Down Again

My just rebuilt laptop got mal-adware and virus infected, unfortunately. Then IT guy came to save me and let me see how he hunts and kills those worms.

It is really surprising what a good job those viruses did. They hide and put lots of hooks in your system. If you missed anyone of these hooks, they will come back next time you start your computer. Amazing how similar these digital-viruses are to the real organisms. It reminds me the movie "Ghost in the Shell" (I have the DVD in hands, but have not watch it yet. I watched the Ghost in the Shell 2 though).

At the end, we found the virus infected a key component of XP which listen the network traffic (don't ask me what that means; that is what the IT guy told me.) So the hard-drive of my laptop was once again taken away for further examination.

Is today my day? I don't know. Although the computer is done, finally my microtubule dynamics experiment works. It appears that there is a mechanism to stabilize microtubules close to equatorial cortex. Greg Gundersen proposed a microtubule capping models for microtubule stabilization in migrating fibroblasts. Apparently the "possible cap" of microtubule tip is ATP sensitive, but so far the protein has not been biochemically identified yet. Maybe the case is also true for cytokinetic cells.