Ed The Dev .com

I’m playing with my new Amazon WordPress add-on.

I’m currently reading ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. It’s full of great advice, but don’t expect to read it through in one sitting. It’s a good pick-up and put-down book. I like reading it in ten minute intervals; taking time in between to internalize it’s advice.

I love books, and the inevitable result is I love Amazon.com. I’ve been signed up for the Amazon Associates Program for quite awhile, just because I was curious about it.

I never bothered linking to books I love because it took so long to navigate over to Amazon to generate the linked book cover image. Thankfully, I’ve just discovered quite a jem of an add-on for WordPress. Amazon Reloaded for WordPress by Nick Ohrn is the WordPress plugin I’ve been dreaming of. It adds an Amazon search as a collapsable footer to the WordPress post edit page.

I like this plugin because it satisfies a need; and I also like it because it’s interface is exactly perfectly right. Nice work Nick, and many thanks.

Conficker (also known as DownAndUp) is a virus that is set to ‘go off’ tomorrow. It has infected millions of computers, but world-wide that isn’t a large percentage of total computers. And Conficker seems to be much better at infecting workplace computers than home computers. But even so, it would still be nice to know whether your computer is infected.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to test for Conficker. In order to defend itself against removal, Conficker messes up your ability to reach several security expert websites. If you’re able to open sans.org/ (SANS are good guys with some great information about protecting yourself from viruses) in your web browser, you’re not infected. If you can’t open it, there could be other causes, but a Conficker infection is a likely explanation.