ask-mark.com

Once again I was notified that ask-mark.com was triggering virus/malware alerts for visitors. My preliminary investigation at work showed that I had some sort of script injected into my files again. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get cygwin and ssh to connect to my host through the proxy server.

When I got home, I connected to my host and poked around, investigating how my site got hacked again. Not finding any obvious evidence other than file modify dates from yesterday, I decided to restore from one of my snapshots. I found that a snapshot from last week was not affected by whatever hacked my site. I wanted to restore the snapshot without first deleting the entire contents of my site. So, I tried using cp -rf ..., but I found that I was still being prompted to overwrite files. A little searching, and I found that my .bashrc file had an alias for cp = 'cp -i' so that it always ran in interactive mode. Commenting out that alias prevented the overwrite prompts, and now my site is back. I went back and restored the alias to ensure I don’t accidentally overwrite a critical folder in the future.

I just found out that the website for another organization with which I work is facing a similar hack. Does anyone know how all of these websites are getting hacked? Are the CMS packages (WordPress, .NET Nuke) insecure? Or are hackers gaining access some other way?

Also, never underestimate the usefulness of backups.

I should be studying for my MSIT 431 Statistics midterm right now, but I decided to have a short Google Reader break. Of course, the break is a little bit longer than I had originally planned. The current reason? No, it’s not the 25 things meme on Facebook. I made a Twitter mosaic after seeing @MrsCDG’s (Carla) Twitter mosaic.

Here’s my mosaic of Twitter friends (tweeps that have reciprocated my following them):

Get your twitter mosaic here.

If you’re on Twitter, follow me @markomni. Then, make your own Twitter mosaic.

Browsing through my RSS feeds, I came across today’s quizzes from mental_floss. The first quiz was Name the Weasleys in 2 Minutes, and I didn’t even bother to try it once I read that there were seven Weasley children. I only knew of four right away, and Chris had to remind me about a fifth one that I had already seen in the movies. The second quiz for today was Name the 30 Dow Jones Index Companies in 10 Minutes. After I took that quiz, I saw a few more quizzes. Here is a roundup of the quizzes and my results (in numbers, not the answers):

• Name the 30 Dow Jones Index Companies in 10 Minutes – 14 our of 30
• Name the Muppet Babies in 5 Minutes – 10 out of 10
• Name the Monopoly Properties in 5 Minutes – 18 out of 28
• Name That Beatles Album – 1 out of 11 (Chris got 8 out of 11 – it’s a tough one)
• A ‘Saved by the Bell’ Quiz – 6 out of 15

So, those are the quizzes I took today. Why don’t you give them a go and post your results below. If you find any other good quizzes, post those, too.

There once was a time that I posted multiple entries in a day on my blog, and on a regular basis. My most active month on the blog resulted in 30 posts. That was December 2005, the end of my most active year on my blog, averaging almost 19 posts per month (ppm). I slowed down a bit in 2006, averaging just over 11 ppm, and I averaged 14 ppm in 2007. So far in 2008, I have averaged just under 9 ppm. Since may, I have not had more than 7 posts in a single month. December is almost over, I’ve averaged only 2.5 posts per month since September, and that includes this post! I have managed to always have at least 2 ppm since my first post on February 28, 2003.

Then came October of last year. All of a sudden my wife is on Facebook trying to communicate with current and former students. I decided that if my wife had finally bit the bullet on this, I might as well, too. Pretty quickly after setting up my profile on Facebook, I jumped onto Twitter. Between being able to tweet from my cell phone and getting Twitter to update my Facebook status, I had quick access to microblog on-the-go. Unfortunately for my blog, that meant not sitting down and hammering out posts.

This post is itself an example of this. I originally started writing this post in September, but it had sat untouched as a draft since September 25th. Why? Because it was much more convenient to microblog on Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, BrightKite and TwitPic, than it was to open up my WordPress admin page and finish the post. I even found it easier to just share the interesting things I had read in Google Reader, or post links to other cool things using delicious.

Of course, it didn’t help that I was spending eight hours in class every Saturday and an additional five to ten hours per week on homework. So, I guess in addition to Facebook and Twitter, I can blame my lack of blog activity on grad school, too.

We’ll see if I can bring the activity up a little bit during my short break (only to see the activity plummet again in mid-January as the new quarter starts). We’ll see how that goes.

I saw this post on rachelleb.com about a Flickr meme. It’s simple to do: use your answers to each of the following questions as searches in Flickr. For each search, pick one image from only the first page of results. Paste the URL to the Flickr photo page for that image into Mosaic Maker. Produce a 3×4 mosaic of your photo picks, and publish it somewhere. Enjoy!

The questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favorite drink?
7. What is your dream vacation?
8. What is your favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to do when you grow up?
10. Who/ what do you love most in life?
11. Choose one word that describes you?
12. What is your Flickr name?

I heard about this on the radio this morning, but I completely forgot about it on my walk from the car into the office. Thanks to Clint for reminding me.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything of substance here. I’ve been too busy with real life lately that I haven’t had much time to pound out a full post. A lot of what I’ve had to say over the past few weeks has ended up on either Twitter or my shared items. Some of those items are NSFW, or will at least result in strange looks from those around you.

As you may have read, I took the leap and bought Xbox 360 Elite and Rock Band, stimulating the economy just a little bit. So far I think it was money well-spent. I found out last week at Pete’s graduation party that Mike and I actually have different versions of the Xbox 360. I was unable to plug my AC adapter into his Xbox 360, and I found out that there was a change to the design sometime between June 2007 and January 2008. This resulted in a lower-power AC adapter for my Xbox 360, which has a different plug than Mike’s. It was pretty annoying, because the Xbox 360 Wikipedia entry is the only place I was able to find why I couldn’t use my AC adapter with his Xbox 360.

With the new console, I also signed up for a Xbox Live Gold membership with the gamertag markomni80. I tried to sign up with markomni, but the registration site kept telling me it was in use. After being frustrated with it for a few days, I gave up trying to get my gamertag and just signed up with my alternate screenname. Now I can do cool things like purchase new songs for Rock Band and play the game with Hersch or Mike or whomever.