Windows XP freezes and sometimes beeps continuously

From past two days I was having this weird problem where my Windows freezes and does not do any thing. Sometimes it freezes up with a continuous beep, other times it just freezes and I have to force windows to shut down.

After doing a bit of investigation online I found out that many people were having the same problem and it’s because of MBR (Master Boot Record) Root-kit that got installed when I visited a infected website. Supposedly these root-kits are new kind of malware that gets installed and replaces the infected computers master boot record. Even though I had McAfee anti-virus installed on my machine it failed to detect the infection. After doing bit more search I found couple of tools that detect these kinds of root-kits and deletes them.

Prevx Scanner

F-Secure Blacklight Rootkit Scanner

I downloaded Prevx scanner and scanned my machine, It found a root-kit installed on my machine and was able to delete it successfully.

Java Decompiler

I have been using DJCompiler for long time as a standalone application to open up .class files as java code and even at one point I used an eclipse plug-in that hooks into a java decompiler, but somehow eclipse plug-in never worked properly.

Yesterday my wife emailed me a new java decompiler plug-in for eclipse that works out of the box instead of hooking the plug-in to an external .exe file as I used to do earlier.

http://java.decompiler.free.fr/

Its an open source project with a standalone IDE and an Eclipse plug-in, and my first impressions it works great

Mylyn with XPlanner

For some weird reason we use XPlanner for tracking our project. We track all of our Stories and Tasks using this tool. Anyways I found out that we can integrate Mylyn with XPlanner and manage all the tasks from Eclipse. It was pretty easy to integrate

I downloaded Mylyn and XPlanner connector from following update sites

Mylyn – http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.4

Xplanner Connector from Mylyn incubator site – http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/incubator/

I selected only Mylyn Connector: XPlanner

Once installed go to Window -> Show View Other -> Task Repositories and create a new Task repository. It will ask for XPlanner server URL (http://xxxxxxx.com:7070), a name for the repository, username and password. Once connected to the repository we can browse stories, tasks and add it to the Task List.

To open Task List click Window -> Show View Other -> Task List.
rightclick -> New -> Query to pull up stories and tasks. We can add, modify tasks from this view.

Mylyn is a very powerful tool and now we can use it with XPlanner seamlessly