Think The Producers‘ “Springtime… in Germany” when reading the title, it might make slightly more sense… A friend of mine was recently posed a challenge by hir instructor in an introductory Java class. The challenge was (sic.) “I was recently writing a program to generate usernames from the first seven letters of a student’s last name and their first initial,
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So, I heard “Pinball Wizard” on the radio the other day and it reminded me of a parody (author unknown) called “UNIX Wizard…” While googling for the text for all of you, I also ran across this “UNIX Heirarchy,” which explains the difference between mere mortals and sucessive progress towards enlightenment.
I wanted to use Drupal to post pictures, much as LiveJournal can. However, I already have… an image gallery. And, while it is a good and wondrous thing to have the gallery integrated with Drupal, what I really wanted was to be able to nicely choose images mid-post, without having to do crazy things like write my own <IMG> tags.
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Recently a few people have asked me how to open DOCX files, which are created in Word 2007 / Office 2007. I have found 4 solutions so far: Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is perhaps the canonical solution. It won’t make new Office 2007 documents, but I haven’t tried doing that in the other solutions either.
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So, yesterday some of you may have noticed that sessrumnir.rootaction.net was down. Today you might notice that it’s back up. I bet you are wondering what happened. Or not. That’s ok, I’m going to give you the short version anyway. 🙂 The system experienced multiple concurrent physical failures. Specifically, the connector on one of the disk drives crumbled (not the
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Yes, it’s true. Khazad-dum (Mark IV) is dead. Some sort of hardware failure. I have a suspicion it’s motherboard damage, possibly brought on a by an ailing power supply. At least, that’s what killed the last one. The short version of the story is that I found some unrelated trouble with one of the new disks while trying to perform
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Very few things amuse me more than insignificant wannabes who think they can own my box for more than a few minutes. My system paged me last night about 5 minutes after some dork exploited a hole in Drupal 4.6.1 and started laying down tracks all over /tmp, /usr and /lib. Unfortunately for the snot-nosed little weasel, my machine is smarter than the average script kiddie and immediately detected something was amiss.
On the slightly sophisticated side, the attacker used chattr to try to make clean-up a bit more difficult for me, denying the removal, replacement or renaming of offending files. However, the idiot pulled down a rootkit that should have replaced a number of system utilities and didn’t even use it to cover tracks. What a loser.
Unfortunately for me, when such things happen, I need to run a full analysis to be sure they didn’t leave anything behind. Believe it or not, that is easier and takes less time than restoring from known-good backups. So, a few hours later of letting the machine do most of my dirty work and confirming key details by hand, and we’re back up, patched and running.
This makes Christmas Eve #2 that I woke in the morning to discover a nasty surprise on my server. In case there is any doubt as to how I feel about this, allow me to make it painfully clear: STAY OFF MY COMPUTER! Today’s incident wasn’t catastrophic, although it easily could have been. On 12/24/98, some dork rooted my server
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