Posted August 5th, 2010, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Technology| WordPress
Badass. Just looked at his site and the Footer of the site says:
Copyright © 2010 Dr. Dre “Detox” – The most anticipated Hip Hop album ever. Running on WordPress | Theme developed by rsuog.
Cool. WordPress is big.
Permalink - Leave a Comment (0)
Posted August 5th, 2010, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc
It was really weird for me to find out that in fact, a lot of the beats from the early N.W.A. records were the work of, if not entirely, at least partially DJ Yella, who is mentioned often on those records verbally (by the rappers), but not often by enthusiasts of music from that era.
I had always bought into the mythology of Dr Dre. Not accurate apparently.
So what happened to Yella? He has a website but it’s not even done (but I can relate)! WTF! Hey, Yella, I’ll help you finish up!
Anyway, he seems to be pushing his pornography lately, not so much his music, if he even still makes music. Who knows.
I don’t care if he doesn’t. The early NWA records were important for the evolution of modern music.
Thanks, DJ Yella, for all the bad-ass shit you did! You changed my life!
Permalink - Leave a Comment (0)
Posted June 21st, 2010, in: 1| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Technology| Videos| WordPress
From the WP Dev Blog, Matt Mullenweg giving his ‘State of the Word’ presentation. Very cool. I’m really excited about where WordPress is going.
Permalink - Leave a Comment (0)
Posted May 9th, 2010, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc
This is the biggest spider I’ve ever seen in Northern California. It is somewhere between brown and gray. The tips of its legs are a lighter color – almost orange. It appears to only have two eyes. It’s legs are a little hairy. It’s abdomen is not hairy as much as velvety or felt-like. It has the basic body-shape of a classic ‘tarantula,’ but I have no idea what it is.
Do you know what this thing is? Did you find a similar one? If so, please comment.
It’s frustrating that google results for searches related to this totally fail. There seems to be no comprehensive online resource for identifying bugs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to identify bugs with the internet and gotten nowhere. So far, it just can’t be done I guess.
Permalink - Leave a Comment (1)
Posted April 28th, 2010, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Videos
I recently bought two shirts at a thrift store that were purple and covered with applique. When describing them to a friend over the phone, my friend announced that they must be from a member of the Red Hat Society, since one of the themes of the Applique is Women in hats and all the the applique is red (red on purple). I had never heard of the Red Hat Society.
My friend couldn’t have been more right.
The Wikipedia says there are 70,000 members and 24,000 chapters… That means the average number of people per chapter is just under 3. Interesting. Also, I think this is brilliant and possibly even sad and evil marketing for the ‘official’ site/organization.
Permalink - Leave a Comment (0)
Posted April 26th, 2010, in: 1
If you’re in the middle of trying to remove the starter from a 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan (or Plymouth Voyager ’cause I think it’s the same car), and you can’t find the second bolt, the upper bolt, I have written this to help you. I googled around and couldn’t find the answer myself when I was stuck, so hopefully the next guy has it a little easier.
2001 Grand Caravan Starter Upper Bolt is Two-Sided
The upper bolt can be seen from above. It has a head on it that is actually another smaller screw, which is why it is hard to find. There are two electrical/ground cables being held on by a nut down there, right about where you think the second bolt should be. Take the nut and two cables off and then with a deep socket (i can’t remember if it was 15mm or 17mm), you can undo that entire thing. I was stuck on this for a few hours. I almost undid that other bolt that’s a motor-mount or something–the big one you can see right next to it. Glad I didn’t.
Hope this helps someone.
Permalink - Leave a Comment (0)
Posted April 26th, 2010, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc
Crunchy is Granola
I lady I know was given a mix tape by an old boyfriend and I asked her to make a copy of the mix for me because it contained a lot of interesting tracks.
For one, it contained this really obscure, super left-wing, hippy folk song from the Eighties about Nuclear Power. To me, it sounds like a very familiar if not cliche kind of ‘folk’ music: Celtic influences, singer-with-guitar, political message, Etc. The kind of thing you’d expect to hear at a protest rally.
“Power to kill!” it exclaims, in a ferocious, dare I say militant-sounding female register. It’s interesting to me how popular opinion about nuclear power has changed so much. I don’t mean that I think everyone loves it now, but it seems like we are a little more rational.
I can still remember how afraid we were of ‘nuclear’ anything in the Eighties. I was a little kid. But the movies at the time had really scary scenarios in them. War Games (1983) and Dreamscape (1984) come to mind.
Cover of a Metal Album I Owned When I was 13
The Russians were going to blow us up at any moment. Then we were going to blow them up automatically and the sky would turn red and there would be air raid sirens as the burning flesh is torn off our bodies by an impact blast just before everything is completely vaporized. All life on Earth would be destroyed except cockroaches. And if there was anyone anywhere that survived, they would be deformed because of the radiation. Or maybe some part of the species would retreat underground for hundreds or thousands of years. Anyway, I think we were scared, and possibly a little too scared.
This song seems to be a pretty good manifestation of that hysteria. And now that I just looked it up, I see that this song came out before the Chernobyl disaster! Wow.
I wonder what issues we are overly afraid of today. Privacy online? Genetic Engineering? I’m not saying I believe we should be less worried about anything per se, but it’s interesting to ponder. I guess we’ll know in thirty years.
Anyway, back to the song. The origin of the song was a mystery to me for a long time. I’ve googled, trying to figure it out a number of times. Finally, I have success!
The cover of the album. The Smiling Sun was designed in 1975 in Denmark. The logo soon was adopted by the anti-nuclear power movement. In 1977 the Smiling Sun was trademarked by Denmark's OOA (Organisation for Information on Nuclear Power), an anti-nuclear energy group.
I googled some of the lyrics I found a page crediting a Nigel Gray as writing the lyrics (as a poem only) (Lyrics Below). So I googled the name of the poem and the name of the poet and voila! I found awebpage for the album. Super crunchy!
It’s called “Nuclear Power No Thanks!!?”
So according to the track listing and credits, this must be the vocalist (see video):
Alison McMorland (what a voice! …the less flowery one)
Finally, here are the lyrics to the once mysterious song, a musical adaptation of a poem by Nigel Gray:
Sleep well my little son and dream
Time flows faster than a mountain stream
I wish you happiness in Spring
Come Autumn it may be too late to sing
While you sleep necessity drives
workers down uranium mines
repair men into the jaws of Hell
radiation through the human cell!
Sleep well my little girl and dream…
Madmen tear the earth apart
like werewolves at the human heart
The powerful crave more power still
Nuclear power; power to kill!
Sleep well my lover and dream…
Acid pond. Poisonous leak
Ships collide. Plutonium slick
Yellowcake waste. Lead-lined tomb
You’re not even safe in Mother’s womb!
Sleep well my unborn babe and dream
Time flows faster than a mountain stream
I wish you happiness in Spring
Come Autumn it may be too late…
Permalink - Leave a Comment (0)
Posted April 26th, 2010, in: Evil Robots| Scam Email Mashups| Spam and Scams
The following is an Email I got from Hanna Mae, mae@moonaconsulting.com. It looks like a phishing scam to me. It contains the following takedown notice. The picture is the face of Vivek Moona, who runs Moona Consulting in Amsterdam, according to LinkedIN. I don’t know if they are legit or not.
UDPATE: a few weeks after posting this, I got an email from the owner of the site this email claims to be from. He says they had nothing to do with these phishing scam emails. The message I got from him is at the bottom of this post.
Subject: Contract terms have been breached.
8 April, 2010
Hello,
It has come to our attention that you are republishing original content from our website on your website.
Your unauthorized use of original material from our website is in violation of copyrights owned by us.
If you do not immediately remove the copyrighted material from your website, and notify us in writing
that you have done so, we will have no choice but to pursue legal action against you.
We require the copyrighted material to be removed and written notice given that such has been removed,
by no later than May 1, 2010. Attached is a list of the copyrighted material that you are infriging on.
It contains links to the copyrighted material that you are using.
Sincerely,
CASE ID: 7714338
[Attached was a Word doc which says:]
(double click to view)
embedded you will find the law suit documents that
we wish to present in court.
Thank you
[It seems this is a phishing scam. They want me to launch an embedded app or something.]
[now here's the response I got to this post from the site's owner.]
Permalink - Leave a Comment (6)
Posted April 26th, 2010, in: 1| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Technology
I’ve decided to turn off the software I have running that automatically tweets to twitter every time I post something to my blog (I use Twitter Tools for WordPress). Twitter, in turn, notifies Facebook.
Having more of an automatic audience (facebook friends) makes me feel less like writing and publishing the things that are on my mind. I am shy.
So goodbye. (You can always subscribe to my email newsletter or to the rss feed if you want to know every time I post something)
-Andrew
Maybe what I will do instead is leave it so Twitter gets the blog updates, but Facebook doesn’t get updated by Twitter.
Permalink - Leave a Comment (0)
Posted April 15th, 2010, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Reviews & Thoughts About Products| Technology| WordPress
When I get asked for help with an attack on a WordPress site, it’s often on the same few hosting providers. And when it’s not, it’s usually a small, local hosting provider. When I have spoken to the staff of one of these hosting providers, about what seems to only occur in these few situations, they never take responsibility for having oddball server settings. And it’s not uncommon for them to actually blame their customers for using WordPress in the first place!
Some of the more popular Hosting Providers that seem to have more trouble than others with WordPress malware attacks in the past two years (in my experience) are Network Solutions and IX Web Hosting. And in general, hosting providers that have a lot of issues with malware affecting WordPress sites either
- Have screwy server settings that tempt developers to take risks with file permissions, or
- Have vulnerabilities that allow malware to sneak from one hosting account to another
As for some of the local, ma ‘n’ pa providers I’ve had problems with, I’m not going to hit them when they’re down by naming names. But let me just say this: Buying local isn’t necessarily a good idea when it comes to hosting. It’s often the worst thing you can do. You usually get crappy support, a high price, a non-standard product, and to make things even worse, you also often get a territorial ‘server guy’ who wants to blame any technical problems on the customer and not take responsibility for anything.
I can imagine being a hosting provider and not wanting to change how I do things just because a few of my customers want to run some weird PHP software they found somewhere. But WordPress is hardly obscure anymore. And although I could be wrong, it seems that the server settings required for a smooth, safe ride with WordPress are in line with “best practices” for hosting providers in general, since all the best and most popular hosting providers seem to run WordPress perfectly.
So in the ‘news,’ I guess on April 12th, 2010, someone (rshinsec) at Network Solutions announced that an attack on many of Network Solutions’ customers’ sites was actually caused by a “WordPress Vulnerability.” (Quote is actually from a WordPress.org page HERE, because according to the WordPress.org page, Network Solutions has since edited the announcement)”
“Beginning last week a WordPress vulnerability has been the target of attacks on multiple WordPress websites on hosting platforms around the web. We have a blog post with additional details about the vulnerability and how to secure your WordPress site.”
In fact, it was not a WordPress problem at all. So in response to some of the inaccurate anti-worpress blogosphere chatter caused by Network Solutions passing the buck like this, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress posted to the WordPress Development Blog, clearing some things up, as well as putting it like this:
“Summary: A web host had a crappy server configuration that allowed people on the same box to read each others’ configuration files, and some members of the “security” press have tried to turn this into a “WordPress vulnerability” story.”
Thank you Matt! We the people that use and love WordPress need to stand up for ourselves and demand what we deserve. We are not a fringe community anymore. WordPress is mainstream software and any hosting provider that has issues with it needs to check themselves!
Loading...