I haven’t had to deal with computer virus for a while. Today I had to spend hours just trying to delete two DLL files injected into my system by some ad-ware/spyware. Here are steps I took to removed them. Hopefully they will be helpful to you in removing those particular files or just in general removing malicious files:

The two files are ddccy.dll and opnnljj.dll. You can Google them to see what they do. I made use of Windows XP Professional CD.

1. I booted the system with the XP CD.
2. (Then inserted my RAID driver since I’m using RAID. You can skip this step if you are using IDE drives).
3. Choose "Repair" mode. Then choose an installation and log in.
4. Navigate to the folder where the files are located, use "del" command to remove them.
5. Reboot back into Windows XP and run HijackThis.
6. Choose "Scan" and check the result
7. Select the items that are related to the files you deleted, and click "Fix Checked"
8. Done.

Good luck and be careful next time.

At work I have to modified a huge Fortran 77 program which simulates some geo-chemical stuff in order to make it run on a cluster to accommodate our large model. I have never dealt with Fortran before, only heard of it. It’s kind of old, I mean, 77, doesn’t that suppose to mean it came out in the year of 77?

I heard of some good things about Fortran in the old days: lots of programs in engineering fields, more efficient than C, wide spread, etc. But that’s not the case anymore. Things have changed greatly after, er, 1/3 of a century.

Read on …