This was really not a good idea on her part. The fact is that she passed along invalid information without verifying it and now all of those employees are going to do the same. The cycle really never ends. The best an I.T. department can do is help educate their employees with some email tips that help avoid this in the future. Attached is the original email the employee passed on and My reply.

Original Email:

This sounds very serious. I checked it out on Snopes, and the link below is correct. However, the message below doesn’t show the true lengths these virus-makers go to. Their subjects don’t always use the word Postcard. Sometimes it’s a “greeting card” or other seeminly inocuous subject. It would a good idea to read the actual snopes page on it. Unfortunately, you can’t cut and paste from that page, or I’d have done so. Dave

Subject: Fw: VIRUS ALERT!!! THIS IS NOT A JOKE!

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp
This is real. The FBI is even involved.

Hi All,I checked with Norton Anti-Virus, and they are gearing up for this
virus! I checked snopes.com, and it is for real!! Get this E-mail message sent around to your contacts ASAP. PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS!
You should be alert during the next few days. Do not open any message with an attachment entitled “POSTCARD,” regardless of who sent it to you
It is a virus which opens A POSTCARD IMAGE, which ‘burns’ the whole hard disc C of
your computer. This virus will be received from someone who has your e-mail address in his/her contact list.
This is the reason why you need to send this e-mailto all your contacts. It is better to receive this message 25 times than to receive the virus and open it. If you receive a mail called” POSTCARD,” even though sent to you by a friend, do not open it.!
Shut down your computer immediately. This is the worst virus announced by CNN. It has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever. This virus was discovered by McAfee yesterday, and there is no repair yet for this kind of virus.
This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept. COPY THIS E-MAIL, AND SEND IT TO YOUR FRIENDS. REMEMBER: IF YOU SEND IT TO THEM, YOU WILL BENEFIT ALL OF US.

CLICK BELOW TO VERIFY THE EXPLANATION ON SNOPES WEBSITE

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp

My Reply:

To All:

The information below is bogus and should be ignored. The contents of the email are almost an exact duplicate of a known hoax warning email that has been passed around the internet since 2006. The only difference is that the link to the Snopes website have changed and that a few key words have been changed in the email. The information is 100% bogus.

The link on the email is legit. It does link to a known virus, however that virus has been out since June of 2007 and would be caught by any half decent anti-virus program available today. So again there is no threat here.

As always here are a few good rules to follow when dealing with your email:
1) Never open an attachment to an email unless you know who the email is from. Even then be wary about opening them if the contents of the email do not look legitimate.
2) Never open any attachments whose file name ends in the following: .exe, .vbs, .cs, .ws
3) Never click on website addresses from an email unless you can verify whom the email is from.
4) Never click on a website address in a email that links to your bank, the IRS, your Ebay account, or PayPal. If you think it might be real then go open a web browser and type in the address to the site yourself. 99.99% chance the link in the email doesn’t actually go to your bank.. just a page that looks like your banks website.
5) To help avoid some older, less effective, virus attacks you shouldn’t use the reading pane in your email client. The reading pane opens emails in a side bar when you single click or highlight the email in your email client. This means that if your just clicking on the email to delete it the client will still open it in the reading pane. You should turn off that pane so you can click on a email to delete it without having to open the email to read it.

Following the rules above will help reduce your chances of getting a virus via a email. They will also help keep you from falling for the recently popular bank fraud scams that are floating around as well.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the days of the email virus are rapidly disappearing. There hasn’t been a good effective email virus since 2004. There have been many attempts since then however security advances in anti-virus software, Windows and email clients such as Outlook have slowed them tremendously. The most effective computing threat today is identity theft via banking , Ebay and PayPal emails.

Finally, Please do not pass around bogus emails such as the one below. Don’t send them to your friends, co-workers, acquaintances or anyone else. Send them to your I.T. department to get them verified instead of sending them out to others. Any I.T. department will be happy to verify the validity of these so called “virus warning” emails and if it is legitimate they will notify the employee’s of a possible threat. The internet is full of invalid information and all internet users tend to get enough spam emails without us contributing to junk in their inbox.

The fact is that any chuckle head on the planet can go to a web host such as <Removed>, yeah that’s a shameless plug, and setup a website full of bogus information. The trick is weeding through all the junk to get the information that really matters.

Thanks,
Your I.T. Department

P.S. If you need something to pass around the internet.. Send a copy of this email. It contains something useful and not fluffy bunnies or cute kittens.

The fact is that what the employee did was not horribly wrong. It’s just that a whole chain of emails can be avoided if the employee followed the advice above. Use the email computing tips in my reply and help avoid causing the same kind of problem at your work place.

That solution is the Gnome Partition Editor, GParted, that comes from the Gnome Linux desktop. GParted is an open source alternative to Norton Partition Magic. It allows users to create, delete, resize, move and even duplicate partitions. GParted is offered as a bootable LiveCD or LiveUSB (Flash Drive) media so users do not have to install Linux to use it.

Recently I used GParted to fix the 130GB partition on a co-workers drive who was replacing an old 80GB drive with a 250GB drive on a fresh install of windows. Unfortunately the user only owned a copy of Windows XP Pre SP1 so Microsoft only allowed for the creation of a 130GB partition. After Windows was installed I was able to download SP1 and use GParted to resize the partition to 250GB with no real effort or pain. Once again a Linux tool has saved us from the horrors that Microsoft has put into Windows.

Side Note: GParted does not work properly on Microsoft labeled dynamic drives. These are drives that are part of a Microsoft software based raid that is normally found in servers. Basic users should have no problem using GParted to resize their hard drive partition.

Download GParted and give it a try the next time you need a partition resized.

All style blocks have the same basic format. They all start with the name of the block and then contain all the style directives within a pair of brackets. Each style directive is separated by a semicolon and normally placed on a separate line for simplicity of reading. Examples of this can be seen below within the samples for each type of block.

The HTML Block
This block is very straight forward. This block’s name is the type of tag that the designer wants the style to apply towards. Examples of names for an HTML style block could be BODY, P, TABLE or DIV. These are all names of HTML tags contained within the HTML document. This type of style will apply to all instances of the HTML tag in the document. If a designer wanted to ensure that all the text on a page was font style VERDANA and size 10 then the designer could place this in the BODY tag as shown below:

BODY {
Font-Family: Verdana;
Font-Size: 10pt;
}

ID Style Blocks
ID style blocks are great for applying some style directives to a particular tag on a HTML page. The HTML tag needs to be marked with an ID attribute for these style blocks to work. Adding an ID attribute to an HTML tag is done as follows:

<div ID=”specificDIV”>This is My Text</div>

When using ID style blocks the name of the block in the CSS sheet is always prepended by a pound sign, #, which informs the browser that it is an ID block. The pound sign is the only thing that separates an ID style block from other block types in the style sheet. Also it is important to know that for proper HTML validation the ID can only be used once per HTML page. Multiple uses of the same ID name are not allowed, please use Class style blocks for this functionality. If the designer wanted to make the DIV tag above use the Arial font instead of Verdana, then they could easily add an ID style block to their style sheet that states the following:

#specificDIV {
Font-Family: Arial;
}

Class Style Blocks
This is probably the most usefull CSS block type there is. Not only can a single class block be used on multiple different types of HTML tags but it can also be used multiple times per HTML document and still be validated properly. Class blocks can also be stacked on an HTML tag to apply multiple class blocks to the same tag. This can help make a CSS style sheet more flexible when using the class blocks. Class blocks are applied to an HTML tag by adding the CLASS attribute to the HTML tag. This is done as follows:

<div class=”center”>This is my text</div>
OR
<p class=”center”>This is my other text</p>

Class style blocks are distinguished in the CSS style sheet by prepending a period, “.”, to the name of the style in the CSS sheet. This can even be taken a step further and prepending the name of the HTML tag to the name of the class block to have multiple classes with the same name that style differently based on the HTML tag it is styling. That can however get a little complex and hard to follow so the designer is better off by applying different names to the class blocks if they are styling differently then a previously used name. An example class block that will center the text on both of the examples used above would be as follows:

.center {
Text-Align: center;
}

As previously stated you can also stack the class style blocks on to a HTML tag. This is done by seperating the names of the classes on the HTML tag with a space. If a designer chooses to stack class styles on to a tag they must understand that if two styles try to modify the same directive, such as font-family or text-align, then the class that was listed on the tag first will decide how the tag is styled. So if a designer had three class styles named “center”, “verdana” and “size10″ that changed the text-align, font-family, and font-size they could easily stack these on one tag as like this:

<p class=”center verdana size10″>This text will be centered and displayed in Verdana at font size 10pt</p>

That covers all of the different types of style blocks that you will find in the common CSS style sheet. Hopefully this will clear up how to create and apply a proper style sheet for designers that are just getting started in using CSS.

Some web sites, like this one, are almost entirely made of CSS directives. This is because there are so many advantages to using CSS in a web document. Here are just some of the examples on how CSS can make any web designers life a little easier:

Cross Browser Compatibility:
CSS allows designers to specify exactly how elements should be displayed on the page helping browsers to properly render the web site. For example CSS allows a designer to specify exactly how many pixels should be between two elements or exactly how wide the borders around the element should be. This helps take guess work away from the browser allowing multiple browser platforms to properly render the site.

General Maintenance:
Using style sheets to specify element directives such as font faces, font sizes and colors is a comment practice. If the styles are setup properly, see below, this allows designers to quickly and easily change these when a client changes their mind. Without proper style sheets designers would have to edit every document to change the <font> tags if a client wanted all the text at 8pt instead of 9pt.

Search Engine Optimization:
CSS can actually help with SEO as well. Search engines prefer sites with nice and clean code that downloads fast. Removing all of the font, font size and color specifications from the document will not only reduce the size of the document, cause it to download faster, but it will also give the engine less code to process. CSS can also be used to remove all of the images from a web document causing it to be even smaller.

There are three methods to implement CSS directives in a web document. Each of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages. All three methods are listed below along with an example situation on when to use them.

Inline Styles:
Inline styles are places within the tag on a web document. These styles are very handy if the designer is only planning on formating one element on one page. If the designer wants to format multiple elements on the page or multiple elements on multiple pages then use one of the other methods. The disadvantage to an inline style is that if the designer wants to change the style on this element it can only be done in this one spot in the document. Inline styles are specified by using the STYLE attribute of a tag. Within the style attribute the designer can specify any of the standard CSS directives that they want. This is an example of a inline style:

<p style=”Font-Family: Verdana; Font-Size: 8pt”>This text is formated using font size 8 of the Verdana font</p>

Document Styles:
Document styles are style sheets that are included in the HEAD section of the document. These styles are handy if the designer wants to format multiple elements on one page the same way. The disadvantage to this method is that because the style code gets placed at the top of every page the designer must edit every document on the site if they want to edit one of the styles on the site. This is why document styles are best used for styling one page differently then the rest of a web site. Here is an example page with a document style section:

<html>
<head>
<title>Testing Document Styles</title>
<style type=”text/css”>
p {
Font-Family: Verdana;
Font-Size: 8pt;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>This text is formated using font size 8 of the Verdana font</p>
</body>
</html>

Style Sheets:
Using Style Sheets is the preferred method for most web designers. Style sheets allow the designer to specify one file in a page that will store all the styles for that page. This allows the designer to create one style sheet document and specify it for multiple pages in the web site. The advantage to using this method that if all of the styles are stored in one file for the entire web site then the designer needs only change that one file to make changes to the entire site. Web designers should use this method as the main implementation for CSS on the sites they develop and use the other two methods to customize a page, using document styles, or a element, using an inline style. Here is an example on how to properly implement a style sheet into a page:

First a style sheet named “styles.css”:

p {
Font-Family: Verdana;
Font-Size: 8pt;
}

Then the HTML file:

<html>
<head>
<title>Testing Document Styles</title>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”styles.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
</head>
<body>
<p>This text is formated using font size 8 of the Verdana font</p>
</body>
</html>

As previously stated each of these CSS methods have their proper place in the web design world. If used properly they can not only give the designer an advantage when designing sites but also help save the designer time in maintenance in the future. For information regarding what kinds of styles are available to use in style sheets please read the CSS Basics article that is to follow.

“Finally, don’t waste money on so-called Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) specialists. Search engines are very quick to penalize sites that try to trick their filtering techniques…”

This quote seems like American Express is telling small business owners that all SEO specialists are just tricking search engine filters and causing sites to get banned.

This is certainly not true. American Express needs to qualify their statements a little better before publishing these documents. Small business owners already have enough things to worry about in and around their business that they do not need “Authoritative Figures” such as AMEX providing them with such false information.

There are many different types of SEO professionals including white hat and black hat specialists. White hat specialists are SEOs that provide clean and natural search engine optimization results. Black hat specialists will do just about anything, including spam in some cases, to get forced search engine results.

If AMEX was to qualify their statement a little better and inform small business owners to be wary of black hat SEO specialists then it wouldn’t be a big deal. Plainly stating that small business owners shouldn’t waste their money on SEO specialists is just ridiculous.

David’s article goes on to mention another AMEX OPEN book PDF that actually promotes the idea of SEO and just to be wary of black hat specialists. This is the real message that AMEX should be sending. It also shows that the author of the first book mentioned is unclear about the message that they should be writing about.

The fact that there are two books promoting clearly different ideas from AMEX goes to show that small business owners probably should not be getting their SEO advice from the credit card issuer. It also shows that AMEX should invest in a editor for these books to keep their message and company image clean and consistent.

The solution is for the web designer to specify a valid DOCTYPE at the top of their web page documents. DOCTYPE is a tag that explains to the browser exactly how to interpret and display the HTML on the page. A complete and valid DOCTYPE tag has in it the type of HTML code the designer is using as well as a link to the specification sheet for that type of code. Keep in mind that the URL portion of the DOCTYPE tag is extremely important. This tells the browser where to find the specifications for the type of document and how to properly render the page. A standard and valid DOCTYPE tag may look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

The above would be a valid DOCTYPE flag for a XHTML 1.0 Transitional page. Take note of how it includes the document type, “DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional”, and the URL to the specification sheet, “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”. Browsers will see this as a valid DOCTYPE tag, download the specification sheet and render the page as described in the specification sheet.

A good list of valid and compliant DOCTYPE tags can be found on the W3C.org web site under Recommended DTD Lists.

The DOCTYPE tag should be placed at the top of every page in a web site. It should be the first line in the page with no white space before it. Placing the DOCTYPE tag anywhere else in the file will cause the browser to return to quirks mode when rendering the page.

Having a valid DOCTYPE tag in a page will cause most cross browser compatibility problems to cease. The reason it does not fix all cross browser compatibility problems is that browsers will need to have some things they render differently then other browsers. If all browsers rendered every page exactly the same then there would be no need to have multiple browsers for the internet. Currently a valid DOCTYPE tag will fix roughly 99% of cross browser compatibility problems with a web sites code, however it does not help fix compatibility problems with CSS or JavaScript.

Note that a designer can get by without specifying a valid DOCTYPE tag such as Portland Technology Consultants, which is missing the specification URL, or Amazon, who does not specify a DOCTYPE tag at all. It is just easier to specify the DOCTYPE tag then fight against the compatibility issues of quirks mode.

Most windows users don’t realize it but Linux has a wide variety of tools that can help windows users out of a jam. In the case of a dying hard drive this tool is called dd. dd is a common unix program that is included in almost every unix/linux distribution. dd’s sole purpose in *nix is to provide basic low level copy of conversion of raw data. In basic terms that means it copies your hard drive sectors instead of copying files like you would in windows. A hard drive sector holds only a bit of information on the hard drive where as a file can be spread across many sectors.

By now your probably saying “thats fine and all but I don’t run linux. I run windows” and thats perfectly fine. The Linux gods have created a helpful thing called a Live CD. Live CD’s allow you to run a operating system completely from a cdrom without needing to install it. So to recover the dying hard drive you will need to get yourself a copy of DSL, Damn Small Linux. DSL is a small enough Linux distribution that can be loaded from almost any type of media including CD’s and flash drives. If you don’t have a computer to download DSL and burn it to CD then have a friend do it for you or ask your local computer store.

Once a copy of DSL is obtained you will need to find another hard drive to copy the data too. The new hard drive should be the same size or larger then the drive that needs to be recovered. Once the new drive is obtained, connect both drives to the computer placing the dying hard drive as the primary drive. Connect the new drive as a slave if using IDE or install it on to the 2nd controller if using sata. This helps ensure the dd commands below are correct.

Now that the new drive is installed in the machine and the DSL CD is in the drive, start the computer and boot from the cdrom. If DSL boots properly then you will be looking at a nice Linux desktop. An icon should be on the desktop or in the menu called “Terminal”. Double click the icon to get a terminal window to open. It will look similar to a dos command prompt window in Microsoft Windows.

We want to start dd and get the drive copy going. To do this you will need to know what type of hard drives you have in the system. Since you just connected a new hard drive or a replacement drive you should already have this bit of information. In Linux the hard drives are labeled as “/dev/” and then a drive prefix and a drive letter. The prefixes are pretty standard, the prefix should be “hd” for an IDE hard drive and “sd” for data. The drive letter is the identifier for where the drive is located on the controller. The primary drive would be “a” and secondary would be “b” and so on. Putting this information together with the setup from above, should cause a primary sata drive to be located at “/dev/sda”. If using sata hard drives you can test this by typing “ls -lsa /dev/sda” into the terminal, you should see the following result:

0 brw-r—– 1 root disk 8, 0 Feb 14 09:14 /dev/sda

If the result looks the same then we are ready to learn about using dd. If not, double check the command settings and drive placement on the controllers. Make sure before continuing that you know the locations to the hard drives in Linux. The last thing anyone wants to do is find out they copied over the wrong drive and now their data is gone forever.

Using dd for drive copies is fairly simple. There are two parameters that need to be specified for the utility to copy the drives. The parameters are “if=” and “of=” these stand for “input file” and “output file”. The “input file” is the source drive that is to be copied and the “output file” is the destination drive. The dd command should look like the following based on the above information if using data hard drives:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Running that command right now however will result in nothing happening. This is because the Linux administrator has to run any executive level commands such as dd. This is done by filtering the command though the “sudo” command. The entire command should look like this:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Typing the above command into the terminal window should cause the hard drive lights to go solid instantly. This is a sign that data is being copied. dd currently provides no progress bars or status indicators while it runs. The hard drive light is the only indicator that it is processing data.

The size of the source hard drive and the condition the drive is in will determine how long it will take dd to copy the data. For the size hard drives that are being in stores today, 80GB - 1TB, dd normally takes a few hours to get complete.

Once the copy is completed dd will exit returning the terminal window to a command prompt. dd will also provide final stats before it exits. The stats will indicate how many sectors were copied and any errors occured. If no errors occured, remove the dying hard drive and boot from the new hard drive. Hopefully there were no issues and disaster has been avoided.

The only catch to the dd recovery process is that the partitions on the new hard drive will be exactly the same as the old hard drive. This only tends to cause a problem if a larger replacement drive was purchased. Any additional space will not be allocated on the new drive. This space can be allocated by creating a new partition or by using another linux tool called Gparted to resize the new drives partitions, however article is for another time.

The person to blame is Scott Hendison, Internet Consultant and owner of Search Commander. I used to work for Scott at a local computer store here in Portland and have known him for over 10 years, wow it’s been a while. Well over this time Scott has told me multiple times that I should “write down everything I know so if I was to get hit by a bus the information is still available”. Scott even at one point came up with a domain for the site where I should put all the information. He said it should be robsbrain.com.

Well after procrastinating on the issue forever I have finally setup a site. I am hoping to get some good information posted up here as I get time and come across it. Unfortunately the domain robsbrain.com was taken when I went to register it. So I came up robertrolfe.com. I know its not very original however I am sure it will serve its purpose.

As for Scott and the information he was once looking for, I doubt he still needs it now that he has become a pretty talented internet consultant. I am sure the information will still make it on here eventually though. Oh and just for you Scott, who I am sure will find this site eventually, I registered robsbrain.net and pointed it here just for you.