Posted November 3rd, 2009, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Evil Robots| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Technology| WordPress

The site links to sites who are also under attack and when the bug is running correctly on those sites, the sites redirect the hits to the final destination,

which is http://www.zml.com/

I don’t know if zml.com knows this is happening.  I mean I suppose it’s possible that some unscrupulous SEO or Marketing guy promised them traffic and then resorted to this to get it.  I’m contacting them now to inform them of this uncool practice being committed on their behalf, and if they are not willing to cooperate on putting an end to it, I will have no choice but to give them some negative attention.

The process of extracting the bad links from the content was long and hard since the strings of code inserted were very inconsistent.

The following is a list of the sites being linked thru, which I assume are all victims of this malware.  If you own one of these sites, feel free to drop me a line and I will point you in the right direction as far as putting an end to this.

• http://blog.segd.org
• http://www.investorsunited.com
• http://www.oca-gla.org
• http://www.thunderstruck.org
• http://subway.com
• http://verdadeabsoluta.net
• http://yourrnc.com
• http://wordpressthemesbox.com
• http://mp3db.org
• http://webconsultingdc.com
• http://turtlesurvival.org
• http://turtleconservationfund.org
• http://truenorthbrass.com
• http://tarabooks.com
• http://kolenalaila.com
• http://techbostonacademy.org
• http://pie-flex.com
• http://www.philebrity.tv
• http://www.landmarkwine.com
• http://artsinbushwick.org
• http://brettmartin.org
• http://bsf.org
• http://www.popandpolitics.com
• http://womanhonorthyself.com
• http://www.brainstorm9.com
• http://webdev.entheosweb.com
• http://www.topicus-healthcare.com
• http://www.vfilings.com
• http://constantinessword.com
• http://www.dopiska.com
• http://writingcenters.org
• http://www.radisson.com
• http://notjustaprettyface.org
• http://www.arizonacriminaldefenseblog.com
• http://www.sembrarpaz.com
• http://www.apostilla.com
• http://www.geektechs.net
• http://johnquiggin.com
• http://blog.pdma.org
• http://bluesheaven.com

Message to ZML:

Hello,

I am a developer and recently one of my clients who is running WordPress for her personal website was attacked by some Malware that inserted thousands of links throughout her content. Those links resolve to your site, but via redirects thru other sites that I assume are also victims of the malware.

You look like you’ve built a pretty nice site here. And I’m writing to give you the chance to get on board with fixing this problem before I am forced to create some negative attention in the blogosphere and social media.

It doesn’t seem like you would want to be resposible for malware. But it also doesn’t seem like anyone would go through the trouble to make all these links back to you unless you were paying them. Perhaps you hired some marketing or SEO people and were not aware that they would be using these tactics? Please write back soon as I have very little patience for this kind of thing.

Thanks,

Andrew A. Peterson

Some samples of weird code that the bot inserted:

<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d0%b0%d0%b2%d1%82%d0%be%d1%80%d1%81%d0%ba%d0%b8%d0%b5-%d0%bf%d1%80%d0%be%d0%b3%d1%80%d0%b0%d0%bc%d0%bc%d1%8b</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ?????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>

<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d1%81%d0%b2%d0%be%d0%b1%d0%be%d0%b4%d0%bd%d1%8b%d0%b9-%d0%bc%d0%b8%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%be%d1%84%d0%be%d0%bd</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>

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Posted October 31st, 2009, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc

I don’t even remember how I found his website, which is beautiful.

I mainly wanted to draw your attention to a thing Mark “Jake” Baker wrote that was touching to me.  It’s sort of a manifesto for modern life called  ”The Human Condition.”

It’s an interesting Internet find.  It says so much!

HERE it is.  I think we will all be wiser people if we read it.

…

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Posted October 20th, 2009, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Technology| WordPress

UPDATE: After about four hours of hunting, I finally found a way to enable CodePress in WordPress! A plugin called Enable Codepress does just that! It only seems to work in FireFox, but it does work with WordPress 2.8.4

copy of a comment I left HERE, a tutorial having to do with adding line-numbers and syntax-highlighting to WordPress’ text-editor.

Wow. I am so frustrated. I have spent the last four hours trying to find a way for me to endow my clients, whom I have set up with WordPress, with the power of line numbers when editing CSS.

WordPress is nearly FTP-free, which is great for lay persons. I’ve had great results with teaching older people how to use FireBug to find and preview changes in their CSS by right-clicking on what they want to change and selecting “inspect element.” And it’s not too difficult for many of these folks to get into their Stylesheet in WP’s Theme Editor and find and change what they have tested in FireFox.

But would make the workflow a thousand times better would be a way to make the Textarea in the Theme Editor disply Line-Numbers. There are a handful of plugins that claim to do this, but none of them seem to work with WordPress 2.8.4 And in my hunt, I’ve found evidence that WP once had this feature briefly, but turned it off because it was too slow. I never noticed it and I’ve been using WP for years, and have always been up to date.

Now I find this blog post. Great. A hack to turn on the CodePress functionality in WordPress 2.8… The problem is I don’t understand how to do this!

Can’t you just make an installable Plugin? A plugin would be great because it would be nice to be able to turn the thing on and off, if it is indeed slow or buggy.

Or if some manual intervention with WP’s files is necessary, could you please-please-please explain which files you are editing in this tutorial? All of the examples show top line numbers (1, 2, 3). There’s no “this is what the whole thing should look like” …You don’t explain what file or files you are editing. This is so annoying because I’m not a programmer and this how-to assumes that we know certain things that I don’t know.

could brave these steps if I knew where to make them. I have been searching for this post for hours only to find that I’m not smart enough to understand the directions!!! Thanks for your consideration and for sharing information, even if I am ineligible for it.

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Posted October 10th, 2009, in: 1| Computer Problems and Fixes

Copy of a forum post I posted at M-Audio’s user Forum.

I love my BX5’s. One of them died. Here’s what’s going on. I would really appreciate any advice on further troubleshooting/diagnosis. 

• One of my BX5’s stopped outputting sound. It may been have been sitting turned on a few days before I noticed that it wasn’t working.
• Upon putting my ear to it, I realized that it was making a steady hum/buzz from both drivers. This was similar to a 60-cycle hum but a little raspy-er if that makes sense, and if I’m not out of my mind. Also it wasn’t a very loud hum. Only about as loud as you’d get from a bad cable or something.
• I tested for a bad input connection and tried using XLR instead of the 1/4 inch input. The problem was clearly inside the unit.
• I opened it up carefully, to see if there was anything obviously burnt or shorted or broken inside.
• After finding nothing that was obvious to me, I googled around and found a few posts on the m-audio forum talking about problems caused by worn-out capacitors. See: http://forums.m-audio.com/showthread.php?t=3871&page=1 and http://forums.m-audio.com/showthread.php?t=11926 and many others.
• One of my two main power-supply caps was indeed bloated. And I noticed some dark-brown crustiness on top of the other which I concluded might be leakage of “electrolyte,” whatever that is.
• I de-soldered and removed the old caps and set out to find replacements.
• I accidentally ordered 16V 6800mfd instead of 25V 6800mfd, which I didn’t notice until I had already soldered them in.
• I tried them anyway because in theory, since all the caps are supposed to do is smooth the supply current, too-low of a voltage rating on the cap would just mean that the caps will wear out sooner. The constant hum/buzz was gone with the new caps in. Instead what I got was a pop a few seconds after the unit was powered on. The pop is new. My functioning unit does not pop.
• I went and got the correct 25V 6800µF Capacitors and put them in but there was no change in the above behavior. Incidentally, I had to mount one on the bottom because the ones I got were more than twice as wide and a bit taller than the originals.
• I’ve double and triple-checked the soldering. I even opened up my functioning BX5 to make sure that the caps are in the right polarity.
• I tested for continuity between the capacitor leads and the destination/source on the printed circuit (for instance one path goes to what I believe is a Rectifier IC so I checked to makes sure that path was solid all the way from that component’s lead to the cap’s lead to rule out a bad solder joint… I did this for all the paths in the printed circuit)
• I’ve quadruple-checked for any visible shorts.
• I believe that my capacitor-replacement surgery was a success, so now I am beginning to doubt that bad caps were the real problem. It’s entirely possible that the buzz/hum I was hearing was there for some time since it wasn’t loud enough to hear until I put my ear right up to the unit. Maybe I have two problems, one of which I just fixed.
• I can now hear some faint white noise and hum from both drivers. The original, louder buzz/hum sound is gone. Instead what I hear is about like what you’d expect from an audio amplifier, but that is not the case with the fully functional unit I have… The functioning unit is very clean. The volume knob makes no difference in the slight noise/hum. And it’s so faint that if I didn’t have the other unit to compare with, I would probably think what I’m hearing is the normal hum of the amp.
• The only other sound I can get from the dead unit is when I change the “Low Cutoff” switch, I hear slight fuzzy, static-y sound during the switching, but none of the other switches make any noise.

What should I do next? Perhaps the real problem here is in the audio signal path? A pre-amp problem? How can I rule that out?

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Posted September 29th, 2009, in: Art Etc| Videos

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Posted September 26th, 2009, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Intellectual Property| Music Industry| New Media| Technology| Web 2.0

I just got a newsletter update explaining that they support a three-strikes policy for file-sharing.

Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.

How backward-ass!!

As an artist, I am going to have to revoke my membership if they don’t do some serious back-peddling in the next few days.

I thought the FAC was a forward-thinking organization.  Maybe not.

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Posted September 22nd, 2009, in: 1| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| Technology| Web 2.0

This is according to Jason Calacanis via This Week in Startups or TWIST.

If this is true, I feel quite a bit more comfortable in my assessment that WordPress is the best CMS for most companies or people, even for non-bloggers.

This also makes me proud of myself for seeing WP as a star product way back in 2005 when I was just getting started with Web marketing stuff and working on the public-facing side of Four Eyed Monsters.

There a a number of other free, open-source systems for managing website content.  Drupal and Joomla are the most obvious to mention.  But in my opinion, these are not mature platforms, even though they may be more appealing to devs.

The point of a CMS is (in my opinion) to make things easy for non-devs.  The point is to make it easy for the owner of the site.  This way, they don’t have to get ahold of their “web person” to fix a typo or add or remove a page.

Anyway, I’ve had faith in WordPress for a long time and watching it grow to the point where it is now is so comforting to me.  Thank god for crowd-sourcing and Open-Source! It works.

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Posted September 2nd, 2009, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Reviews & Thoughts About Products

I’m playing around with a mashup that includes the music of NWA, but I had initially decided to focus only on their first 3 albums, “and the posse,” “straight outta compton,” and “100 miles and runnin…”

My buddy pointed out to me that for what i’m looking for in the samples, “Niggaz4life” might be a good idea.

DAMN!

I’ve heard all these songs before, and I think when I first heard them (while I was riding a skatebord and wearing punk combat boots) I was turned off ’cause the music seemed “over-produced” and “overly-mass-marketed,” (the latter probably because there’s even reggae-influenced rapping which i wasn’t used to)…

The lyrics are of course mostly terribly juvenile.

But here’s the thing.  This is a shining example of great early rap production.  The beats are awesome and really cleanly done.

I hear a lot of the style I assoicate with the name “Dr. Dre.”

I’m rockin’ this shiznit.

The rapping is pretty good mostly.

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Posted August 18th, 2009, in: Art Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Projects| Visual Art

Juicy Butt Sweats

A few years ago I noticed this new paradigm in logo placement on clothing.  I think it was the Company Juicy Couture that first put their logo right on the ass of the customer. I’m not sure if they were indeed the first, but the word “Juicy” is the first word I remember actually reading from the seat of the pants of a young lady walking in front of me on the street.

I don’t need to explain why the the word “juicy” is so provocative when placed prominently on a woman’s rear end, and perhaps this is why I remember it as the beginning of this era, whether or not the credit (or blame) is really owed to the JC clothing line for making this a trend.

Fast forward a few years and many colleges and indeed even my twelve-year-old niece’s junior high school’s athletic clothing line has the institution’s name featured in this manner.

But not on the men’s/boy’s shorts and sweats.  Only on the women’s/girl’s.

Hairy Butt Jeans

I have therefore decided to examine the cultural subtext of this phenomenon further by adding a twist to it, which I shall be wearing around town in search of truth.

Behold, the unveiling of the Hairy Butt Jean by Andrew A. Peterson.

Sorry for the camera-phone pic.  I’ll have better photos as soon as I’m ready to do a proper shoot for this amazing new addition to my artistic legacy.

Also, I know I’m not the best butt-model but I work with what I have.

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Posted August 5th, 2009, in: Computer Problems and Fixes| Technology

Problem: Yahoo! Small Business Hosting doesn’t allow “Pretty” Permalinks (particularly with more recent versions of WordPress)

Solution: This Plugin I found after hours of searching: Disable Canonical URL Redirection

More reading that may or may not be helpful HERE.

As far as I can tell, Yahoo! Small Business Hosting Sucks for WordPress. Any time I want to do anything with it I seems to have to spend a day doing research.

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