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Archive for the ‘Administrative’ Category

Posted in Administrative by brian on October 9th, 2007

I have no idea how this is supposed to work. I guess I don’t get to pick the individual video, just a category like “Technology.” So, here goes…

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

…and it seems it does not (yet?) work…

XML-RPC, WordPress, and Dreamhost (No Comments)

Posted in Administrative by brian on June 5th, 2007

I just started using MarsEdit for writing posts. I tried it when I first set up the blog at the new address, but did not stick with it. I vaguely remember something slightly broken, but that may have been my inexperience with WordPress at the time. Anyway, there is a new version, which is what prompted me to try.

At first, the new version of MarsEdit did not work at all. It turned out (after some Googling) that this is because Dreamhost upgraded to a recent version of PHP, which has a known bug that breaks WordPress’s xmlrpc interface. The fix is simple and now all is well. This will be my first post with the new MarsEdit. Hopefully, the formatting turns out okay, giving me actual links instead of raw HTML codes.

In related news (well, semi-related–they both used to be owned by the same company, right?), a v3.0 release of NetNewsWire, the OS X RSS reader, is now available. It looks pretty slick, although I have yet to see any revolutionary changes from the previous 2.x version I was using.

Today in dirt-worshiping, granola-eating, tree-hugging news… (2 Comments)

Posted in ARGs, Administrative, Dear Diary, Portland by brian on May 6th, 2007

Today we watched An Inconvenient Truth for the first time. I actually bought the used DVD from Netflix last month for a few bucks, but just now got around to watching it. We are now, officially, on 100% renewable power. I signed us up for the PGE Renewable Future plan. This means our power bills will be slightly more, as our power will be coming from the semi-local Klondike II wind farm, but our power usage will be entirely from renewable resources. This also means that our power rate will be fixed until 2012. In theory, as fossil fuels become more scarce and prices rise for everyone else, ours will stay fixed. In practice, I guess we will see how that works out.

In related news, my web host (Dreamhost) is now carbon-neutral:

We’ve calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something….

It only took us three days to go from “Hey let’s do this” status to “Hey it’s done!” status. Three days and several thousand dollars, but that’s another story. You don’t have to be a tree-hugger to appreciate the value of renewable energy and you don’t have to charge a premium for your services to afford it, either.

More information is available at their blog post on the matter.

Hello from the new netninja.com (No Comments)

Posted in Administrative by brian on May 6th, 2007

This is a test post after dropping all existing netninja.com content and merging the netninja.org and netninja.com content into the same site. They now mirror each other (although the .com is still the preferred access domain.) At some point in the future, I expect web filters to drop netninja.com from their list of evil sites. I have no idea when this will be or if there is a way to expedite the process.

First Post! (4 Comments)

Posted in Administrative by brian on April 8th, 2007

Welcome to the inaugural post with the new blog setup!

I have been meaning to redo netninja.com for about a year now. Because of stuff I made available there a long, long time ago and never got rid of (namely: BO and BO2K plugins), every web filter declares it to be a mean, bad, nasty, evil hacker site. It even almost failed me from getting a job about 5 years ago because the HR department got scared. The current plan is to slowly migrate content from netninja.COM over to netninja.ORG. The good stuff moves. The “naughty” stuff does not. Eventually, the netninja.COM content is dumped and completely replaced with the .ORG, so that both sites mirror the exact same content.

For a long time, I was hesitant to choose any given framework for building the new site. I wanted to build it by hand because it gave me the most flexibility (and that is, basically, how I do most of my sites–using PHP templates to, effectively, present static content.) On the other hand, there are a number of blog and content management solutions that automatically take care of everything, none of which I really liked, until I looked at WordPress again. The latest version seems flexible enough, with powerful plugins, and a good caching plugin (for slashdotting/digging), and I think I can live with it.

As part of this migration, I am writing my blog posts over at netninja (using methods that I blatantly stole from Rich.) Don’t worry. Everything I post at netninja is automatically mirrored at LJ, and I still use LJ to read friends’ blogs so that I don’t miss out on any protected posts. I’m not one of those people who posts a lot of “private” stuff, but in the rare event I do need to (e.g. a new phone number, new mailing address, party invite, Wii friend code, etc.) I’ll just skip right over to LJ and post it with the proper friend permissions.

For Future Reference - MySpace (1 Comment)

Posted in Administrative by brian on April 8th, 2007

For future reference: the magic incantation to see who on MySpace is leeching your images

grep -i myspace.com access* | cut -d ' ' -f 11 | sed 's/"//g' | sed 's/&MyToken.*//' | sort -u

For future reference: the magic incantation to redirect those requests to a picture of a unicorn and a princess (reminiscent of Substitute’s “LOL-American Cheez” image, but including the text “H4cK3D Pr0pP4 BY Za M4D +T0LoLZ” because, ya know, any time someone changes a linked image on MySpace, the first reaction is “someone hacked my MySpace!”)

Rewrite Engine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} myspace.com RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/ms RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.jpg$ [OR] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.gif$ RewriteRule ^.*$ http://netninja.com/ms/unicorn.gif
Interpretation: Any image request from MySpace (excepting those pointing to the special “gated community” directory of /ms/) get redirected to the lame unicorn picture. Google will still index the images, so that people may still use them on their MySpace profile in the future. *evil grin* The few images I use on my own intentionally-convoluted MySpace profile get served up correctly.

Abbreviated list of URLs that were affected (basically, as many as I could pull from my logs and check before I got bored):

orly (and other birds):
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=112896984
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=147237753
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=81916786
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=91653995
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=49804837
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=77461154

Wendy Carlos Moog synth
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=125003992
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=35480690
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=107804129
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=169817253
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=72272494