December 28th, 2007

The Berry Experiment

Posted by John Havlik in WordPress > Themes

Originally the concept was to be highly modular, allowing for flashy yet quickly loading design. This concept still has yet to be met, mainly due to a lack of time. Blu-Berry, a rather bastardized version of the vision for Berry, remains the incomplete theme powering this blog. Its introduction was a stop gate measure as WordPress 2.1 had some changes that broke the blog with the theme it replaced. Some have inquired on the link to download the theme. When the time comes Berry will be released to the masses.

Despite the incomplete implementation of the vision, I admire Berry (sounds awkward doesn’t it?). When messing around with a few of the images for the holiday season, with the transparencies and such, the thought crossed my mind about the future of this blog and what it will look like for the majority of next year. Nothing new will surface until the end of April, but a three column layout may not be out of the question. Those ugly “date badges” will receive much needed tweaking.

The crib will undergo some much needed organization in the meantime in preparation for changes present in the next Berry. Its a big task, and between other projects time for doing such things is scarce at best.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

December 25th, 2007

Retiring the Zen Micro

Posted by John Havlik 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]

December 13th, 2007

Iframe-B-Gone 1.0.0

Posted by John Havlik 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]

December 8th, 2007

One Regular Expression

Posted by John Havlik 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]

December 3rd, 2007

Mtekk Iframe-B-Gone

Posted by John Havlik 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]