BiggAndyy the Magazine

I have not spent a lot of time investigating the WHY’s and WHAT’s of the problem but in a nutshell a customer with a Sony VIAO Notebook computer was having a terribly long wait at boot time. The machine would literally sit there frozen for 6 minutes at the VIAO background after Windows login.

It did not take a long time to find out that the program running in the background causing this was SPBBCSVC.EXE, a Symantec Antivirus 10.1 program. While the machine was sitting seemingly frozen I was able to pop open a taskmanager and see that SPBBCSVC.EXE was the last PID opened and running. I uninstalled Symantec and rebooted. The machine booted quickly and easily.

I reinstalled Symantec 10.1 (the version we are running here at Pitt) and the 6 minutes startup reappeared. About an hour of digging found the solution. The SPBBCSVC.EXE file is running an AUTOMATIC STARTUP VIRUS SCAN of the hard drive. This is a big hard drive so it takes quite a while to run the scan while the machine just sits there waiting for it to complete. What a crappy default to set by Symantec.

Bottom line, open Symantec Antivirus, open the Startup Scan Option and delete the AUTO-GENERATED QUICKSCAN.

That will fix the problem for you.

The XML-RPC Ping Services list at WordPress sometimes needs sprucing up, as in a reality check. Not all of the services listed there are there anymore. Some are just outright gone, others are refusing updates, and some still work fine but take a LONG time to respond.

That is why it sometimes seems like forever between the moment you press PUBLISH and the time it actually finishes publishing your article. The ping service sites that are not there or taking a long time to respond are gumming the works up.

Here is my list of sites, adopted from the WordPress site, that I have done a reality check on and respond quickly and reliably. BTW: this list is entered in the wp-admin panel at OPTIONS - WRITING - UPDATE SERVICES.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://www.catapings.com/ping.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

Periodically I do a reality check on this list and remove those entries that seem to have fallen into disuse. It would be a good habit for everyone to get into to maintain a healthy and fun blog experience.

Is anybody out there?

I know I have readers. I get about 2,500 hits per month (not all of them are googlebots). People are clicking on my ads (Thank You everyone who has). FeedBurner reports that I even have subscribers. I notify nearly 40 update services when I publish a new article. I post my articles on all the message forums I frequent throughout the day. I get referrals from delicious, digg, technorati, google, and a host of others.

By most accounts my little blog and the tripe that I write about have a good start.

But where are the spammers???

In the 4 months that I have blogged with WordPress and akismet as the spam blocking software I have had only 119 spam attempts (no false positives and no missed spam attempts). The number of hits a blog has, the actual geographic reach, the number of return visitors, and the number of incoming links from other blogs are all measures of the health of the blog. But so are spam attempts I believe.

Now don’t get me wrong. A website that is getting hammered by spam is a bad thing. The reliability and bandwidth go down and sometimes people who want to get in don’t because the spammers are killing the site. But a healthy blog is going to have a certain number of spam attempts per day I would imagine. If a site is so small and so quiet in the blogosphere that the spammers don’t bother with it… well, we are known by the friends we keep and the enemies we accumulate.

Maybe I just need a cup of coffee.