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Stupid site hacked

matt — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:02:03 +0000

So it looks like some bot managed to guess my FTP password and installed a malware script on to my wordpress files. This in turn caused Google to report this site as distributing malware and block it (at least in Chrome).

I’m 99% certain it was a bot, since I’ve seen the *exact* same hack done on a Drupal site that I did for work.

I’ve changed everything… hopefully this won’t happen again.

I think this is from submitting the Python Extensions post to reddit. It had a good deal of spam comments blocked.

What to do?

matt — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:53:57 +0000

I’m a little up in arms about what to do with this site. I barely program any more in my free time. I want to do stuff, but I lack motivation. I have about 20 unfinished posts. By the time I get through, I don’t care to re-read or add the links I want to reference.

I’m also a little worried about WordPress. I don’t like it and I want to ditch it. However, I have a bunch of posts that get me some attention from Google. Is there a way to export my posts to static files?

On a more positive note, I got to use Django for a project at work. It’s an excellent product. Anyone developing webapps should try it, at least once. I might want to convert my site to Django CMS… dunno yet.

Site Crawler Chronicles, Part 4: I might be dumb

matt — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:08:00 +0000

Turns out urljoin() wasn’t behaving badly, I just supplied it a lousy URL. Turns out after running urlopen, the file-like object that is returned has two additional methods, one of them giving the true URL (i.e. after redirects). So far, that’s seems to have fixed the issue.

Hopefully I’ll have a release soon, but I still gotta work out some bugs.

Almost forgot

matt — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:05:24 +0000

I need to start updating this site a bit more. If you’ve ever visited this site around December then you might have noticed that my site’s anniversary is Dec. 4th. Also, you might have noticed that I almost always forget to mention it.

So, this is 3 months late, but my site turned 12 on Dec 4th 2009. If we count this site and Sloatworks combined (and I do) and also ignore the 3 months of downtime I had in 2007, then I’ve had a web presence longer than everyone’s favorite giant corporation, Google.

They are only slightly more successful. :P

Being lazy

matt — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:55:52 +0000

I’ve been slacking in my updates. I need to get some content up. I don’t want to lose my visitor. Hi MKR!

Oh no, Memories!

matt — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:06:14 +0000

I’ve been working with haXe at work doing some Flash testing. It’s a pretty handy little tool. But something about it brings back some not-fun memories…

There was a time when I was collaborating on an IRC client with a few other people. We had a particularly difficult time getting what we wanted out of the standard Windows control set. So we had to make custom controls. Subclassing wasn’t good enough and Owner-Drawing never worked out as well as we wanted. So we made, 1) a custom Listbox, 2) a custom text control for rendering IRC text, and at one-point, there was 3) a custom menubar. There were going to be others… a custom Tab Control, a custom Toolbar, tooltip, and probably a button and progress bar and a few others that I’m forgetting.

Does that seem ridiculous? It should. Making custom controls is a lot of work. So why does haXe remind me of this? Basically, unless I decide to use Flex or another 3rd party lib, there is no UI api. Everything has to be custom.

Maybe this is why I’ve stayed away from Flash since version 4.0? If I never had to code a custom control again, I’d be a very happy man.

WordPress Installed

matt — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:59:14 +0000

Working on getting this thing up and running…