Make your own EICAR test file

Clearly, we couldn't include this on the SuperDisc as a ready made executable file because your anti-virus program would pick it up and not allowed you to do anything with it. Further than that, it could be that some AV programs would then not allow you to access any part of the disk (because it is a removable medium) and that would not be on.

So, here is how to make the file which,

• will not reproduce itself,
• will not infect your machine,
• will not give your ex your new telephone number, give you Dutch Elm disease or wipe clean your heavy rock CD collection ... and so on.

Trying to execute this file will cause any on--access AV product detect it and, if it is working properly, not allow you to run it. Also, if you scan where you have saved the file, your on-demand scanner should pick it up and do likewise.

If you can run it, it just opens up a DOS box and prints the string EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!

Here is how to make it.

1. Open up a copy of Notepad or similar text editor that can save plain text files.
2. Copy the string below into the text editor (without a carriage return)
3. Save the file as EICAR.COM
4. Test your AV programs.

Note that not all AV programs are programmed to detect this but most should. If yours doesn't either it is not configured properly or it is not programmed to look for the test file.

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

If you change the name of the file (remembering to leave the extension as a .com of course) it will still detect it.

Starting OpenOffice.org office programs

With OpenOffice.org office programs, it is possible to try them out in Windows in order to get used to them. If you want to stay with Windows, that is all right but if, in the long term, you are planning to move over to Linux, or one of the other supported operating systems, it is a useful starting point as all that the users will have to get used to when you change operating system is the system itself and for those of us that use Linux with, say, KDE, there is not a greate deal of difference any way as far as the end user is concerned.

Once you have installed the office suite, you can opt to have it load from the system tray on the Taskbar - here under Windows XP. This is a lot quicker than going through the Start menu. For this Helpdesk Extra, we are looking at using the Drawing program.

Toolbars and Tools

If you right-click on any of the toolbars, you will get the smaller menu, displaying which bars are displayed. Put a tick by any that you want.

If you put the mouse over the Visible Buttons menu option, all of the buttons that are available in that particular toolbar are displayed, again with ticks by the ones that are displayed.

Some of the toolbar buttons have a green arrow as part of the design.

If you hold down the mouse over one of these, another menu is displayed and you can select one of these which will also be the default the next time you click on there.

Tool-tips are also useful while you are familiarising yourself with the interface.

3D Effects

The 3D Effects dialogue box appears when you press this innocent looking button.

Really, the only way to familiarise yourself with the functions available with this is to have a play around with it.
From the magazine, you can see what happens when a 3D structure is created from an array of squares but here is something interesting that happens when you take a Windows Metafile - a vector file that is already a composite together with transparency, shading and other effects.

The original Tux Windows Metafile.

You can download this from the Internet to play around with yourself. Being a vector graphics image, it is resizable without getting any step patterns in diagonal borders as you do in pixel image files such as BMPs and so on.

Tux turned 3D and then grey (instead of the default pale blue)

Being 3D now, you can rotate him and although he is not particularly penguin shaped from other angles, you can see how the shapes interact with and intersect each other.

Note that this program is a vector drawing program with 3D facilities and not a 3D modeling program per se. Therefore, if you create several 3D objects separately and overlay them, they will only go one in front of the other, they will not occupy the same space. It is as though the 3D image for each is converted into a 2D image and it is these images, one for each 3D object, that are overlaid.

Lighting

Normally, objects - including the Windows interface - are lit from the left. That is just the way that it is normally. In our case, the WMF of Tux is lit from the right so it is important to light any 3D models that we create from the right as well otherwise they will look out of place.

Often in films, you can see when somebody is superimposed on a background, not necessarily from any line around the actors (as it is possible to get rid of this these days) but from differences in the way that the actor and the background are lit. There are a number of clues such as:

• how sharp the lighting is - a sunny day with hard-edged shadows compared to a dull day with little or no shadow at all;
• the colour of the lighting - again, sunny days have a yellowy direct light with a cooler environmental lighting from the shadows (remember that in the shadows, all that is illuminating the object is the blue sky and anything that is reflecting the direct sunlight)
• the direction of the light - from the left, right, straight in front and so on.

Get any of these wrong enough to notice and you don't stand a chance.

In the image on the right, the upper set of objects look as though they belong to each other because the lighting is consistent whereas the lower set do not because they are lit from different directions and with different coloured lights

Transparency v Gradients

A gradient goes from one colour to another and for the back of an image, this is all right. However, if you want to overlay another colour, going from, say, black to white as in a shadow, it will obscure the background image.

If instead, you make the shape a solid colour and have a gradient transparency, you can still see the background image.

In the image on the right, the top shades use gradients to effect the transition from black to background colour. This is fine with the one on the left and if the background on the right was a continuous red, it would work okay as well. However, because the background is a gradient, a simple gradient for the image in the foreground is not good enough. The lower pair of shades use transparency with a solid colour (if you really wanted to, you could use a gradient here as well if the effect suited your needs) and as you can see, the shading works regardless of the background.

Transparency can also be used in images that support it such as vector images like WMFs and other metafiles and also in images such as PNG or GIF. With PNG where the transparency is in the form of an alpha channel, this can make the degree of transparency variable so if you wanted to generate an image of, say, a lens flare, you could do this in, for instance, the GIMP, save it as a PNG and then use it in OpenOffice.org Draw.