That wail of despair you heard yesterday morning was the sound of geeks all over the country discovering that the latest update to Norton Anti-Virus was falsely identifying their TiddlyWiki files as containing the W32.Feebs virus and immediately deleting them. Argh!

TiddlyWiki is a notetaking program that takes the form of a .html file, so you don’t have to install it; you just open it in whatever browser you like (it plays best with Firefox but works okay with others too). I use it so that I can shuttle my notes back and forth between my own Mac laptop and my office’s Windows computer. I keep my TiddlyWiki file on a USB stick and move it from work computer to laptop as needed.

There are other possible ways of doing this, but as I don’t have admin privs on my work box, and our IT department is too overworked to have time to check out and install software I want to try out, I have to go with what will run from a USB stick. This lets me take my laptop into meetings and access my notes, take meeting notes on my laptop and access them later on my work computer, work on organizing and updating my notes on my laptop during the train ride to or from work, cut and paste info from my work email into my notes, and so on.

I worked on my work notes this morning on the way to work, as it happens. Fortunately I had not forgotten to drag a copy of my notes onto my laptop’s hard drive this morning before moving the stick to my work box, or I would be much more bummed right now than I am. Apparently we installed the Norton update sometime last night, because when I plugged my stick into my work box and opened up its window, my notes file vaporized a few seconds later, right before my eyes.

I understand Norton has quickly issued an updated update that corrects the problem. Hopefully we’ll get that installed here very soon.