An evening with Google’s Marissa Mayer (alan.blog-city.com)

This is one of the best sites I’ve found for background graphics. Every texture variation tends to come in multiple colors. (Look for colors link.)

Barracuda Backgrounds.

Make little buttons on the fly thanks to Adam Kalsey:

Button Maker :: Kalsey Consulting Group

A nice guide to changing file permissions. Something I do so infrequently I cannot memorize.

chmod chown chgrp File Permissions

I purchased Ecto (formerly Kung Log) to make posting easier. It is kind of like Microsoft Word for blogging. You can bold and color text and even change the background color of text.

It didn’t work at first because an XML Parser was missing: /mt/extlib/XML/Parser/Lite.pm. I had just upgraded MovableType to version 3.14 from 2.6 and the new extlib did not contain this folder and file. I moved it from a back up copy and it worked. I got lucky to decipher this messy Server Error message, especially given Ecto 2 and MT 3.14 are so new there is nothing out there on Google about this:

Method metaWeblog.getRecentPosts produced a server error:

Application failed during request deserialization:

XML::Parser is not available and

Can’t locate XML/Parser/Lite.pm in @INC (@INC contains:

/Library/WebServer/Documents/mt/extlib –

/Library/WebServer/Documents/mt/lib –

/System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi2level –

/System/Library/Perl/5.8.1 –

/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level –

/Library/Perl/5.8.1 /Library/Perl –

/Network/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level –

/Network/Library/Perl/5.8.1 /Network/Library/Perl . –

at /Library/WebServer/Documents/mt/extlib/SOAP/Lite.pm –

line 1228.

Now playing: That’s Right (You’re Not From Texas) by Lyle Lovett

Gandalf (the white) was set up two weeks ago without anti-virus protection. So a worm (or two) moved in and started routing pirated files. This morning it started being so “loud” on the network it ground everything else to a halt.

I had to go make a personal call to perform surgery. Norton Anti-Virus found the following:

C:\WINNT\MSsrvs32.exe is infected with W32.Randex.gen

C:\WINNT\system32\MSsrvs32.exe is infected with W32.Randex.gen

C:\WINNT\system32\webchecks.dll is infected with W32.IRCBot

C:\WINNT\system32\dhcp\csrss.exe is infected with W32.IRCBot

C:\Documents and Settings\DoNotUse\payload.dat is infected with W32.Randex.gen

C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Templates\winspsv.exe is infected with W32.Spybot.Worm

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\payload.dat is infected with W32.Randex.gen

I had to manually delete MSsrvs32.exe and webchecks.dll using a command line because Norton and Windows were “denied access.”

When I logged into my.yahoo.com on my birthday, I spotted this subtle, friendly greeting at the top. It’s good to have friends in the Yahoo I.T. department.

I’m running into “URI” more and more in tech talk space.

URI = Universal Resource Identifier (in)

URL = Universal Resource Locator (out)

The hip initials are “URI” explained here.

I predict “the people” will keep “URL” alive. People like to talk a little geek, but not this much. A conversation I heard the other day: “No, that’s an e-mail address, what you need is the URL. URLs don’t have ats in them.”

Your blogs are safely backed up every day (and now I know for sure.) Finally got around to verifying that the daily backups using AutoMySQLDump can be used to restore the entire database. I ran a mini disaster recovery using the old iMac.

Note to self: Kept trying to use the command “mysqldump” to restore, but that is an output only command. Just using “mysql” and reversing the out character > with the in character < did it:

root# /usr/local/bin/mysql -umxxxxx -pgxxxxx mov_type < /2004-10-17.Sunday.sql

(User and password masked.)

SYDNEY, Australia — Swinburne University of Technology’s center for micro-photonics have constructed a model of the Sydney Opera House, see photo above, that is about half the diameter of a human hair. It is more than a million times smaller than the real Sydney structure. The model was built from a hybrid material of glass and polymer by firing intense laser light into the matter in a liquid state to create what to the human eye appears as an almost imperceptible dot, but under an electron microscope it contains the detail and the beauty of the iconic Sydney harbour side structure. (07/23/04 AP-Swinburne University)