Retiring the Zen Micro

Posted by in Reviews > Hardware

My old Zen micro 5gb served me well for the last three years, however during the last semester the on-off-lock switch became unresponsive, requiring a cleaver hack to turn on and off the device. This was my first hard disk based mp3 player, and I’m returning to a flash based device (so that I can run while listening to music). For Christmas I received the 8GiB Creative ZEN, which is sort of the spiritual successor of my Zen micro.

Let me be the first to correct the others out there that make it seem like you have to transcode everything to WMV to play on it. While it is true that the ZEN needs mpeg1/2 files transcoded, they don’t have to be transcoded to WMV. The ZEN does natively support Xvid/MPEG4-SP/DivX in addition to WMV. Since I do have many mpeg music videos I will have to transcode some, but MediaCoder does a good job at that. Most users would transcode anyways as playing a 720p video on a 320×240 screen is overkill and would eat up battery life in order to scale the video while playing, the size benefit is there too, 30MiB or less for most music videos under 5 minutes in length. Hope you all are having a merry Christmas.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Iframe-B-Gone 1.0.0

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

As Christmas approaches one bears early gifts. The first is the release of Iframe-B-Gone 1.0.0. It should greatly help in identifying and removal malicious code that is contained within the wp_posts database table.

This is the first plug-in that one’s written that utilizes the official WordPress way of localization, included in the zip archive is a .po file that can be used in writing translations. If you have created a translation and would like it to be included in the main distribution please leave a comment. Iframe-B-Gone can be downloaded on its project page.

Note that even though this software has been tested in a testbed, it may not be fully ready for production use. Before utilizing the cleaning functions please backup the infected posts, as if any data is lost, or erroneously removed one can not help in restoring that data. This plug-in comes with absolutely no warranty. Use this software at your own risk, and report any bugs that are found. Unless a serious bug is discovered no updates to this plug-in will be released until the first of next year (Breadcrumb NavXT needs some loving).

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Tagged:
Updated:

One Regular Expression

Posted by in Enemy of the Spammers 
i.?[:punct:]?.?f.?.?.?r.?.?.?a.?.?.?m.?.?.?e

That should find most iframe phrases when used in a SQL query, which I won’t lay out here (fairly easy to do with phpMyAdmin, it’s literally a copy and paste procedure in the “search” form just change the mode to the proper setting). I tested it against over a year and a half of my archives with some purposely planted and obscured iframes and it has no false positives. This will find any iframe obscured via methods found in attacks on Weblogs.us and it’s users. It may be advantageous to remember this for when Iframe-B-Gone is ready.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Tagged: ,
Updated:

Mtekk Iframe-B-Gone

Posted by in Enemy of the Spammers

Seems that the events of early last month did not stop. More and more WordPress users are having issues with malicious iframes being inserted into their blogs. Until now, there were no automated detection and removal tools. Iframe-B-Gone, it’s quick, it’s dirty, but it should do the trick. I’ll get a build up sometime this upcoming weekend, after Beta 3 of Breadcrumb NavXT.

What to expect from Iframe-B-Gone:

  • Scanning of the wp-posts and other WordPress database tables for Iframes.
  • Support for regular expressions for custom “evil” tag detection.
  • Notification of locations and option to not delete selected “results”.

Note that fixing hacked themes is beyond the scope of this plug-in, for that manual searching and removal is necessary, and those familiar with a the terminal shouldn’t have a difficult time figuring out the quick way of searching for stings in files contained within a folder.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Tagged:
Updated:

Breadcrumb NavXT 2.0 Beta 2

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

No bugs were reported for Beta 1, but I did find a problem with the way the breadcrumb was build for pages. Beta 2 fixes that and not much else. I need feedback and translators. There is now a SVN repository for Breadcrumb NavXT, its over at wp-plugins.org. This version also has a slightly different file structure, the main folder for Breadcrumb NavXT is now breadcrumb-navxt instead of breadcrumb-navigation-xt-2. The change corresponds to the assigned directory in wp-plugins.org.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]