ben.parmeter

Short post today.  How many blogs does it take to install a light bulb?  On second thought, no light bulb jokes today.

Just the other day, I noticed that our front porch light had burned out, again.  In a rare burst of efficiency I decide to replace this burned out bulb as well as another bulb in our hallway that had recently burned out.  Our hallway light, unlike our porch light, is a compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) which is part of our general plan to replace all of our light bulbs in the house with these energy savers.  I had always assumed these bulbs would last much longer than standard bulbs – I guess I’ll learn to make those kinds of assumptions in the future.

My front porch fixture contains a light sensor which slowly turns on the porch light automatically, at night, and is supposed to turn it off during the day.  Unfortunately, the way CFL’s are designed, with a ballast that alternates current through the fluorescent gases inside, it doesn’t take well to the sensor mechanisms.  Any CFL bulb I’ve attempted to install flickers worse than a strobe light at a rave.  So I continue to stock the old filament style light bulbs for the porch.

All this light bulb installing got me to thinking.  Light technology really hasn’t improved much over the last 200 years.  I mean, we’re basically using the same method of passing enough electricity through a filament, until it heats up enough to emit light.  Come on folks, this is just a couple of steps away from candle technology!  We can do better.

Maybe we can do better with LED technology in the future.  I’m not holding my breath.

Say it ain’t so Internet!!  I’ve been nothing but good to you.  But you’ve stabbed me in the back.  You’ve done me wrong.  I feel so violated.  It’s as if my house has been robbed.  You’ve taken my security from me.  

It all started yesterday when my friend Erik called me up at work.  He said he had just installed Chrome (an excellent browser from Google by the way) and had tried to surf to my site.  Unfortunately he was greeted with the message “Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer!”  

Apparently, my site was attempting to redirect his browser to some site in the Netherlands where no doubt it would unleash hordes of viruses and porn onto the unsuspecting user.  Well, I’m not sure it is actually in the Netherlands, but that is where the European hub is and where it seems lots of bad activity originates from.  Why was my site attempting to do this??  I was compromised.  After closer inspection, I found that the index.php file on my blog was appended with some really suspicious looking code.  In fact, all of the index.php files on the entire site in every folder were appended with the same code.  It was a precompiled piece of javascript which obfuscates the actual intent such that even the site owner doesn’t recognize it as malicious.  It was a bit tough to find, but once I found it I was able to do a little research.  Turns out it’s called an iframe attack (inline frame), which will launch in a frame, redirect to another site and if things go right for them, install malware on your PC.  Sneaky.  

However, what I don’t know is how in the world this little virus/script thing was installed on our beloved site.  There is a possibility that my username and password has been compromised, but I’m not so sure that is likely.  I think it’s more likely that a old, outdated, highly vulnerable script was probably compromised to allow them to run their own scripts on the site.  I’m looking at you PMWiki.  

So, I’ve spent a good portion of the day today, shoring up the security on the site.  Thanks to the technical support at StartLogic, they have removed the virus and stopped the spread.  That’s given me a chance to remove my unused/older scripts from the site, install htaccess files in critical directories, removed admin users, change passwords, and install security scripts.  I’m hoping that this will stave off any future attacks on the site.  Fingers crossed.

The jig is up. I got the following note from YouTube today:

Video Disabled

A copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in your video What’s Inside: Continuous Spray Bottle. The audio content identified in your video is Crimewave by Crystal Castles vs. Health. We regret to inform you that your video has been blocked from playback due to a music rights issue.

Replace Your Audio with AudioSwap

Don’t worry, we have plenty of music available for your use. Please visit our AudioSwap library to learn how you can easily replace the audio in your video with any track from our growing library of fully licensed songs.

Other Options

If you think there’s been a mistake, or you have other questions, please visit the Copyright Notice page in your account.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Content Identification Team

It seems a big corporate recording company doesn’t like people using their copyrighted material in our personal YouTube videos. Even if those videos were only viewed a total of 50 times by probably only a handful of unique visitors. Well, big recording company, I’m sorry – truly. I should have gotten your permission first. I suppose there was some blatant copyright infringement here, but isn’t it good marketing in the end? Please, please don’t sue.

Oh well, I’ve swapped out the audio with some creative commons licensed music from NIN. All is right with the world again.

That’s right folks, I now have the ability to write posts on the go. I just downloaded the WordPress app for my shiny new iPhone last night which is going to allow me to log into my sites backend interface to post stories and updates whenever the whim strikes me. Look out Internet, I’m mobile now.

Well folks, just so you know, I haven’t just been sitting on my hands lately. I have been working on the website. I did a bunch of exhaustive research on free picture gallery software to use on this website. I was motivated by the few sporadic pictures that I get from my sister through e-mail. I’d sure like her to be able to post pictures (easily) to the site so that everyone could see them. The dilemma is, unfortunately, that there just is no simple gallery software out there for your own website. I honestly tried a bunch – gave them the a serious shot. I currently have four installed and none of them cut the mustard (whatever that means). I tried Gallery 2.0, Coppermine, Singapore, PHPGraphy, and Gallerific. All of them had their good points, but universally they suck at user-friendliness. They’re downright limited.

So, sis, I think I’m finally going to throw in the towel and say, let’s use Flickr. It’s fast, easy and best of all free (there are limits). We can link directly to your galleries from the website and I don’t have to worry about broken databases, site outages, code atrophy, or whatever else plagues this site.

So there we go. With that said, I’m going to switch to using a built-in gallery in wordpress and for everything else, we’ll switch to Flickr. If I have time this week, I’ll post some pictures from Suzy and I in Yosemite last weekend.

Muwah.

Another techie post…

Bad News: Gallery is broken again. I know, you are totally frustrated by it, right? Honestly, why does this keep happening? I’ve reached my wits end with this software and it may be time to ditch it for something more robust and simple to use. Is there anything else out there? If you have any ideas internet, let me know. In the meantime, sorry about the busted gallery.

Good News: I’ve been having difficulty with Bittorrent ever since I installed DD-WRT (v23 SP2) on my Linksys Wireless Router. For some strange reason, every time I run Bittorrent, Suzy’s wireless connection on her laptop slows to a crawl and eventually stops working entirely. This has severely hampered my downloading habits – which for me has been pretty painful. Initially I had searched the internets for a solution, but came up with nothing. After that first attempt, I gave up and just stopped using Bittorrent altogether. Yesterday, I decided to give the debug effort another shot and discovered a forum post which pointed to a potential fix. They suggested turning off the DHT (Distributed Hash Tables) in the client application which potentially can overload the router. Sure enough, that was the trick. After disabling the DHT, we’re back in business and I’m currently ratcheting up a my ratios again. Woot!

This is a nerdy tech post. You have been warned.

Those of you who read this blog (all two of you) may remember a previous post where I talked about setting up a RAID array under Ubuntu. My intended purpose was to store all of my pictures, movies and music on a independent set of disks as a backup. In case my main OS HD failed, I’d have a mirrored backup on standby. And it paid off! Just months after I implemented this, my main OS HD failed and I lost everything on that drive. Luckily, I had my RAID backup which had everything conveniently backed up. I simply bought a new hard drive, re-installed the OS and restored the data from my RAID array. Needless to say, I’m sold on RAID backups. This solved my personal backup needs, but it became evident that my wife also needed a solution when her iPod hard drive got wiped and her music collection disappeared (thought we found a backup on her laptop HD). Purchasing a NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution was expensive and pretty much out of my league. Until now…

After doing some internet searches, I discovered FreeNAS. I guess I should have known that there would already be a perfect solution in the open source community. But this software is truly phenomenal. It’s polished, simple, and perfect for what I need. Folks, this thing is open source software based on FreeBSD (an open source OS), and it all fits on a 32MB USB Flash Drive.

Lets back up for a moment, what is FreeNAS exactly? It basically provides you with all the software you need to setup a fully featured network attached storage system. All you really need to do is supply the hardware. This means you can take that old Pentium III system sitting in your closet, and turn it into a fast, powerful home server. It can serve up movies, music and pictures to your laptop, desktop, WMA, XBOX, or Media PC. No need for a keyboard, mouse or monitor. All you need is a network cable and power to the system and this thing can sit anywhere in your house.

The list of features on this is mind boggling. RAID0/1/5, JBOD, SMB/CIFS, FTP, uPNP, RSYNC, and on and on… The web user interface (featured as my graphic above) is incredibly slick and easy to use. I literally had this thing setup and running in under 5 minutes. Seriously. It installs just that fast. It’s the perfect use for my tiny Intel D201GLY board, which has a built-in CPU and runs completely silent (no fans).

This experiment wasn’t without it’s issues. When I started, I was using a Promise 4-Port SATA card, which after extensive testing I discovered was the source of my problems. Using this card exhibited some really unstable behavior, especially under heavy network loads. I finally decided that I didn’t really need four ports for my little home project and removed the card. And I’m happy to say that it works flawlessly with the two onboard SATA ports.

All I need to do now is find a case for this thing and put it up on the bookshelf. I have to say that I’m super happy with this project and I hope to put it to full-time use soon.

Until next time…

If you’ve looked over at the Gallery page, then you have likely noticed that my gallery thumbnails are totally busted. I’m currently in the process of transitioning my website from one server to another. Same hosting company, just an “upgrade” to the service. Apparently it has wreaked havoc on my gallery application – so please be patient while I attempt to “fix” this issue.

W/Love – The Admin.

UPDATE 1/28/2008: The system is up! I finally had some time to contact the StartLogic folks last night and we’re back in business. The gallery link is back and in working order.

I’ve been given some feedback recently that the content of my site is too heavily focused on tech. You know, nerdy subjects. I admit it, that 90% of my material is geek fodder. And I just want to say, “deal with it”. I write about stuff that interests me and that just so happens to be computer stuff. I hope that I’m not alienating anyone by saying this, but I will most likely continue to write about this stuff. (Editors Note: I said the word “stuff” three damn times in that paragraph – apparently my vocab sucks too)

Maybe this is a testament to my personality, or perhaps lack there-of. This behavior of mine extends into my social face to face interactions as well. I am very conscious of this behavior, and when I meet someone for the first time it’s a lot easier for me to break the ice by talking tech. There it is. I’m socially retarded. The jig is up. Please forgive me. Will you still continue to be my friend?

Anyway, I’ll try not to be so droll and boring in the future with those kinds of posts. It’s just that interesting, non-tech content is hard for me.

Over-and-out.

My employer sent out a mass e-mail today warning against posting my personal photos online, especially those personal photos featuring my own face. Apparently, there is some danger of this particular search engine company violating my privacy, by mapping my face in 3D and identifying it in other photos floating in cyberspace. Astounding. And remarkable mind you. Shocked, I immediately informed my friend Dave about this site that was allegedly violating my privacy. He apparently already knew about this and in fact trumped my news by showing me that Google has a similar search technology! Does any one else find this intensely 1984-esque creepy?! I haven’t yet figured out how this violates my privacy, but I can see it eliminating my anonymity online. But gosh, I already kinda did that by creating this blog. Am I missing something, should I be worried? Or is this just big brother trying to keep me living in fear? In the meantime, I’ll be adding more deadbolts to my front door, canceling all my credit cards and bank accounts.