I only occaisionally read articles about computer viruses (and trojans and so on), since in my experience avoiding viruses is a solved problem. Yet it’s nice to see general awarness about viruses increasing – especially in mainstream news.

Once again, another virus (it doesn’t really matter which) has used security flaws in Microsoft Programs and Operating Systems to do some damage. Whilst the BBC has always taken care to mention the word “Microsoft” when describing which systems are affected, today is the first time that I have seen them mentioning the alternatives –

The worms affect Windows systems but not Linux or Apple Mac computers.

– albeit as the last paragraph of their article. It’s a start, but when such a disclaimer comes as the second or third sentence (preferably with “As usual”, “Once again”, or “We’re not surprised to note that” in front, I’ll be happy.

Folks, computers aren’t vulnerable to computer viruses. Email programs aren’t vulnerable to Email viruses. However, Microsoft Windows (of all varieties) is vulnerable to Windows viruses, Microsoft Internet Explorer is vulnerable to Internet Explorer exploits, and Microsoft Outlook is vulnerable to Outlook viruses (propagated via email). Linux, Mozilla and any email client you can name (that’s not Outlook) are not vulnerable to any of the above viruses.

Sure, other alternatives might be vulnerable to viruses written specifically to target them. But until that starts happening on a large scales, that possibility is only used to try and divert attention from Microsoft’s failings.

A long while back, I decided that if I ever had a problem, and the answer to the problem wasn’t obvious from Google, then I’d write it on my weblog and hope that the next person with the same problem finds my solution instead. So here goes. If the wording sounds a bit funny, it’s because I’m trying to cast the search-word net wide enough to catch anyone who’s looking for similar things.

In Konqueror (the KDE file manager), there is a limit to the file size for the file previews to work, to try to stop your computer getting bogged down if you’ve got lots of large images. I ran into this today when I was trying to look at some of my new photos, since my shiny new toy takes rather large pictures, and only a couple of them were small enough that the preview worked. Searching for ‘kde preview image size limit’ picked up some stuff about the limit being hardcoded into KDE, but that’s waaay out of date, and you can change the limit from the menu nowadays. For KDE 3.0.3 at least (yes, I know how old it is), try Settings->Configure Konqueror->File Manager->Previews->Maximum File Size, and increase the slider.

Fairly obvious, I know, and I fixed the problem a lot quicker than it took to write all that out. But the internet is supposed to be the Source Of All Answers, so I’m just doing my bit.