No related entries

Here it is – my first book. Woot! All the dedicated copies on the premiere sold in like half an hour and I felt a bit stupid and definitely out of place while giving autographs. Got my second interview for the day in couple of hours. It’s really funny, as it makes me feel kind of proud. Public reactions are deeply controversial, but then again, you can’t love a book, that denies your reasons, your role models, your way of thinking and your very existence, can you?

No related entries

… needs to sit down on his butt.

No, really. Taking each and every possible chance to work on your public image by any means necessary (to be read as: any social services, that are at hand should be exploied to their limits) is in fact shallow and obvious. Are you some kind of a show puppet? If you are not, you might consider a bit different approach, because dropping popularity proves this one is not working quite well for you.

I myself hardly give a shit about you, your political beliefs and general mumble jumble you are known for. But problem for me is, it is getting nearly impossible to ignore you, because you seem to pop everywhere I turn. Be it on TV, on the general media or even on YouTube. We all know media is king and your advisors know it even better, but this is starting to cause slight pain in the ass.

Do I give a fuck about you eating chicken wings with some redneck deep down south? No, sir. Do I give a fuck about you playing basketball with your pets in the White House backyard? No, sir. Do I give a shit about you trying to be “the different” president? Hell no, sir.

I don’t need pathetic speeches, political crap and “America equals world” statements. And I certainly don’t need you to be in my house, my office or everywhere I go 24/7. And I put my balls on it, I’m not the only one.

No related entries

Remember that little book of mine I was talking about sometime ago? Good news is it’s being printed as I type and it’s premiere will most probably be on February 2nd. Also known as “the hookers and pimps day” in Bulgaria lol.

In the meantime I decided to do something quite unusual. Unusual because I dropped 3D and video production more than 10 years ago and went web. Nevertheless, I decided to make a video. An EVE video. An epic EVE video. Took me 40 days and most of the time was spent “shooting” scenes. Post production itself took about 15 hours or so. Final result is satisfactory for something I haven’t done for a very long time. But nothing is perfect and I almost fainted when I saw a very annoying glitch right in the beginning. It’s caused by simple overlooking and even that it won’t be obvious to the majority of watchers, it’s still inadmissable – planet scene fade is just a second shorter and that causes slight bump when next scene kicks in. Problem is one can’t just replace video on YouTube. And I’m not changing it now, when its popularity surprisingly exploded.

I will be doing more videos in my free time (unless someone hires me to do it for money) when I take enough new good scenes, so watch my YouTube channel. Also watch my Vimeo channel, where all YouTube videos will be doubled. Why is that? Simply – because there are “legal” issues on YouTube.

Aight, enough talking, where is teh video?! Oh well, here it is. I chose not to embed it, so you can watch it in it’s full resolution.

Clicky to watchy mah spaceships pew pew video

“Anyway thanks for introducing me to Kasabian, I’ve got their most recent album (after watching this vid) and it’s genius. Cheers.”

Now, dear YouTube… I know copyrights are a bitch. And I know you’ve been persuaded by publishers to enforce certain fail actions (such as muting a video). But check this out. Do you (all) really believe I am going to license a specific track just to put it in my just-for-fun video, when I do actually own a legal copy of the same album? This is ridiculous! Especially when you take into consideration the simple fact this video (and all other videos sporting a music track) does indeed boost sales! Check out quote in the blue square. That’s a real person, not bullshit I pull out of my ass. So, there you go – 13 bucks down your pocket. And I put my balls on this – he’s not the only one. Welcome to the new millennium btw, seems like your are still stuck in the early 90’s. Well, maybe it’s about time to move the fuck on and adopt a brand new paradigm?

p.s. Sony, dudes, your Vegas Pro is amazing! Even that I won’t be paying nearly 600 quid for shits and giggles anytime soon…

No related entries

Magis Chair One is the most uncomfortable piece of furniture I’ve ever laid my behind on. And not even the cushions help it feel a bit better. Being made of metal also impacts other aspects of its usability – one has to put significant effort to move the damn thing just a few centimeters to the side. I believe it would have been much better if it was made of plastic. It’s not something I’d put in my living room and feel proud of anyway. If I’m about to spend €275 a piece, I’d rather go for an Eames DSR.

No related entries

What the exploit does, is alter your posts, adding random hidden containers, including links to various sites.

As far as I understand it, it tries to trick Pagerank and help SEO-ing those sites. Containers are randomly generated and placed at random spots within post content. Most commonly you will find them at the bottom, but also amid lists, paragraphs and everything else. They generally look like this:

<p style="display:none"><a href="http://lavamp3.com/buy_mp3_album1609846/N-P-G-/Gold-nigga.html">N.P.G. Gold nigga download</a></p>

<div style="display:none"><a href="http://johnquiggin.com?sweat">sweat.mp3</a></div>

<p style="display:none"><a href="http://lavamp3.com/buy_mp3_album2430365/Rex-Stout/Nw-46-A-Family-Affair.html">buy Nw 46 - A Family Affair mp3 album</a></p>

But it does not only affect post contents, it does alter post dates, which results in posts being rearranged and some of them being scheduled for publishing in the next weeks or month. And that’s how you will know you’ve been hit. As soon as you see your front page posts shuffled, you should know you are pwned.

But that’s not the worst part yet. You will soon find out the inevitable – you need to go through all your posts and clean up injected code by hand. Unless, of course, you can come up with some ingenious tool, that does it for you. I’ve got totally frustrated having to clean like 40 posts, so I can’t even imagine the amount of fury one will develop if they need to go through a couple hundred. Don’t even want to think thousand or more. But, hey, there is good news too – at least it seems it does not affect drafts.

So what should you do? First of all – see if you have got a recent database backup. Depending on the number of your posts restoring it may save you hours or days. Even at the cost of few recent posts and comments lost, it’s still worth it.

1. Change your MySQL database password to something brute-force resistant – use special characters, capital letters and numbers and make it at least 8 characters long. Do it now!
2. Change your admin password to something equally complex just in case.
3. If there are scheduled posts, reset them to draft so they won’t get published in the meantime.
4. If you don’t have a recent database backup, either dump your database and find an automated way to clean up every segment containing display:none (I think Dreamweaver’s advanced search and replace abilities might be used for that task, but haven’t tried it), or start cleaning it yourself post by post.
5. Once you clean the mess up make sure to check on shuffled post dates. Unfortunately, you can’t revert to original dates, so you will have to improvise here.

Good luck.

No related entries

Behind this awkward name lies a great site. Simple, good looking, easy to comprehend and navigate. I particularly like the soothing tones. The only problem, as I said, is the name. Guys, I’m sorry to say that, but have you ever thought about how difficult it is to spell it or type it seamlessly? I assume those are your names and I don’t want to sound like a dick at all or give the wrong impression I’m actually making fun of these. But I know how frustrating it is when foreigners misspell your name. And was just thinking if you are having that problem or not.

No related entries

But it seems Rose City and Poco Systems forgot to agree on implementing a core feature. You just can’t import your Courier boxes in Poco. I would have laughed if it wasn’t ridiculous.

Anyway, I’ve downloaded the trial version and will give it a spin. Post will be updated on-the-fly.

Update 1: When cyrillic e-mail is sent by UTF incapable client (such as Courier), there are encoding problems in notification pane and tabs, while it displays correctly in view pane. When sent by Poco, the same email would display correctly in notification pane and tabs, but incorrectly in view pane.

Update 2: There are also problems with rich-text interpretation. About 80% of HTML emails I receive are shown simply as plain text, including HTML syntax. That makes it impossible to read the content. And so far, I haven’t found a way to switch to a plain text display or something that will strip HTML code. The only solution is to view it in browser, which is not an option for a busy daily routine.

Conclusion: It is an improvement over Courier, yes, but not what one would expect for their money.

No related entries