Lillesvin Networks » Programming

New Look and WordPress Bug

Anders K. Madsen — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:01:39 +0000

I accidently stumbled across this nice WordPress theme by Rob Goodlatte, which automatically increases/decreases the font size depending on the size of the browser window in order to maintain a sensible and readable line length. I’m still not entirely through modifying it (the CSS is a bit of a mess and I’ve found several inconsistencies throughout the theme) and I’m not quite sure how well the dynamic font size works with regards to accessibility, but what the hell — it’s easy enough to switch back to the old theme again should this turn out to not work as expected, so let’s just give it a go.

Actually, I stumbled across this theme because I had to do an urgent upgrade of WordPress because of a nasty, nasty flaw recently discovered and described on Full Disclosure. Basically it allows anyone to reset the admin password effectively locking out the standard admin user, so if you’re running WordPress, make sure to update to the latest version at once — and upgrading is not that hard. I upgraded from an ancient version without a single problem (that I know of).

phpCF 0.5b — “Who would have thunk it?” edition!

Anders K. Madsen — Tue, 05 May 2009 03:32:07 +0000

phpCF version 0.5 beta is just done (after almost 4 years!) and commited to the repository. Among the changes are a completely new and more managable rules system, that allows for easy rules writing while still allowing for even more flexibility than previous versions. I’ll tag a release, upload tar-balls and update the phpCF page as soon as I get home from work tonight. See the ChangeLog for a more detailed list of changes.

Update (May 5 2009 @ 4:32 AM): The phpCF page is now updated and with links to tar-balls, docs and stuff.

Scale — “digits, yes please”

Steffen — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:47:47 +0000

Just now and again one need a one-liner [0]. Just now and again it’s executed in bash [1]. Just now and again it involves some calculation. And just now and again it easy to do those things with bc [2] as it can read from standard input [3]. But at exactly those “now and again” times I normally find that bc truncates and returns only the integer part. Which at a subset of those “now and again” times are just not good enough. F.x.: one might be fuzzy about the resolution when counting how many keystrokes there are to go in order to have produced the scheduled amount of text for the day.

But fortunately I today got wiser; I met the scale variable in bc. It properly still truncates but now I can set a resolution that at least satisfy my fuzziness issue, which means I can now M-! my way to the following one-liner to get what i want.

C=`wc -c main.tex | cut -c 4-8`; P=`echo "scale=4; ${C}/2400" | bc`; echo ${C}c, ${P}p

Bliss. Back to work.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-liner_program
[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/bc/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_input#Standard_input_.28stdin.29

A bid on my soul

Anders K. Madsen — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 23:00:30 +0000

This morning I found this in my inbox…

To: madsen@sjovedyr.dk
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 02:21:23 -0500
Subject: php contract work
From: #####@########.org

I saw your ad posted on phpbuilder.com for php contract work.

I have a survey form / MySQL database project I am working on and am wondering
how much you would charge to complete it.

Here is a link to the form, and what I am looking for is explained there:

http://www.friendsofdenmark.us/.

If you want to call, my number in Washington, DC is ### ### ####

Thanks,

##### ######

From IP Address: ##.##.###.##
From Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5)
Gecko/20060111 Netscape/8.1

Two words: Hell no!

Magnet poetry with Ajax

Anders K. Madsen — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 05:47:59 +0000

Based on DOM-Drag (which is really nice btw), I hacked up a little thingy for the Migato Estalo Co. website. (It’s in danish, but you know the concept.)

I’m growing more and more fond of Ajax (or rather XMLHttpRequest). It’s really nice, but unfortunately it’s not very Lynx-/Links-friendly, but I guess that’s the price to pay and I guess it’s all part of development. (I mean, you usually ditch something old in favour of something newer and smarter – though not necessarilly better in every respect.)

phpCF 0.3 released

Anders K. Madsen — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 06:11:28 +0000

This release of phpCF features:

Incorporation of the Lillesvin Networks blacklist (text/plain version) – possibly more blacklists will be supported in future releases.
Better testing for HTML
Configuration to allow specific HTML tags, thus excluding them when testing for HTML
Better debugging methods
Removal of disabled checks in the instance-log

Go get it at http://lillesvin.net/phpcf!

Lillesvin Networks serving online game

Anders K. Madsen — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 03:34:01 +0000

It’s true! It’s nothing fancy really (you’ll understand when you see it), but it’s a game non the less. And it has an online Top 10, so you can compete with others! It’s really simple, highly addictive, non-violent, non-sexual … pretty much non-anything – just the way some americans (e.g. from Michigan) like it. Who knows, I could start chargin a monthly fee for playing – I could make billions! Muahahaaa!

Ok, I’ve been taking to much of your precious time – here’s the game! Enjoy!

Heavy Spam Decrease

Anders K. Madsen — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 06:56:15 +0000

I was just looking through my logfiles (I tend to do that whenever I get a bit tired, but don’t go to sleep) and I realized that the number of spam attempts has decreased heavilly. From blocking more than 30 attempts a day, all the way down to 52 attempts throughout June and no attempts at all in August or September. Same goes for blacklist redirects (ie. blacklisted hosts being redirected to a customized 404 page saying that they’ve been blacklisted.)

I’m not quite sure what to make of this, because there are a couple of things involved and the decrease started just as I made some big changes to my anti-spam system. The following are some possible factors in the decrease and there may very well be some I’m overlooking.

I started returning 404 Not Found on blacklist redirects instead of 200 OK

Are the spammers running some kind of automated learning, so once they receive a 404, they stop trying? That would be weird, because in order to even see the before mentioned 404, they have to make at least 3 attempts at spamming. So automated learning would be indicated by a vast amount of blocked attempts compared to the number of blacklist redirects, which is not the case here – both numbers have decreased heavilly, though the number of blacklist redirects varies from zero to 5-6 a day.

phpCF is working great

If the spammers are in some way measuring their success-rate, then it must mean that phpCF is working great, because no spam has gotten through in a long time. But this would also be strange, because how would they measure the success-rate? Googling? I think not.

The blacklist is complete

I’ve finally blacklisted each and every spam-bot on the planet! Yay, for me! :-p
Actually, this would explain the small number of blocked attempts compared to the larger amount of blacklist redirects. But still, somehow I don’t believe that this is the reason.

More options

Last, but not least, there may be outside factors causing the decrease (even though I’d like to think that I came up with the “cure for the cancer”). Maybe Google-bombing has gotten harder, or the spammers are getting more cautious – or maybe blog-spamming just isn’t profitable enough…

… and then there is all the stuff I can’t think up right now because it’s 8:46 AM and I haven’t slept yet. If you have any ideas, experiences, thoughts … anything! Please, post a comment or drop me a mail. I’d be more than happy to know what you think.

New music site (again)

Anders K. Madsen — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 10:34:00 +0000

In order to keep things as simple as possible, I’ve re-done the site for my music: http://akm.lillesvin.net. Much love to die stffii for opening my eyes for simple sites. Now the site features an RSS feed for the songs, so you can simply subscribe to the feed and you’ll know when a new song is out.

Enjoy!

2 Songs – Out Now! 2 Websites – Up Now!

Anders K. Madsen — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 22:54:01 +0000

Yay! When my computer was in for service I was really bored out of my mind, but fortunately it inspired some creativity, which resulted in the two songs that I’ve just unloaded on the world.

They’re titled Ode to DOOM and Rockstar and you can get them on the website dedicated to my music – http://akm.lillesvin.net and for a while yet you can get them on http://lillesvin.net/music/. And while we’re at the music-websites stuff… I just hacked up a couple of temporary sites for the other two projects I’m involved with, Migato Estalo Co. and Laxness 101 – go straight there, download all the songs and enjoy them. (It’s not an offer, it’s an order!) Also I’d like to get some feedback on them – according to die steffie there’s a problem with the Migato Estalo Co.-site in IE, but since I don’t have an IE around it’s kinda hard for me to fix, so any feedback will be most appreciated.