Fix WordPress Databases Infected With Spam Links By Automated Hacking Bots

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Users of WordPress 2.1 and possibly other versions have been the target of automated spam attacks – which are actually hacks against your site. The hacker has automatically targeted sites using 2.1 using a robot that exploits vulnerabilities in the wordpress code – see this page for more information:

http://gordon.dewis.ca/2008/01/06/expunging-the-wordpressnetin-spam-injection-hijack/

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Developing A Thai Text Sanitizer For Web Development

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

This blog post details the nature of problems when working with Thai text.

Anyone that has ever worked with the Thai language in web development surely encountered problems entering Thai text into webpages – HTML, XHTML and even XML. The main problem is that the Thai language does often not use spaces between characters / words and without spaces, web browsers and other document viewers may have no idea how to wrap text. Furthermore, Thai language is written in an LTR manner – meaning “Left To Right” alike many languages such as English and is not RTL as many non Thai speakers may think. For more information on script directions you should read the detailed article by the W3C.

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Hacking Drupal Project / Theme “Bluecurve” For Drupal 5.x

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

This Drupal theme project was created for Drupal 6.x. In order to hack it to work with Drupal 5.x the following changes can be made to page.tpl.php….

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Video Card / Video Config On Linux – Editing xorg.conf the X11 Configuration File

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

A simple restart of my Ubuntu Linux development server went drastically wrong when the system failed to start back up again. It was hanging on the Kubuntu splash screen after seeming to go through a regular error free boot. After a few restarts to elimiate any chance it was just being weird, the same thing kept happening. What was going wrong?

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Back From A MySQL Nightmare!

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

Finally, my MySQL databases and server are back online! It has been days and days of endless stress and nightmares.

The disaster started after what should have been a simple upgrade of MySQL server. The existing install went down while configuring to allow external connections and the newly reinstalled version would then not start as a service.

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Reminder – PHP4 Running Out Of Time

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

In a news release dated 13-Jul-2007, the PHP development team (http://php.net) announced the phasing out of PHP4…

“The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.”

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Microsoft “Home Server” Disaster Coming Soon

Friday, November 30th, 2007

According to Sky News in the UK, Microsoft has come up with a ”new idea”.

“Plug it into your broadband router, they say, wait 10 minutes, and it will have discovered all the computers, printers, scanners that you have on your system and linked them together.”

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Manually Repair Broken Blocks In Drupal

Friday, August 24th, 2007

Quite a few times I have had to manually repair MySQL databases in Drupal installs because new PHP code in a block is crashing. When you add a block written in PHP it may behave differently to when you have tested it outside of the CMS because of the way Drupal works.

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Drupal Module RoleSignUp Bug / Feature Request

Friday, August 17th, 2007

This is a great module for auto assigning roles… however there is a possible bug or unwanted effect in the function theme_rolelist in rolesignup.module I am posting my suggested fix here incase it does not get adopted by the modules developers, so that other developers can find it useful.

Navigate through the file rolesignup.module in the modules directory and modify the function so that it appears like so…

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Skype Down – Users Can’t Connect

Friday, August 17th, 2007

After two days of not being able to connect to Skype from my Linux system, I today noticed that Windows systems also can’t connect. What does this mean? It means its not an isolated problem specific to the client side programs on either Windows or Linux – it’s a server side software issue.

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