Bryan Davis dot ca

If you or someone you know has had this happen, don't feel alone; this issue has become a widespread problem. There are 3 things you need to know:

  1. Your contacts can most likely be recovered by the excellent hotmail staff
  2. This is not caused by a virus as far as I can tell
  3. How you can prevent it from happening or happening again
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To get your contacts back you'll need to 'ask a question' in the Hotmail forum. Here is a link to the appropriate one:
http://windowslivehelp.com/forums.aspx?forumid=8cf20399-aaeb-453a-860e-1868ebe5b411

Once there you'll need to set up an account and ask a question with 3 things. You'll need to tell them that all your contacts have suddenly disappeared, provide your email address, and provide 3 of your contacts' email addresses. Format the question like this:

My hotmail contacts have all been lost

my email address is _____@_____

three of my contacts are:
_____@_____
_____@_____
_____@_____


Please help. Thank you in advance.

You'll need to fill in the blanks appropriately.

Don't fret, this is not caused by a virus. It's happening to people using every operating system and on PCs and Macs. It's very unlikely that a virus could affect both PCs and Macs and work on every operating system.

What's going on is that spammers are getting people's hotmail passwords. There are a few different methods they can use for this.

They can try a dictionary list of words in which case if your password is a regular word they will find it eventually. They can set up websites where people are asked to sign up with an email address and password; since many people use the same password for everything they can then try the password you entered with your email address. The last method I'll list here is that they can take a look at your password hint. I've seen some people write their password in the password hint.

The spam messages being sent out are also mainly harmless from what I've seen. They seem to be using the spam to drive traffic to various web sites, but there hasn't been a virus in any that I've seen.

To keep this from happening or happening again the best thing to do is to use a strong password and make the hint something that only you will know. A strong password is soemthing that won't be found in the dictionary. If it's a regular word, it isn't strong. You should use a combination of letters and numbers and it is a good idea to mix their placement. For example, put some at the beginning and some at the end.

If your account has been hacked, it is very very important that you change your password immediately. The spammers will still have it and they will do this to you again.

It's also a good idea to back up your contacts once you get them back or better yet before this happens. Hotmail allows you to do this very quickly and easily. Log in to Hotmail and click on the 'contact list' link. When the list comes up, click the 'manage' link near the top and choose 'export.'


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Optimizing MySQL Databases
You can quickly optimize an entire MySQL database using the mysqlcheck command. To accomplish this you need only invoke the -o flag. For instance a command I use as a cron job is:

mysqlcheck -o -A

This command, if run as root, will optimize all the tables across all databases.
(more) The optimize command in mysql is similar to defragging a hard drive. It can speed up operations by putting things in order, and performing other maintenance operations on the tables.
It should be noted that running this command can use a lot of system resources and may even start a server thrashing. It is not necessary to run the command too often either. I usually set the cron job to run no more than every few days even on a very active database server.
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