admin on August 31, 2010 - 0 Comments
After spending a full day fixing sites, upgrading versions and changing passwords I woke up this morning to find another RSOD (Red Screen of Death) from Google on one of my websites and an email in my inbox warning me that my site had been found to be serving “malicious content”.
MediaTemple, the host I’ve been using for a few years now and have come to rely on their service, claimed the hacks have been through the WordPress blogging platform. In the defense of Matt Mullenweg and everyone working on WordPress I’m going to have to disagree. Several of the pages that I’ve had hacked haven’t been WordPress pages but the majority of the attacks have been malicious code placed into the top of .JS (javascript) files, more specifically jQuery and jQuery plugins. Only one of the attacks I’ve had to fix in recent days has been a MySQL injection attack, obviously due to an outdated version of WordPress used on the clients site, the rest have been JavaScript pages hacked.
I’ll post more as I find out more information but for now, this newest attack has been cleaned up and everything locked down again.
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admin on August 27, 2010 - 0 Comments
I was never much of a fan of the trackpad that comes built into most laptops. I am, however, a huge fan of my Wacom pen tablet. The only problem is I’ve never been able to get over the hurdle and use the Wacom table for anything more than photo and graphic editing.
All that has changed. Enter Apple’s newest toy, the Magic Trackpad.
Right off let me say, if you get a Magic Trackpad for your Mac and you don’t turn on the touch settings you’re going to be disappointed, hate the thing, and yearn for your old fashioned mouse right away. The hard click is annoying. Having to press down on the whole thing until you hear it audibly “click”. You need to turn on “Tap to click”, secondary tap, and set Three Fingers as “dragging” before you do anything else. Me, I also upped the tracking speed for when I’m coding but I turn it down when I’m doing photo editing or clipping out photos, that’s just my preference.
Once you do that all you need to do to click something is tap lightly on the trackpad. You don’t even need to push down hard enough to hear it click. Just tap lightly.
Want to double click? Tap twice.
Right click to open a contextual menu? Two finger tap.
And now for the Pièce de résistance, say you’re typing a blog post, like this one. There’s a section of a web page you’d like to cite in your post. Position your I-beam over the start of the paragraph you want to copy. Now, using 3 fingers, drag the I-beam until the paragraph is highlighted. Two finger tap, select copy. Go back to your page, two finger tap, paste. And you’re done!
So in case you missed it, using 3 fingers on your trackpad will let you navigate around a page that’s too large for your window. On a browser, it lets you select as if you were holding down shift and dragging.
Pretty cool.
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admin on August 27, 2010 - 0 Comments
Over the last few days we’ve had the highest temperatures we’ve had all year. Couple that with a late almond harvest due to our unusually cool winter and you’ve got the “perfect storm” for the world’s crappiest air.
Unfortunately I don’t think my current state of crapiness can be blamed on the air. I think I have a cold.
So what’s so special about getting a cold? Lots of people get colds all the time. This one is special because I have been lucky enough to dodge the bullet for 2 years.
That’s 2 years, at work, in the office, surrounded by people who don’t know better than to stay home when they’re sick. At home, surrounded by the wife and kids who bring the “illness du jour” home to share with the whole family. I’ve managed not to get sick with kids coughing in my face, wife breathing in my face while she’s sick, accidentally drinking from a cup the sick kid has, snuggling with the sick kids; all things you would expect to render you helpless to their germs and a sure thing to get sick.
So how did I do it? Well about 2 1/2 years ago Dane turned me on to Vitamin D. Yes, the same Vitamin D you get in fortified milk. Research is just now being done into Vitamin D and so far it appears to strengthen your immune system. That’s why if you look at your grocery store shelves you’ll notice everything now days is “Vitamin D Fortified” or “Now with Vitamin D”.
Unfortunately I stopped taking my normal regimen of 4000iu’s of Vitamin D everyday when I started working from home since I was able to spend 1-2 hours daily out in the sunshine where your skin naturally produces Vitamin D. This kept me safe until this month when the kids and wife went back to school and a busy work load has kept me inside, away from the sun.
Now I’m sick.
If you’re curious about Vitamin D you can find more information at vitamindcouncil.org. As for me, well I’m drinking lots of fluids and getting lots of rest.
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admin on August 25, 2010 - 0 Comments
Test? What test? THIS is a test? It doesn’t feel like a test. Well, OK. Maybe it is a test. I’m so confused. I guess this might be a test. If it is a test I should probably say something like, “hello world” so everyone knows it’s a test.
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You Said It, Bub