. verture [prik] net .

When you whisper Jennifer

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:59:53 +0100

From the comments on youtube:

Is this one of the sexiests tracks ever or what? Her voice turns me on, and i'm a straight girl

Jennifer Charles, need I say more?

How to buy tickets from irishrail.ie using Firefox

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:43:13 +0100

In case you are an annoyed non-Windows user of the Irish Rail website, here's a little guide on how to purchase tickets using Firefox.

Install the User-Agent extension and restart Firefox
Change the user-agent string to Internet Explorer 6.0
Make your reservation online
Notice how clicking 'Purchase' doesn't give you an error message?
Print the confirmation email
Bob's your uncle

Why am I writing this post?

I've been buying tickets from Irish Rail for the last two weekends. The first time around I tried three times to purchase the tickets online, but was met with this error screen every time I clicked the 'Purchase'-button at the end of my reservation.

I got curious. I was using the recommended software for the platform (Firefox 3.5.3 on Mac OS X), yet it still didn't work. Could Irish Rail really be checking the User-Agent string at the very last step of the purchasing process, to give me the error message?

Yes, dear reader, they do. I followed the above procedure and I could purchase the tickets. 2 things wrong here: 1) giving the error message after going through the reservation process, while already knowing that the browser is not supported at the beginning, seems pretty user-unfriendly and, 2) it's obviously not a browser issue, since I could buy the tickets, so why check for the user-agent string in the first place?

There are around a million other things wrong with Irish Rail's website, but they are covered better in this article by Paul Fitzsimons.

While their website might suck, I've had no problems with their real world service. It's actually quite good.

Rumba from Timbiqui in the style of Quantic

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:31:28 +0200

If anybody ever had any doubt about Will Holland's tireless effort to get involved in as many and as versatile music projects as possible, this should silence them:

The Sounds of VTech / Memoria de Justinho by Quantic and his Combo Barbaro

Quantic y su Combo Barbaro plays Memoria de Justinho, a rare Afro-Colombian treat.

Dear Mayer

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:22:27 +0200

Mayer Hawthorne plays Crawdaddy in Dublin on the 31st of October. I think you should come along.

My site got hacked

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:54:15 +0200

That statement is getting more and more common, and it's now the 2nd time my site has been the target of it. First time was 2 years ago, when the ftp on the server it was hosted was breached, and some industrious hacker injected code into a bunch of sites, to get links to some other sites. Dreamhost took a good beating on that occassion, and learned some valuable lessons.

Earlier in the week I was checking my Webmaster Tools Account and noticed that I had a lot of very strange incoming links all of a sudden:

I looked at a site search for my site:

That didn't look like posts I had written, in fact, they were full of gibberish. Here's a screenshot of the cache of one of them.

Here's what I managed to figure out about this case:

One file (config.inc.php) was modified to include the path to a file called sessions.inc.php. The modification date was not changed for the file, so it didn't look like it had been tampered with
sessions.inc.php was created on my server and contained some of the content on my site, which had been base64-encoded
Other hacked sites had a bunch of links to my site, with funny strings in the URL
The funny strings are also base64 encoded, and they seem to contain the actual content
going directly to the pages won't yeld anything, as the content will only show for GoogleBot

In most cases, having your site hacked comes from running a standard installation of one of the popular blog tools or CMS'es out there (Wordpress, I'm looking mainly at you). The recovery method is to clean your site, and update to the latest version of that tool, which usually has some security patch to apply. The issue in this case is, that I always have the latest version of my blogging tool, since I wrote the damn thing myself.

I'm not saying it's pretty, or a great piece of software, but I wrote it myself hoping that it would help me avoid being a victim of automated hacked attempts. This incident makes me curious, and I see a couple of possibilities as to how this happened: Either my attempts at being non-standard are part of the checks that an automated script looking for vulnerabilities can deal with or, somebody actually did this personally, after having found a possible vulnerability in a script of mine.

Obviously, there's a third option as well, that my homegrown CMS just isn't up to par on the security front. I should probably spend some time securing it after this event.

Liquid Stones

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:23:23 +0200

there was a stone on the beach
there was another stone as well
actually there were a lot of stones

static

by the break of the waves they met
on the tender shores of slight autumn
lively breeze on their crystalline surfaces

motion

by the bubbly saline surroundings
they found comfort in the tumbling
in the valleys they found safety

and lucidity

waves went out of their way
a physical anomaly
became meta normality

for a while

Yoyo, it's a theme

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:04:56 +0200

Bowie and friends, doing their free jazz thing. I do think the horn arrangements are pretty fantastic on this track, not to mention the ad libing and crazy sounds in the background.

You can also find it on my Year in Music mixtape for 2009.

I get scared in Sweden

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:57:10 +0200

I get scared like in Sweden.
It�s kinda empty, they are all drunk, everything works. If you stop at a stoplight and don�t turn your engine off, people come over to talk to you about it.
You go to the medicine cabinet and open it up, and there�ll be a little poster saying �In case of suicide call��
You turn on the TV there�s an ear operation.
These things scare me. New York, no.

What the web asks Google about

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:40:21 +0200

Au revoir Julie

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:47:59 +0200

The video is made of clips I took, while Lella was filming the fingerfilm dedicated to Julie.

Julie, all the best, take care, and I'll see you in Den Haag. Gros bisous! (:

DM Stith at Crawdaddy

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:13:50 +0200

I went to see DM Stith play Crawdaddy back in May, and having just received my D90 camera, I tried to take a video at the concert. I should've brought a tripod however, or shaken less on my hands that evening, and I should probably have practiced a bit on the manual focus as well, but at least the music is good! We enjoyed it.

It cuts off a little abruptly, as there's a 5 minute max length for video-clips with the camera.

You can download the track for free from the album profile on Last.fm

On a sidenote, As a child I used to play with the funny sound tubes they swing over their heads, forgot what they are called, anyone?

Breaking my drum

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:49:07 +0200

Sylvester

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Sun, 03 May 2009 19:29:57 +0200

Swedish genius

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:19:08 +0200

MOVITS! Fel del av g�rden from Axel S�derlund on Vimeo.

Franz Kafka International - Worlds most alienating airport

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:11:21 +0200

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport