This Computer Hates Me
This morning it was my virus software, ESET NOD32, that decided to abandoned me. The message at boot read: Virus Scanner Initialization Failed. The icon in the tray came up red instead of the normal green.
I started off cursing Adobe because that is the only software I loaded yesterday, but that wasn’t it.
I then cautiously went on the ‘Net to search for answers while trying to remember which curses were appropriately offensive in Slovak as well as Russian [ESET is a Slovakian company, located in Bratislava].
After reading about various people who had been afflicted with seemingly the same problem, I started to think about it as a programmer. Why wouldn’t I load a virus scanner at boot up? Obviously I would abort the program if I couldn’t verify the virus definitions. You don’t want to use a program designed to spot viruses, if the definitions are corrupted or compromised.
Back to the forums and it became clear that the very first thing the program does when booting is to call “home” and check on the virus definitions. I surmised that if, for any reason. it couldn’t do that, it would abort the installation.
Apparently I was right, because when I right-clicked on the icon and forced a manual definition update, the program finished the cycle and the icon went green.
The forums were suggesting an uninstall of the current software, installing an older version, then reinstalling the current version as a solution. That looked like too much work for me.
How about some better error messages, guys?
2 comments
LOL Coders! Ya can’t shoot them, and ya can’t get them to write anything that isn’t cryptic code! 😉 I used to be one… once. 😉 Then, I ended on the other side of the fence and saw the error of my ways! The solution was obvious… NEVER cut code again, since time for writing decent comments and useful messages was never factored into any project schedule I was ever forced to work with! There was barely enough time allocated to write code that could function with some reasonable efforts at making sure they were as free of errors as possible. In the end, as with almost everything, it’s all a compromise. 🙂 I realized to *REALLY* write code *properly* would take so long, you’d never get it finished until it was obsolete. And throwing more coders at it tends to make it worse rather than better. *shrug* Now, they have people who specialize in *Use Cases* and UML and *end user design* etc to write messages and document things. But they don’t really understand the code. So it’s an educated guess most of the time. 😉
LadyMin and I had problems with NOD32 v3 and went back to v2. Now, I use Avira. *shrug* It regularly scores high (along with NOD32 & BitDefender) but I found Avira to be efficient and reasonably unobtrusive (unless I turn on *everything*)! 🙂 I consider Norton AV to be a huge virus in itself, and a serious PITA! Also dislike McAfee, Grisoft AVG, Kaspersky (used to be good, garbage now), F-Prot, Norman, and a few others (oh, and ESPECIALLY *anything* from CA!! barf!). 😉 Oh, I like Dr. Web too. 🙂
/rant 😉
I switched to NOD32 after Norton totally locked up once too often, and this is the first problem I’ve encountered. I think it is a port issue, i.e. it is trying to use a port that wasn’t ready this morning because I altered the power on sequence for my equipment this morning.
It has been invisible for 18 months, which is more than I can say for most of the software I use.
Oh, I agree that no one factors in the time to write meaningful comments in the code, or meaningful error messages. Getting things out the door is all that the companies care about anymore. I came down from “big iron” and you were required to follow the corporate guidelines which included flowcharts, designs, comments, and a separate technical writer took care of the messaging. That writer could understand the code because everyone was an experienced member of a team, not a one-time collection of people.