How to remove search2box.com malware

Short Version:
reinstall Firefox (no need to uninstall first)

Long version:
A friend recently asked me to remove some malware from his computer that was hijacking his Google search results.  He was using Firefox 4 on Windows XP and when he searched on Google the results would show up as normal, but when he clicked a link it would take him to search2box.com and show their "search results."

I scanned his computer with Microsoft Security Essentials and one other tool he had -- I can't remember what it was right now, but I will update this post when I find out -- and neither found a problem.  I checked to see if anything had modified his hosts file, nothing had.  I checked to see if anything changed his proxy settings, nothing had.  I asked a guy at work whose job is studying malware if he had heard of it and he said it looks like it might be the TDSS rootkit, so I grabbed TDSSKiller and that didn't find anything.

My friend also had Google Chrome installed, so I tried searching with it and it was unaffected.  After all the other efforts had failed I decided to reinstall Firefox to see if that would help and, sure enough, that seems to have fixed it.  It's not supposed to be that easy and that concerns me a little, so I'll post an update if anything changes.

Git merge fails with "fatal: git write-tree failed to write a tree"

I was trying to merge my dev branch back into master after converting several views in an ASP.Net MVC project from the WebForms engine to Razor and the merge failed saying, "fatal: git write-tree failed to write a tree."

I'm not exactly sure why it failed.  To git my files appeared to be renamed as I had created .cshtml files to replace the .aspx files, but I have renamed files in the past without this issue.  Telling git to use a different merge strategy using the following command fixed the issue for me:

git merge -s resolve dev

AHL Live video quality

The blog is (mostly) going to be where I share my solutions to interesting computer programming problems, so I wasn't expecting to post something about AHL Live on here, but I just saw something that made me cringe.  I did not meddle with the AHL Live portion of the screen capture below.  It is an unusually honest depiction of the quality of the service being advertised.  AHL hockey is high quality and fun, but AHL Live leaves a lot to be desired.

On the bright side, I used Gimp 2.7 to create the image and the MDI mode I have longed for since the mid to late nineties is so much nicer than the old SDI interface.  Thanks, Gimp team!