It'll Never Fly

… now I’ve got two problems.

Apparently, a long running joke. I first heard it in 2004, I think, from a coworker who read it on a programmer’s blog he was following. Unfortunately, I can’t find it anymore. I think it was a Python developer, as that’s the technology this particular coworker was fond of.

Is this it?

We found it particularly funny, as the work we were doing at the time (a lot of ASP.NET, Web Services, and XML Serialization) involved a lot of work with XML and XSLT stylesheets, and it seemed every time we finally thought we had figured out all the rules to the game, someone went and changed all the playing pieces. We never seemed to be able to apply what we had already learnt or written to any new problems, and always had to start each time from scratch.

Occasionally, in the middle of a work day, you’d hear one of us blurt out, “Yes!” And, by that, you could invariably always tell that person had just got their XML Stylesheet working.

It was also around that time that I proposed my hypothesis that, “I could solve any problem, given a time machine… and a big enough stick.”

All that reminds me of some posters my dad used to have hanging on the walls of his office when I was a kid. They were of course posters detailing the laws of Murphy. A couple of my favourites being, “Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it,” and, “Eat one live toad first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

Classic stuff.

Just a quick note to the readers.

I’ve been tweaking the stylesheet for the site over the last few days, making it a little more efficient and readable hopefully (i.e. making it more about the “C” than the “SS”). There’s a lot about CSS that still throws me for a loop sometimes. I seem to have a hard time with styling technologies in general (but that’s a different story).

I didn’t have too hard a time of it this go around, I think mainly because of the new Web Inspector in Apple’s web browser, Safari. DOM/HTML/CSS inspectors in web browsers is not a new idea, and Apple wasn’t the first to the table with the idea. In fact, their inspector has been around for a couple of years now, in various forms.

It wasn’t just the live-updating of the CSS that helped, but also how it shows the different style rules in play and how they’re being overruled by others, and lastly the ability to see the final computed style. It’s still a little clunky and could use some more features, but it’s definitely usable the way it is now.

If I didn’t find Firefox as a whole rather clunky on my G5 (but only on my G5, for whatever weird reason), I’d probably be using it with Firebug, which looks awesome. Actually, if I was back in the business of coding web pages to make a living, I’d definitely be using that.

Anyway, if you’re still reading this, you shouldn’t really notice too many changes. I’ve pretty much kept all the styles the same, I’ve just reorganized how they cascade in the stylesheet. The biggest change I just implemented, is switching the main font over to a series of various Lucida variants from Verdana (which I’ve used for years now, simply because it was different, and Tahoma looked too cramped). Only problem now is finding the right Lucida variant for the job, as only certain ones came pre-installed with certain OSs or applications at certain times, and some look like utter crap. But I’ve done my research, and I think I’ve chosen the best option that screws all people equally (maybe the Windows people slightly more than others).

I’ve also started using tags, so at least I now appear to be “with it.”

You may (or may not) have noticed this site (and my sister site, rjmaguire.com) have been really slow as of late. I was trying to do some extensive logging about those hacking attempts I reported before, so I installed a new add-on in my Web server to do so. I never actually got it to work, but it didn’t seem to be doing any harm, so I left it installed and turned on.

A word to the wise, trust documentation. The help for my add-on said not to leave it on for extended periods of time, and that it’s really only meant for short periods of debugging traffic. Well, I read that and chose to ignore it, thinking of course that I knew better.

Well, it’s turned off now, and things are much snappier than they were.

I still don’t know what it was doing, because I never did get any output from the darn thing. Apparently, it was just spinning its cycles, spewing its data into the /dev/null’s of the world.

My non-blogging site, rjmaguire.com, that mainly hosts my genealogy stuff, was hacked recently. The perp found an underground published security hole in the 3rd party genealogy software I use called TNG: The Next Generation. I found a message on their support forums that describes how to close the hole and now it has. I’ve also replaced the damaged file (as they at least were kind enough to only do a minimal amount of damage).

I don’t blame the author of the software or the PHP programming language. It was an easy mistake to make. I still intend on using the software (and upgrade to the newest version even). It was my own fault for not keeping a closer eye on the server logs and on the TNG mailing list to notice that this kind of thing was going on.

I haven’t actually been able to pinpoint the exact day or time when the hack occurred. The first attempts began in mid-March. I don’t think the hack actually occurred until just a few days ago, when I noticed the page on my site was posted in a Spanish-language forum as a badge of honour as it were. Thankfully, the kids trying this stuff out aren’t really that bright, as witnessed by a lot of failures to even copy and paste correctly.

One of them actually managed to copy a couple of executables that looked like IRC server software or something, but was undoubtedly stopped cold when it had no chance of running on my server’s architecture.

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