Instead, I’m going to be tweaking this current look and fucking about with the fonts. Right now, I have to leave the cafe and head home before the caffeine takes hold and I’m without access to a bathroom.

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2

Here’s what I need to do:

• Redesign the footer so it works with a longer blog title
• Update the header so it can take a custom image or just display text
• Add support for categories
• Add styling for some default widgets (text, archives, links, tag cloud, etc.)
• Add admin page with customizable theme options

It’s far easier to hardcode everything and know exactly what things I want to display. It’s pretty hard to make things more generic to please everyone.

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2

What went wrong with installation?

Switching – Backing up is easy but there’s some shit that you just can’t take with you when you go between OS X and Windows. Stuff like iPhoto libraries and Mail (ok, you can probably take mail over but I can’t be fucked jumping through the hoops).

OS X Partition – You can install Windows on a Mac without keeping OS X around. But you lose access to any firmware updates from Apple and it’s a bitch to access your old files. MacDrive can help but as of writing it does not support Time Machine folders.

64-bit Windows is not supported by Boot Camp – I have 4.0 GB of RAM and I wanted 64-bit Windows in order to take advantage of it all. You have to Google instructions but basically you rip the DVD to your HDD and then use an official Microsoft utility to recreate a new installation DVD that Boot Camp can understand. Very time consuming and requires a Windows machine.

Crashing during Windows 7 Installation – I still don’t know why but the computer would just lock up during the “Completing installation…” phase (i.e. the very last phase of a lengthy install). My theory is that the DVD was bad or my laptop was overheating. I gave up and tried again at home and it worked.

So how is it to use?

Trackpad – The reason I gave up on Vista and Boot Camp 2.0 was because the trackpad support was abysmal. So bad that I was completely turned off by the idea of spending any amount of time in Windows. Apple make some first-class trackpads on their laptops and they are integral to the experience. Under BC 3.0, trackpad support is much better but still doesn’t compare to the OS X experience. The cursor jumps around as my palm grazes and the scrolling is there but it’s not as precise or comfortable. But it’s useable.

Keyboard shortcuts – Ooh this one pisses me off a lot. I am used to the Mac’s keyboard shortcuts where the Command key serves pretty much the same function it serves in Windows. Under Boot Camp, the Command key becomes the Windows key and it’s very jarring and I’m still not used to it when copying, pasting and opening new tabs.

Power – This is a big pain point too. Sometimes it just doesn’t wake up from sleep or hibernation. Bringing it out of hibernation gives you a bright grey screen to look at before you see the Windows logo appear. This is very painful when you use the laptop in the dark like I do. Sometimes it just crashes on boot up. This may have to do with 64-bit or maybe because Windows 7 support hasn’t matured yet. The automated fan control also works far better in OS X.

Switching in general – I miss Time Machine. On the flip side, I love being able to maximize apps and play games. I feel like OS X is more trackpad-friendly whereas Windows has a love affair with the mouse. Adobe Flash works far better on Windows. It’s much easier for me to connect to the corporate intranet on Windows (virtualization through VMWare Fusion eats far too much battery and generates a lot of heat).

Conclusion

I love Windows 7. I love my MacBook Pro. But the two mix very poorly. I could live in either OS but I do love using the Mac and I would miss it terribly if I went 100% Windows. I’m not really sure what to do!

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2

The reason being that I’m feeling very lonely over here in Mac land. My work is completely Windows-based as are all the cool games and some of the technologies I’d like to learn. So I embarked on the internet looking for laptops that are equivalent to the latest MacBook Pros.

The MBPs are about 4 months old but they are priced as if the technology inside were brand new. That is to say, the prices are extraordinarily high when compared to laptops of similar caliber. But rest assured that you aren’t being entirely ripped off. The MBPs also a far better design, size, weight, and materials and they are of course the only high-end laptops that can legally run Mac OS X.

I saw a lot of cool laptops that I’d like from Dell and Sager. But I think Apple have completely won me over with their hardware design because no matter where I look, it was always a compromise on the design of the MacBook Pro. I’m not saying it’s empirically better than the rest but it’s familiar and feature-packed without being obnoxious.

Thinking on this, I realized that all I really wanted to do was run Windows for a while. So I’ve decided to take my existing MacBook Pro, backup everything that I need and then wipe the whole thing and run Windows via Boot Camp. Whether or not this is successful mostly depends on the quality of the Boot Camp drivers as things like battery life, trackpad and the function buttons are all governed by the Apple-provided drivers.

It’s going to be pesky to backup things seeing as a bunch of them are Mac-only

• Photos from iPhoto
• iPhone snapshots
• Music
• Videos I’ve downloaded
• Videos I’ve recorded in iMovie
• Address book
• License keys (TextMate, VMWare Fusion, Microsoft Office)
• Email
• Documents
• Website files

The photos will probably take the most time but it’s something that’s long overdue. I have been backing up with Time Machine but I’d like to throw some stuff on DVD anyway.

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2

Also, the camera operator is either profoundly drunk or a 10-year-old who cannot stand still and just loves that zoom function.

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2

Reddit’s URLs for comments look like this:

• http://
• www.reddit.com/
• r/
• [SubredditName]/
• comments/
• [SubmissionID]/
• [SanitizedSubmissionTitle]/

The [SanitizedSubmissionTitle] part is calculated by taking the real title of the submission and applying the following steps so that it makes a sane, search-engine friendly URL.

1. Force the title to only use Unicode characters (this is the step I understand the least)
2. Replace all white space (tabs, spaces, etc) with underscores
3. Remove unprintable characters (yes, such things exist)
4. Remove instance of multiple consecutive underscores
5. Remove any underscore at the end of the title
6. Convert the title to all lowercase
7. Trim the title to the maximum allowed length of 50 characters
8. If the title was greater than 50 characters, trim the title again, this time to the last word boundary

You could say there’s a flaw in the logic of Step 8 in the case where trimming to 50 characters leaves a whole word occupying the last part of the title. Step 8 would still snip off this last word even though we’ve got complete words and we’re under the 50 character limit. But this is just a nitpick and I doubt anyone has ever noticed.

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2

Idea #1 was to learn a Radiohead song on the guitar. That got old fast. They need to write easier songs or I need to get better at the guitar.

Idea #2 was to sketch a little more and I’ve accomplished tiny bits here and there. Mostly, I’ve been drawing animals on the comment cards at restaurants and leaving them behind for the waitstaff to find. I like to think they get a chuckle out of it but maybe they’re are all like, “Aww, looks like that big retard kid had fun. Good tipper, too.”

Idea #3 was some kind of programming project. The plan right now is to parse and display JSON for Reddit pages. I’ve been ridiculously addicted to Reddit lately so it would be fun to play around with some of that data.

My plan is to whip up a quick website in Ruby and Camping. Parse the JSON and display it in an iPhone-friendly way. I have serious reservations about a) trying to run Ruby in the shared Dreamhost environment and b) trying to use a micro-framework that has been orphaned by its father. If somebody out there can suggest an alternate super tiny framework that works, I’d be happy to use it. (As long as its not PHP, I’m bored of PHP now.)

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2

• Personal laptop (an old 15″ MacBook Pro)
• Work computer (dual monitor Dell machine, running the Windows 7 Beta)
• iPhone 3G

I have illustrated this with a professional-looking Venn diagram. You can see the kind of data that I need access to on each of the devices.

I want to say I use each of these computers for very different things but it’s not really true. It’s mostly checking email and dicking about on websites. I attribute three factors that allowed me to justify going multi-device: 1) Web 2.0, 2) Wider adoption of Macs, especially amongst developers and 3) iPhone developer gold rush.

Web 2.0 is a horrible buzzword that has sadly slipped into my vocabulary. I basically mean websites that function like applications do. Things like Gmail, Flickr and Google Reader do the things that desktop apps used to do and they have the added benefit of being accessible from any computer in the world with an internet connection. These days, the website version comes first and then the desktop apps follow later.

Adoption of Macs among developers is probably a catalyst to the whole Web 2.0 thing. Before, Mac users and Windows users suffered a lot of segregation. They each lived in their own universe of applications and file formats and getting them to talk and share with each other was about as frowned upon as interracial marriage. Nowadays, everybody uses the same frigging websites and they work fine in any major browser. While it’s still hard to introduce a Mac into an old corporate environment with lots of legacy, Windows-only cruft, you’ve got a much higher standard of features, interoperability and compatibility.

iPhone developer gold rush has inspired a lot of big wins for the consumer. Mobile internet only a short while ago was a barren desert going through long periods of drought. Quality was low and applications were either written by hobbyists or the lowest bidder that your phone provider could find. The iTunes App Store has proven quite notably that there is money to be made and customers to be won; Apple solved the chicken and egg problem by building an incredible hype machine and selling a jillion phones. Hence, the gold rush. There’s actually a bit of Wild West mentality in the App Store, it’s more of a bazaar where people are churning out all kinds of trivial apps to cash in on all these trigger-happy customers before the App Fatigue (or the economic recession) sets in.

I like all this data convergence that’s going on. It means I can move between devices without losing access to my data and, more importantly, it means I could move away from devices.

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2

Are you infected? Visit your blog site and hit View Source. Search for “display:” and see if there are any spammy links that occur around the code. Better yet, if you’re a technical person, you can check the contents of your header.php file. So far, I’m only seeing this on blogs hosted on Dreamhost.

Solution: Delete the offending eval line from /wp-content/themes/theme-name/header.php. Delete /page.php, /installed.php, /wp-content/wp-manager.php, /wp-content/cache.php. Change your passwords for your blog users, database, hosting, etc. Go to the Dreamhost “users” panel and enable Enhanced User Security.

Long Speculation

You see the part of the image I circled in red? That’s an eval function followed by a base64_decode. Eval means “execute the following as if it were PHP code” and base64_decode means “convert this crap from Base64 encoding to regular text.” The file is /wp-content/themes/theme-folder/header.php, a file that is executed on every single page of your blog in order to draw the header. In short, it’s some compressed code that is injected and executed every time someone loads one of your blog pages.

I noticed it when I started getting Google links from other infected WordPress blogs. I noticed they had these invisible links in their header like:

<a href=“http://boxofjack.com/page.php?id=buy-shitty-drugs” style=“display: none”>
buy drugs
</a>

I thought, it’s great that I’m getting links but why the fuck are spammers hacking blogs and linking to my site. Then I realized that my blog was hacked and I got kind of mad.

Two possible options: Either there is a flaw in WordPress 2.7 that caused them to gain access to my shit or my provider, Dreamhost has been compromised. Given that this is a hack that is designed to infest WordPress installations and I host three blogs but only my most popular one was infected, I’m going to guess that it is a WordPress-specific bug.

Note that this is not from me installing any infected themes. I coded this WordPress theme from scratch, I have backups to prove that it was not infected when I installed it. It happened some time later. I launched this theme on the official WordPress 2.7 release. XML-RPC is enabled (yes, I know it’s a common attack vector but I need it.)

This is not a thorough investigation and it’s just what I’ve discovered through poking around on my own website. I haven’t even bothered to dissect all the shitty code, I just deleted it. I’m kinda angry at the moment and I hope it wasn’t something stupid that I did to cause this.

Update – Feb 12th @ 12pm

I’m pretty certain that this is a Dreamhost-specific problem. All the similar blogs I’ve seen are running WordPress on Dreamhost. What the fuck, Dreamhost. This is a pretty big issue.

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2

Anyway, Deutlich talks about her old BackStreet Boys fansite. It makes me think about the unlikely story (ahem) that led me to where I am today with the web development skills that I have. Allow me this 1000-word traipse down a sepia-toned memory lane of HTML.

Somewhere in the late ninties, I was making pages in Netscape Composer, the free WYSIWYG HTML editor that was bundled with the Netscape browser. I think it was actually quite good for its time. Not as whiz-bang as some of the other editors out there but it was a great starter kit and not as evil as trying to create HTML in Microsoft Word.

Being a high schooler, I was a big fan of putting scary red text on black backgrounds. It was pretty badass. Sadly, I had no content. I had a desire to create a form but no associated function. A battle that I still fight to this day. I think I slapped on an email address, a guestbook and maybe a membership to a web ring.

In the year 2000, I moved on to Macromedia Dreamweaver 3. Professional web development software that I obtained through entirely legal means on my vast income of $0.00 per month. It was a step above and I started getting familiar with the code underneath the surface. By now, I had moved on to Tripod for my free webhosting. I think my website was called “Bullshot” or something like that. It was pretty much a precursor for every web page I’ve done since. I used it to bitch about life, bitch about myself, and write stories about my imaginary girlfriend of the time. (Haha! Yeah, Jack is crazy.) I think there were a few parts that were actually well written, if you’d believe that.

This was the time of what I like to think of as “manual blogging”. You copy and paste a previous post you wrote and then edit the title and content manually. Change the file name and upload it back. Update all the other pages so they point to this new page. Viola, new blog post. It was very quaint and repetitive, like churning butter.

2001 and 2002 saw the beginning of the demise of free sites like Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod. They were still free but they started imposing more restrictions like 5MB of space and all sorts of banners, frames and pop-ups. Somehow, I got into the invitational community of the now-deceased DigitalRice.com. Some dude just gave us free hosting on a subdomain and we even had Perl and PHP scripting enabled. I tinkered around with a few different things until I finally discovered version 2.5 of Movable Type.

I continued to roll my own HTML code in Dreamweaver and create my own custom themes for Movable Type. I think my site went through 3 or 4 iterations until DigitalRice.com finally shutdown sometime in mid-2003. Supposedly for some sort of re-working of the sites features so we’d have all new community stuff. It never came back online. I never got my files back. Which was good because that blog had a pretty detailed account of how I got smitten over a girl, invited her to our “senior prom” (in Australia, we called it something different), convinced all my nerd friends to get dates, and then was promptly canceled on. But that’s all behind me and she wasn’t a very nice person anyway.

Late 2003, I was well into freshman year of college (I can hear my Australian friends cringing as I use these US-centric terms), but it annoyed me no end that my blog was trapped and I couldn’t get it back. In October 2003, after an impatient 30 days, I signed up for hosting with Quost.com.au (check out their logo) and registered boxofjack dot com. To this day, I still can’t give you a good reason for this name. It’s… adequate but it’s not going to win any Blog Title of the Year awards.

Late 2003 was also the time I started paying attention to web standards in a big way. It was in the middle of a big advocacy push and it was really cool to see people share all these techniques about XHTML and CSS. Web designers blogs were full of all these amazing tips and it was just so cool to be on the forefront of something like that. These skills all came in handy when I landed an internship as a web developer in 2005 whilst everything they had so far taught in school was interesting but impractical fluff. Not to say that it shouldn’t be taught but the real world has a curious tendency to fall very short of the ideal.

So far, I think box of Jack has been through at least 10 different designs, two hosts and three different blogging engines (Movable Type, Typo, WordPress). I was asked what it’d take to stop me blogging and all I could say was,

“Blogging has been that constant in my life for the longest time because I’m so connected to the internet. I spend 8 hours a day at a computer and then I go home and spend some more time on my laptop. In between, I use my phone to read the internet.”

Sure, my fire has been diluted somewhat with commercialization, Twitter, Tumblr, blog stats, lack of depression, and the sad loss of my imaginary girlfriend but I think I’ll stick around. Maybe I’ll finally get that book deal.

box of Jack is Jack Banh trying to write better, write more and find what excites him most about being alive. 18ee2665717544fe5b21551f9d9b2eb2