One of the problems I ran into when I moved to another university was the awkward way in which internet access was provided for the students. Instead of having routers in each dorm room that connected onto a high-speed fiber connection as I was accustomed to, I had to be satisfied with inconsistent WiFi. Anyway, this post is not meant to complain about unreliable internet access. On rare occasions you may find that your internet provider requires that you connect through their proxy server with a username and password in order to surf freely. This presents no problem for your web browser once the settings are configured, but what about all those other applications such as your antivirus software that require a constantly active connection in order to download and install definition updates?

Some antivirus applications have a problem calling home through proxies. This can spell trouble for you because, without the necessary virus definitions, your antivirus has no way of protecting your computer from the latest threats that may slip through questionable web surfing habits. I noticed here at my university that the proxy inconvenience seems to also coincide with the number of infected personal computers. Scary! Anyway, here is a brief walkthrough on how to configure avast! Antivirus to connect through a proxy server.

1. Make sure that settings for an active proxy server are configured through Internet Explorer.
   
   

   Internet Explorer LAN Proxy Settings

2. Right-click on the avast! Antivirus icon in the system tray and select Program Settings from the menu.
   
   

   avast! Antivirus right-click menu

3. In the Settings panel, choose Update (Basic) from the menu and click the Proxy button.
   
   

   avast! Antivirus Settings

4. Activate ‘Auto detect (use Internet Explorer settings)‘ and select OK to apply the changes until you exit the Settings panel.
   
   

   avast! Antivirus Proxy Settings

That’s it! You’re done! Not difficult at all. avast! Antivirus should now be able to get updates manually or automatically without hindrance. Don’t let some silly proxy server stop you from defending your computer.

I do not believe it has been a full year yet since I last changed my blog’s theme. Anyway, I thought that this change was necessary for several reasons. First of all, I wanted to focus more on the content than the stuff in the sidebar. Yes, links to popular posts and tags are important for keeping visitors on the site, but I find that I need more lateral screen real estate for the type of posts I will be making. Secondly, I like the minimalistic and clean feel of the new theme. There is some elegance in simplicity. Right now I am working on attaching more meaninful and theme-friendly thumbnails to each post, so the blog does not look too drab to visitors. Looking forward to future posts!

Unfortunately, my blog updates have slipped. So I just wanted to post something to at least show some signs of activity. I still have an article to publish concerning some modified .htaccess code for GZipping static and dynamic web pages, but will not be able to do anything for a while now as schoolwork has to take priority.

I should have posted this earlier, but I am now in medical school pursuing an MBBS. Hopefully, by 2014, I should be graduating from the program and transitioning into specialization, but that is a long time off. Right now I am heavily focused on getting through this first semester of year 1 because I hear it is the toughest stage. Therefore, most of my time is spent reading medical textbooks and studying. I am not looking forward to having to resit any exams, so I have to put the majority of my focus on my work. That means that I may be making fewer regular posts here. However, that is no sign that my blog is going anywhere. If I manage my time well, keeping this blog active should not be a problem.

Anyway, it’s back to the books. Exams are quickly approaching. I never doubted that medical school was difficult, but I now have a new appreciation for the tremendous amount of work good doctors have to put in to become successful healthcare practitioners.

If you haven’t gotten a notification as yet, go and check your WordPress installations. This update addresses an XSS vulnerability in Press This, which I happen to be using to make this post. [Weird, isn't it?] Anyway, since this is a security update, every WordPress user is encouraged to update/upgrade.

Read more here: WordPress 2.8.6 Security Release.

Quick Tip: Before running the automatic updater through the WordPress Dashboard, ensure that all of your current plugins are up to date. Afterward, deactivate all of your plugins and run the WordPress updater. You can re-activate your plugins after the update has been applied. Doing this will help avoid any conflicts during the update process not only when it comes to plugins, but also with the classic “Fatal error: Allowed memory size exhausted” error.

Do you sometimes find yourself with a file that you cannot open because you do not have the correct program installed? Or perhaps you only encounter them on rare occasions and find that this is not a sufficient enough reason to purchase the necessary software. Instead of requesting another format, why not use the variety of free software available to open the file for you!

Check out OpenWith.org for free software that will allow you to open a multitude of file extensions. Long gone are the days of not having the correct program for the job!

Wow! This one made me laugh! No offense to Microsoft; I still use Office 2003 Professional.

Didn’t the WordPress team just recently release v2.8.2 to fix an XSS vulnerability? Well, it seems as though a few other fixes were also made and here we have WordPress 2.8.3.

Update/upgrade your WordPress installations now because this is a security release that fixes a bunch of issues from v2.8.1.

Read more here: WordPress 2.8.3 Security Release

This is not one of my regular technical posts. I do have a sense of humour and enjoy a good laugh, especially when everything can be achieved through clean comedy. Here is a video I came across while on YouTube. Yes, it is totally random, but you will have to admit that it is funny. Enjoy!

By default, WordPress installations announce their currently installed version in the header. You will find it within a meta tag of the page’s HTML.

If you do not keep on top of WordPress updates, you can imagine that this presents a security risk. Those wishing to exploit vulnerabilities like the recent XSS vulnerability in WordPress 2.8.1 can target blogs just by looking at the header meta information. The situation gets worse if you are still using an even older version of WordPress.

Getting WordPress to stop advertising this version information requires that you add the following to your theme’s functions.php file. Remember how we removed other header elements? This WordPress hack is similar. Note that you need to do this every time you change your theme.

add_filter( 'the_generator', create_function('$a', "return null;") );

Upon logging in to one of my WordPress blogs this morning, I saw the notification to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.2.  Wasn’t WordPress 2.8.1 released just a few weeks ago? Well, I’m thankful that the WordPress developers are keeping on top of security.

WordPress 2.8.2 fixes an XSS vulnerability that was found to exploit comment author URLs through the admin panel. Wow! That’s scary!

Read more about it here: WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.8.2

I found that using the built-in automatic upgrade does not always work properly and may get stuck at the “unpacking” stage. While you can try the manual upgrade, it can be a very long process. Automatic upgrading has progressed very far and can be completed within seconds. Just ensure that before you update and subsequently deactivate all of your plugins before executing the upgrade in either case. They can be re-activated after the upgrade process is complete.