Here is a video of Roger Alsing’s EvoLisa project evolving an image of the Mona Lisa using random polygons.

The video was made using Roger’s source code modified with Dan Bystrom’s FitnessCalculator written in assembler. The program was changed to output a frame whenever the image improves by 5%. The program was run for 16 hours to generate the 660 frames used in the video below. The final image uses 242 polygons (average 6.9 points per polygon) and is the 7,052,061th generation. It only took 48 seconds to generate the first half of this video and the remaining 16 hours to generate the second half.

I used VirtualDub to combine the frames into a video. The music clip is Company I from Philip Glass.

By the way, Vimeo kicks butt on YouTube – higher quality videos and a better interface for uploading/managing videos.

Over the holidays I was infected with multiple viruses. One them was Trojan.Vundo.GCY. It’s job is to download other viruses and malware. I had over a dozen files infected with various viruses causing popups and network slowdown.

I tried 6 or 7 anti-virus / anti-malware products and found they had abysmally low detection rates. The best only finding 30% of infected files. This included software from Symantec Online Security Scan, Eset Nod32 Online Scanner, BitDefender Free Edition, AVG Free Edition, Spyware Doctor from the Google Pack, Malware Byte’s Anti-Malware and Ad-Aware Free.

Perhaps using installed, retail versions would have given better results but I doubt it. All of the companies claim the free/online scanners use the same core engine and virus definitions as their retail products. I suspect this is true as it looks like these companies are competing on features like email integration, phishing protection and real-time scanning. I ran these scans from a fresh, uninfected install so its unlikely that any viruses were actively attempting to hide from a scan.

As a result, I won’t be purchasing anti-virus software in the near future. I will keep AVG Free for quick scanning of files I believe are already clean. That statement shows how little confidence I have in these scanners. Despite this I think they are still good for catching the older viruses propagating among completely unprotected machines.

I did find a useful website: VirusTotal.com lets you upload a file and scan it with almost 50 scanners. Here is an here is an example report). They also have a small utility you can install to get a right-click -> Send To target. You are limited to scanning one file at a time though can you can upload a zip archive to scan several. There are a number of similar websites, but VirusTotal appears to be the best.

My anti-virus/malware strategy:

• Use AVG Free for quick scanning of files I believe are already clean.
• Turn off real-time scanning – it’s not worth the performance hit for such low detection rates.
• Use VirusTotal for scanning suspicious files.
• Use Chrome and respect the malware warnings.

To recover from an infection:

• Unplug infected drive.
• Reinstall Windows on a new drive.
• Reattached infected drive.
• Install a virus/malware scanner. Run full/deep scan. Repeat a minimum of 3 times or until you stop finding infections.
• Copy data from old drive and reformat.

How do you prevent infections?