Category Archives: Applications

Has my WordPress blog been hacked?

At some stage, some weird text seems to have inserted itself into a bunch of my links on my personal blog… a Get parameter referencing phpMyAdmin and a long hexadecimal string, which appears to be the same every time.

So for instance the link:
<a href=”/1995/12/22/the-bill/”>

became:
<a href=”/1995/12/22/the-bill/?phpMyAdmin=3bceb1b20913e8babce341325e13bf76″>

And this one:
<a href=”http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/energy.shtml”>

became:
<a href=”<a href=?phpMyAdmin=3bceb1b20913e8babce341325e13bf76″http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/energy.shtml”>

A Google search suggests that this specific parameter appears to be unique to my blog.

It mainly appears to have hit internal relative links, but has hit some external ones too. But it hasn’t affected all the links, by any means. Maybe a few dozen posts. And for the most part they are like the first example, above, and don’t actually break the links.

At first I thought it was a hack back at some time when I might have had a vulnerable version of WordPress on my blog. Though I’ve been unable to find any other examples of it (not that it’s the easiest thing to search for), and now I’m wondering if it was some mistake during a migration of the database.

Weirdness.

Directing Mailman replies

For an announcements list, you don’t want people replying to the list, which will reject their messages. I had to do some digging to find out where to set this in Mailman. It’s under the General Options:

Where are replies to list messages directed? Poster is strongly recommended for most mailing lists. — which lets the recipient replies go back to the list, to the poster (which is the old-fashioned way to do it on discussion lists) or you can set to go back to an explicit address — which for reasons I won’t go into right now, is the way I wanted it.

OK, so this setting probably should have been really obvious, but I only just found it. Call me slow if you like.

Office 2007: Menus and SP2

Try as you might, you can’t get used to the Office 2007 ribbons, and you want the menus back?

There have been a few paid solutions, but here’s a free one (for non-commercial use): UBitMenu (Corporate licence applies for business usage for €10 + €0.65 per user).

It adds a Menu ribbon which has the traditional menus, with extra items added for new Office 2007 functionality. Neato; I’ll be giving this a try pronto.

(via Office Watch)

By the way, Office 2007 SP2 is due out on April 28th… this MS blog article previews some of the new features included. (via Malcolm)

Something I don’t like about WordPress

I love WordPress.

But not 100%.

Something I don’t like is how it decides arbitrarily when to decide to re-authenticate you.

I had logged in here to write a post, and it happily let me type it all out, until I hit the Publish button, when it decided to double-check who I was. Which was fine, but by the time it had done that, it revealed that the draft of the post that had been saved was from several minutes before I’d hit Publish, and I’d lost a couple of links I’d put in which now I’ll have to find again.

Blargh.

Acrobat rant

I knew there was a reason I'm an Acrobat luddite. What moron decided the toolbar options most frequently sought in a hurry, rotate page, should be removed from the default toolbars in Acrobat Reader 8? (The corporate PCs just got upgraded from 7 to 8. I haven't tried 9 yet.)

To get the Rotate back: View / Toolbars / More Tools. Scroll down the window to the options for the Page Display Toolbar and turn on Rotate Clockwise and Rotate Anti Counter-Clockwise.

Now, can someone explain to me how Acrobat has bloated so much over the years?

Acrobat versions sizes

And WTF was the deal with version 7.05?!

Accelerator keys

Why does Ctrl-F4 mostly close a single document/tab in a multiple-document/tab interface (eg Firefox), but sometimes (eg if there’s only one doc/tab open, and the moon is full), it instead drops down dropdown boxes?

Alt-Down will also drop down a dropdown box. Which I guess is why back in Windows 3.1 the button to do the same looked like a down arrow underlined.

Oh yeah, and why, when using Alt-F4 to shutdown the Windows XP desktop, does it take two or three goes pressing it to get it to register? Like it doesn’t really believe me the first time?

The Triple J question

Trust Josh to ask a curly question for the StackOverflow podcast: “Why did the Stack Overflow schedule blow out?” and quoting back Jeff and Joel's own previous forecasts at them.

Made for an interesting discussion though. I certainly agree with the point that until you're actually working on something, you d

on't have a great deal of confidence in just how much there is to do … that becomes apparent as you go.

Transcript.

(So I can find it later: WordPress URL parameters, for example for showing all posts by Josh.)

zp8497586rq

Quicktime and a decompressor are needed to see this picture

Of all the useless error messages, this one would have to take the cake. I found it in a Word document tonight.

Quicktime and a decompressor are needed to see this picture

It appears to be caused by the author using Mac Word, and having pasted a picture into the document in some weird and wonderful way.

The error is useless, because I already have Quicktime installed on this machine. (I didn’t particularly want it; it came with iTunes.) And if it wants a particular decompressor, it would be very helpful if it gave me a hint as to which one, and where I should get it from.

I couldn’t even see a way of extracting the picture so I could try and throw it at another viewer program.

In this age of standards, when the vast majority of pictures flying about the place are either GIF, JPEG or PNG, and even proprietary standards like MS Word are almost universal, why on earth should I be getting an error message like this?

Evidently the only fix is to go back to the source (on the Mac) and change the picture to something more universal. Thankfully the document’s author was around, so I could do that. But who knows why Mac Word lets people insert pictures in this way in the first place. (Powerpoint is susceptible too.)

Conclusion? Blame Microsoft!

Recent finds

Ever wonder how they fitted an entire computer language into just a few kilobytes, back in the 80s? Documented disassembly of BBC Basic 4.

How to highlight author comments in WordPress … but it relies on the author being user ID 1, so it won’t work here, where we have several people posting. Could easily be customised to look for other user IDs though.

Some developers are throwing in the towel and running Vista as Admin.

The excellent Secret Life of Machines not only has a web site, but is available freely (and legally) via BitTorrent. And the theme tune is available on iTunes.

How to compress attachments in Outlook

I use Outlook at work, and sometimes people send big attachments without zipping them up. Often they’re documents which are in the document management system anyway. Sigh.

Anyway, it’s easy enough to compress them within Outlook.

1. Open mail item.

2. Save attachment(s) to a temporary directory.

3. Zip (or whatever) the file. (See? 2Mb XLS down to 300Kb. Why didn’t the sender do that?)

4. In the email, click Edit / Edit Message on the menu. (This feature is a boon for fraudulent modification of emails, but also for compressing attachments.)

5. Right click on the attachment and Remove.

6. Drag the zip file into the email. (For some reason you can’t use the menu to insert an attachment like you can when composing. And the drag-drop has to land in the body section of the email.)

7. Save and Close the email.

Voila, a bunch of space saved.

I haven’t explored to see if the same method can be used in other mail clients.