Recently a personal web site of a friend of mine was hacked by Mr.Moro the Moroccan Hacker. He had a cheeky message up on the site, which was then indexed by Google. It took Google a couple of days to reindex his front page. You would think that I would be personally very angry with Mr.Moro, but you would be incorrect. Mr.Moro was the first step in the solution.
Upgrades to WordPress are important to keep hackers from destroying your site and your index status on Google Search. After upgrading to WordPress 3.5 there were some preexisting files that should also be deleted. These now unused files can be hijacked by hackers to damage your site. It is best to delete or move these files from your WP directories.
Iovei I thought “What the Hay?”. I booted my dual boot machine with Xubuntu 12.04 and all was peachy. Tried a large update with Update manager, then powered down as normal. The next time I boot up my mouse was dead and there was no connectivity to the internet! What to do? At least I could get the session started, as normal but sans mouse. I plugged in a USB mouse and it auto detected. Back to Update Manager, which then did a “Partial Update”. This fixed itself, and now all is back to normal.
It seems that the WordPress “Incoming Links” is a good feature to display but it is not working properly for me. In doing my research on Incoming Links I found the correct URL from Google, but this contains mostly Pharma Hack links and therefore highly undesirable. In contrast when I go to Google directly I get sites that link to my site, or the proper Incoming Links. I cannot, however, figure out a URL that will give me the correct RSS to input into WordPress.
The correct URL I should use for Incoming Links would seem to be https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link:http://www.dontai.com/wp/&tbm=blg&output=rss
Old machinery is ugly, strongly made of metal, is serviceable and lasts a long time. This is the case of my Viking Auto dryer, made by the T. Eaton Company (long defunct), model no. EDX22RW1181. This dryer came with the house and has been working pretty well until recently. Ten years ago or so it stopped heating, so I took it apart and fixed the broken heating wire. Now it runs but the heat shuts off after about 20 minutes, so our clothing takes 3 hrs to dry. Why did I wait this long to repair the dryer? Because others in the house did not tell me of the problem until recently. Now that I cleaned out all the lint from 10 years it should run well again.
The web is said to be about free access, and I certainly agree. When China’s Great Firewall entered a more rigorous phase, and Google decided to leave China, some said that free access to information on the internet was a basic human right, I disagreed. Still, here in Toronto, Canada I do appreciate open internet access. There are limits, however, when certain people take advantage of your hospitality. People try to scrape your site to use for their purposes, they try to break in and use your site to launch their own malicious doings, they try to spam you so that your site’s comments increase their link and trackback stats. There are all kinds of schemes that cost the site owner bandwidth, and eventually money. The site owner is forced to increase his level of service from his ISP (or get kicked off of his shared service), or move to another ISP. This is not a zero sum issue: The site owner loses financially.
Procrastinate I did, and for a long time, but I bit the bullet today and upgraded my Drupal install. I had known that this was required a long time ago, as I had a suspicion that bots were attacking it. I do hate bots that attack me. It went well, all without drama. It was a minor upgrade.
Automonous Bot: Arduino, Ardumoto board, and the Dagu Magician Chassis
Late am I with this posting, but life gets in the way and takes over. The Little Weed wanted to delve into robotics, so we bought an Arduino Uno and the Dagu Magician Chassis. This chassis is a robot platform for a three wheeled vehicle, complete with two wheels and two motors, a single ball caster, and all the nuts and bolts to put it together. Programming of the robot is done with the Arduino IDE or in Eclipse. This posting steps you through our experience putting together this robot platform.
Busy I have been recently, with not much time for my blog, but it was all for a good cause. My internet service provider (ISP) informed me that I was taking up too much CPU time on their shared service and banned me. I am a good guy and generally follow the rules, so getting banned is out of character. After a frantic email they restored my account so that I could figure out what happened. I truly am a “less is more” type of guy, and that includes IT resources, and my online sites are pretty consistent, so a propensity of new content was not the issue. Eventually I took some steps to rein in the numerous bots that were scraping and doing whatever to my site, wasting my CPU usage on my tab, and eventually getting me banned. If your site is suffering the same fate, you may glean some hints and tips for reducing your CPU usage.
Ever since I started this blog I have been wanting the ability to write in Chinese. Every time I did WordPress would dutifully save the content but would then replace my characters with rectangles. Well, now I think I solved the problem: UTF8 encoding. As roundabout as life is, I solved my Chinese input problem while trying to track down the remnants of the Pharma Hack injection.
