AV2010 has gotten worse!

It was preventing me from installing Malwarebytes, and everytime I would run any program the virus would be started. I had to use the following registry fix:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.exe]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\secfile]
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\secfile]
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe\shell\open\command]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe]
@=”exefile”
“Content Type”=”application/x-msdownload”

Then save as fix.reg and run it. After restarting the PC I was able to install Malwarebytes Anti-malware and remove the viruses.

Thanks to Kwisatz - http://www.virusremovalguru.com/?p=5528#comment-34676

Steps to creating a EBS image from an AMI (Windows)

Download Amazon's EC2 API Tools to C:\ec2-api-tools

# Run the following on a remote machine with Amazon's EC2 API Tools installed
# Adjust these variables to match your own system
set EC2_HOME=c:\ec2-api-tools
set JAVA_HOME=c:\Program Files\Java\jre6

# Update PATH
set PATH=%PATH%:c:\ec2-api-tools\bin

#Test by running
ec2-version
# Output: 1.3-46266 2009-11-30

# Add keys
set EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=c:\aws-keys\pk-XXXXXXX.pem
set EC2_CERT=c:\aws-keys\cert-XXXXXXX.pem

# Use AWS Management Console
# Create new instance based on existing AMI
# Once instance is launch and running create a volume, make sure that the availability zone is the same as the instance, set device to /dev/sdh
# Attach the volume to the instance
# Connect to the instance using Putty
# Create the following script
vi instance-to-ebs-ami.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Run this script on the instance to be bundled
# tested with Canonical Ubuntu 9.10 base ami

EBS_DEVICE=${1:-'/dev/sdh'}
IMAGE_DIR=${2:-'/mnt/tmp'}
EBS_MOUNT_POINT=${3:-'/mnt/ebs'}

mkdir -p $EBS_MOUNT_POINT
mkfs.ext3 ${EBS_DEVICE}
mount ${EBS_DEVICE} $EBS_MOUNT_POINT

#make a local working copy
mkdir /mnt/tmp
rsync --stats -av --exclude /root/.bash_history --exclude /home/*/.bash_history --exclude /etc/ssh/ssh_host_* --exclude /etc/ssh/moduli --exclude /etc/udev/rules.d/*persistent-net.rules --exclude /var/lib/ec2/* --exclude=/mnt/* --exclude=/proc/* --exclude=/tmp/* / $IMAGE_DIR

#ensure that ami init scripts will be run
chmod u+x $IMAGE_DIR/etc/init.d/ec2-init-user-data

#clear out log files
cd $IMAGE_DIR/var/log
for i in `ls ./**/*`; do
echo $i && echo -n> $i
done

cd $IMAGE_DIR
tar -cSf - -C ./ . | tar xvf - -C $EBS_MOUNT_POINT
#NOTE, You could rsync / directly to EBS_MOUNT_POINT, but this tar trickery saves some space in the snapshot

umount $EBS_MOUNT_POINT

chmod +x instance-to-ebs-ami.sh
./instance-to-ebs-ami.sh
exit

# Go back to AWS Management Console
# Detach the volume
# Create a snapshot of the volume

# Now, we register the snapshot to be able to create an EBS image
# Run this command from your remote machine with Amazon's EC2 API Tools installed
# Fill in the required variables

ec2-register --snapshot snap-xxxxxx --kernel aki-xxxxxxx --ramdisk ari-xxxxxxxx --description="" --name="debian-5.0-lenny-base-20091011" --architecture i386 --root-device-name /dev/sda1
#sample output => IMAGE ami-xxxxxxx

References/Credits:
http://www.capsunlock.net/2009/12/create-ebs-boot-ami.html
http://gist.github.com/249915

Try this script for creating automated snapshots:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?categoryID=100&externalID=1663
or
http://johnwoconnor.blogspot.com/2009/06/automatic-volume-snapshots-using-amazon.html

Creating a Remote Git Repo

Here are some steps I used to create a remote Git repo based on my local files.

Create the folder for the new application and change to that directory.
> mkdir /var/www/html/newapp
> cd /var/www/html/newapp

Make sure git is installed, if not install it
> sudo apt-get install git-core git-doc

Initialize the folder to become a git directory
> git init

********* Now switch to your local files ***********
> cd ~/myapp

Initialize git with the local folder as well
>git init

Tell git about yourself
>git config user.name "Your Name"
>git config user.email "Your Email"

Now, tell git which server to talk too
>git remote add origin username@yourdomain.com:/var/www/html/newapp/.git
Make sure that this user has SSH access to the box.

>git config branch.master.remote origin
>git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

Make your initial commit and push it to the remote server.
>git commit -a -m "Initial commit"
>git push origin master

And viola! Your files will be pushed to the remote server. Now, I was wondering why when I went to access the server, the files didn't seem to be in the working directory, even though I could see the log showed my Initial commit. It turns out that when things are pushed to master, they enter a limbo state. You have to do a git checkout -f, to actual have the commit become live. Note that doing a git checkout -f, will throw away any changes that have been made on the remote server.

To make the updating of the server easier, you can do the following:
> vi /var/www/html/newapp/.git/hooks/post-receive
Add - git checkout -f
Save the file
>chmod +x /var/www/html/newapp/.git/hooks/post-receive

2 Good articles for programmers

5 Tips for creating good code every day; or how to become a good software developer
http://www.makinggoodsoftware.com/2009/05/15/5-tips-for-creating-good-code-every-day-how-to-become-a-good-software-developer/

5 Top non-technical mistakes made by programmers
http://www.makinggoodsoftware.com/2009/07/07/5-top-non-technical-mistakes-made-by-programmers/

Read-optimize your source code

A good article about writing well-written code that will make it easy for other developers to quickly understand your code.

http://www.brendel.com/consulting/blog/2009/06/read-optimized-source-code.html

Another useful unix command to find text in many files

find . -type f -exec grep -il "text to find" {} \;

Will give you a list of all the files that contain "text to find", starting with your current directory and searching all sub-directories.

Useful unix command to find and replace text in many files

Here is a useful unix command I used today to find and replace text across multiple files and multiple directories.

find . -type f -exec sed -i "s/string1/string2/g" {} \;

This will replace all instances of string1 with string2.

Credit to Google and http://www.sb.fsu.edu/~soma/Proj/How-to/Search+Replace.pdf for helping me figure this out.