the-officialsurvey.com PopUp Removal

Are you getting pop-ups from a site called the-officialsurvey.com? So did I when I tested the adware software called WebCake.

the-officialsurvey.com tries to create the impression that a web site owner is running a survey as you can see in the screenshot to the right.

Since I'm the owner of freefixer.com this is in no way an official survey. If you go through with the survey, which I don't recommend,  they state that you will get a 500 SEK value gift. One of the gifts is an IKEA gift certificate, but surprise, they are temporarily out of stock. The other free gift that they do have in stock turns out to be free as in having to pay 35 SEK.

Anyway, in my case the-officialsurvey.com pop-ups started to appear after testing the WebCake adware. Please check out the removal instructions for WebCake.

Did removing WebCake stop the the-officialsurvey.com pop-ups? Please post a comment below to let me know.

WebCake Ads Removal Instructions

WebCake is a browser extension that shows ads in Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. In the screenshot to the right you see it showing a banner ad at the bottom of the page and a floating coupon ad to the right when browsing amazon.com.

If you see ads labeled "Webcake Ads" while browsing the Internet you have the WebCake software installed on your computer. You can also see it in Firefox's Add-ons tab and Chromes Extension tab as the two screenshots to the right shows.

You may also see files such as webcake.exe, WebCakeIEClient.dll, OptChrome.exe,  WebCakesetup.exe, WebCakeDesktop.exe and webcakedesktop.updater.exe running on your system or on the hard-drive.

How To Uninstall the WebCake Ads

Luckily it's easy to uninstall WebCake. On Windows, just open the Windows Start Menu -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove (or Programs & Features in Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8) and select Remove or Uninstall for WebCake. Done.

Please give me some feedback

Did this blog provide the information you were looking for? Please let me know so I can improve the blog post with any missing information.

How to view the current queries running in a MYSQL database

The SHOW PROCESSLIST mysql command will show the live queries in your database. This can be quite useful if you are troubleshooting a slow web application or if you are getting the "too many connections" error message and suspect that it is caused some inefficient query to the database.

The output from SHOW PROCESSLIST looks something like this:


| Id | User | Host | db | Command | Time | State | Info                                                                             | 43930645 | username | host:44495 | dbname | Query | 1906 | Locked | DELETE FROM Cache WHERE id LIKE '/file/%-34333/' |
| 43933139 | username | host:50412 | dbname | Query | 3041 | updating | DELETE FROM Cache WHERE id LIKE '/file/%-72655/' |

In most database applications that I've built queries finishes within a second. And in this case there are two queries that have been running for 1906 and 3041 seconds, which clearly indicates that something is wrong.

In my particular case the WHERE LIKE queries had to touch a large number of rows even though the id column was indexed. This happened because the majority of items in the Cache table began with "/file/". I reduced the number of rows the database had to take into account by storing the ids in reverse order and reversing the LIKE query.