If you live in the UK you can't have helped notice that a snowy apocalypse has descended upon us, and the whole country has grind to a halt.

I was on my way home across the Cotswolds, just about to start taking advantage of the company's home working policy, when it all got a bit too much for my old Peugeot. I ended out getting stuck between two reasonably steep hills in a village called Seven Springs.

The Cotswolds are picturesque at the best of times, but in the snow they are pretty stunning.

It's just a shame I didn't have the Canon SLR, the HTC Magic's camera dealt with taking shots until the light started failing, then it all gets a bit grainy.

This last one was taken whilst I ran back down the queue of vehicles on my way to an open motorway.

So whilst playing with some flash sites I managed to pick up the msa.exe virus, despite having a firewall (hard and soft) antivirus, and anti spyware.

It was the flsh injection virus, and it installed several files into windows 7, and a few sneaky .dll's to try and put it back again. SpyBot search and Destroy will kill it, and so will Microsoft Essentials.

SpyBot search and Destroy

Microsoft Essentials

Alternately follow these instructions, they worked for me.

sshnas.dll is a component of trojan FakeAlert. The trojan come from malicious websites that ask users to download an Adobe Flash Player update or player needed to view a movie online. The filename of the trojan is flash-HQ-plugin. Once started, the trojan will download and install core components: c.exe, msa.exe and sshnas.dll.

When downloaded, it will be configured to start automatically when Windows starts. Trojan FakeAlert may display many popups and fake security alerts, hijack Internet Explorer, disable Windows Task Manager and Registry editor.Also it is usually installed in conjunction with a rogue antispyware programs.

Download OTM by OldTimer from here and save it to desktop. (It looks a bit home made, but it works great.)

Run OTM. Copy, then paste the following text in "Paste Instructions for Items to be Moved" window (under the yellow bar):

Click the red Moveit! button. When the tool is finished, it will produce a report for you. Then it will reboot the machine.

I had the luck last week of attending Scotch on the road 2009 in the SwayBar, London. There were quite a few sessions crammed into the day of talks, some taking a more technical approach, others a little more evangelistic. In this article I'll cover the points that I found of particular interest.

Firstly I was struck by how well the ColdFusion community seems to be doing over the last few years. There were several comments as to how many more developers and companies are now using ColdFusion as a development language. It really is encouraging to see that ColdFusion still has a place in the modern development world.

The overall focus of the sessions this time around was ColdFusion 9. Obviously with a big release arriving Adobe are keen to extol its virtues as much as possible. The major differences appear to be some major performance increases, and several additions to the existing functionality.

ORM (Object Relational Mapping) Is the newly integrated Java Hibernate framework. This is pitched as a way of speeding up development time, and avoiding writing repetitive getters and setters in your CFC's. The Java engine handles the entire database layer and frees the developer up to write the actual functionality, rather than endless SQL scripts. At its most basic it is a way of mapping CFC's using the CFProperty tags to a database schema. It's an interesting methodology that I hope to test out soon. (This is known as 'Active record' in many other languages.)

Solr/Verity/Sphinx - The Verity search index is still present but has taken somewhat of a back seat to the new Solr search index. This was something that really piqued my interest as we currently use Sphinx to create large full text search indexes. There are murmurings that that there are some performance differences between Verity and Solr, but it would also be very interesting to see Sphinx thrown into the mix. At some point I hope to run some comprehensive tests against the three to see their performance differences under load.

There has been an interesting change to the Eula this time around too. It isn't something that most people look at, but the licensing model has changed slightly. You can now reuse your ColdFusion 9 license on a non production server. This means that it is very cost effective in upgrading your staging or failover servers, as they can use the same license as your live servers. (For legal reasons don't take my word as gospel, this is how I understood Claude Englebert's presentation on it.)

Another very interesting feature of ColdFusion 9 is its ability to expose a lot of its functionality as external API's. You can now expose specific functions of the server, and it is only a slightly different syntax from the traditional cfml code:

Overall it was a very informative and thought provoking seminar. Fuzzy orange are to be commended on putting on a great day. I'd highly recommend any of their future events, not just for ColdFusion based developers, but for Adobe affiliates in general.