Alden Bates' Weblog

From the latest NZ TV Guide:

There's a slight problem with the picture they published. It's not David Tennant at all - it's football player Paul Gascoigne.

When you see this, post it.

"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."

-- President Bush, April 2004, nearly three years after he authorized secret domestic surveillance by the NSA without court orders or warrants.

Quote courtesy the transcript of Bush's speech, taken off the official White House site:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html

"WOOHOO! A scale model of a sailing ship"
-- fellow behind the counter at Caltex as he handed me 50 cents change.

"...but the judge set the Tribbles free"
-- TV3 news reporter reporting on this case.

If you were offended by the title of this post, that's probably a sign you won't like the rest of this post. :)

Recently I saw the Star Trek Enterprise episode "Fusion", in which Enterprise encountered a ship full of Vulcans who had embraced their emotions rather than suppressing them. The Vulcan ship had been in space for eight years. (Also, one of the Vulcans mind-raped T'Pol and gave her Vulcan AIDS, but that's irrelevant to this post).

I was also introduced to First TV Drama's Enterprise reviews, which point out the many inconsistencies in the episodes. I'm going to make specific reference to one bit of their review for "Fusion".

As Richard Whettestone points out about 2/3 of the way down that page, the ship has been out in space for 8 years. As we learned in the original series, male Vulcans get extremely horny every seven years, and it makes them go a wee bit insane. In the original series, this leads Spock to have a fight to the death with his best mate, Kirk. "If the Pon Farr makes a logical Vulcan go whacky, imagine what it does to emotional ones," says Richard.

It's my contention that Pon Farr would actually affect an overtly emotional Vulcan a lot less than the normal emotion-suppressing Vulcans.

Your normal everyday male Vulcan suppresses his emotions and is entirely logical. This means that logically he does not masturbate or have any sex as that would be illogical and a display of emotion. This leads to a gradual build up of sexual frustration, which the Vulcan routinely suppresses. When their seven years are up, the biologically-triggered Pon Farr causes a simultaneous release of all this pent-up sexual frustration, driving the poor fellow mad.

On the other hand, a Vulcan who has embraced his emotions would tend to have sex in his biological off-hours, as they were, or masturbate should he not be able to find a suitable partner. This means (a) no pent-up sexual tension, and (b) a better-adjusted Vulcan. Thus when they reach Pon Farr, the biological changes don't make as much difference to them.

In summary, Vulcans are not screwed up because they are wankers, but precisely because they are not.

Proof:

Yesterday: I awoke, looked at my clock, realised I was late, jumped out of bed and got half dressed before realising I'd just gotten up half an hour earlier than normal. I could have really used that half hour's sleep.

This morning: Hopped in my car, drove to work, stopped in the carpark... and realised I'd left my briefcase at home. With my wallet and everything in it.

Maybe I need to get up a half-hour earlier just to let my brain boot up. Tsk!

OK, A scant couple of days after we upgraded Teaspoon to a more secure version of eFiction, we were hacked into. The hackers used an exploit in eFiction to break in and add some code to one of the files. I have patched the exploit in the version of eFiction on our site, and notified the eFiction authors.

The hacker (who had a Russian IP address) changed a file to insert a 1x1 iframe on every page on the site. The URL they used was malformed and didn't work, but would have pointed at iframebiz.biz, which tried to load a Trojan onto the target's PC.

The registration info on iframebiz.biz is:
Ezhi Brozkevitsh
Al. Armii Ludowej 24
Warszawa 00-609
Poland
+21.225798***

I'm presuming he pays hackers to put code onto sites so he can infect PCs for whatever nefarious purpose.

Edit: the eFiction authors have already issued a security patch. :)

As I mentioned last night, I had to restore some database files. Unfortunately the backup I'd downloaded was in a tarred/gzip file with each database table represented by three files with the extensions frm, myd and myi. After googling a bit (dear Google: please don't bother giving me "Supplemental result" listings if the target page is gone and you don't have a cache copy of it. That's just dumb.) I found that these were raw SQL database files.

The only way to restore them is appeared to be to copy them directly to MySQL's data directory - the problem being that I didn't actually have access to the MySQL data directory on the web server in question. You would think, given that phpMyAdmin had given me these files as a backup that it would have an easy way to restore them, but if it does, I couldn't find it.

The solution ended up being:

1. Install MySQL and MySQL Administrator on my home PC.
2. Copy the appropriate table files to the MySQL data directory.
3. Use MySQL Administrator to make a backup in SQL format.
4. Use the SQL script from the backup to restore the table on the web site.

Once the tables were restored, I used a couple of SQL statements to copy the data across to the appropriate table, and all was hunky dory.

Some things were still broken after I did yesterday's upgrade, so I took a look tonight. Some of the fixes were easy, because they were things missing from the style template which were necessary for the new version. They'd turned up to have changed the default sort order on the story lists, which was easily fixed.

However two things weren't easily fixed: the chapter titles were gone (I presume this was a bug in the upgrade script) and the stories no longer had hit counters on them (they've been removed from the program for some unfathomable reason). Fortunately I had backups of the database, so I reimplemented hit counters, then restored the appropriate table under a new name and copied the appropriate values across.

The last step took a lot longer than it should have, for various reasons.

It was a lot of work, but hopefully people should be happier.

Tonight I spent upgrading A Teaspoon and an Open Mind to eFiction 2, because I found a post on the eFiction forum indicating that there were security holes in 1.1 which could allow people to view other user's passwords.

Looking at my previous entries on eFiction (keep in mind I'm only studying the code briefly here):

• Fixing the Teaspoon - The disappearing help text appears to be fixed in this version, but I can't tell whether they've implemented anything to fix Mac posting.
• eFiction sucks part 2 - I don't see any error handling for when the database is down, or when the story file is unable to be written.

Another thing I fixed a while back was the javascript on the "add story" page. There are two methods of uploading a story: write it in a textarea, or upload it as a text or html file. If you select the textarea, it disables uploading, and vice versa, but there's no way to switch, short of starting over.

At some point I will go back and reinsert my fixes... I'm sure the users will be kept busy by the many and varied new features the authors have added to the software in the meantime.

I cleaned my monitor earlier because the amount of dirt had been bugging me, only to discover that some of the dirt was not dirt at all. There are a number of fairly nasty scratches on the screen of my monitor. I'm not sure how they got there, but suspect that they might have been caused by me when I was putting the cover of my PC either on or off.

It's a CRT 19 inch ViewSonic monitor. Googling didn't help much, other than to instill a fear of imminent monitor implosion in me, so I may have to ask at stores tomorrow...