e.g. some configuration that was missing. Issues exist with carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF) handling across platforms. Nevertheless this was a dead end.

    Digging around Vim’s extensive wiki provided some clues as to what was going on. Having ‘autoindent‘ or ‘smartindent‘ on creates havoc when pasting into Vim and therefore should be disabled. The problem is that these are nice features to have on when simply typing.

    Vim has an alternative mode called ‘paste‘ that does not modify the pasted input in any way and therefore code looks just as in the original source. To enable ‘paste‘ mode during insert simply type ‘:set paste‘ and you are ready to paste. When finished pasting you probably want to leave ‘paste‘ mode by typing ‘:set nopaste‘.

    As I am too lazy to type this every time I need to paste something I have now added the ‘pastetoggle‘ key into my profile’s .vimrc file as follows: ‘set pastetoggle=<F12>‘

    From now on simply hit F12 on the keyboard and you will be in ‘paste‘ mode. Press F12 again to leave it.