Category: living

A few days ago Jason Kottke linked to this review of a new book on the growing economic divide.

As someone who worked full time through college and financed classes and books with the help of my wife and our credit cards, I can relate. Passages like this bring back memories:

Here, the world of possibility is shrinking, often dramatically. People are burdened with debt and anxious about their insecure jobs if they have a job at all. Many of them are getting sicker and dying younger than they used to. They get around by crumbling public transport and cars they have trouble paying for. Family life is uncertain here; people often don’t partner for the long-term even when they have children. If they go to college, they finance it by going heavily into debt. They are not thinking about the future; they are focused on surviving the present. The world in which they reside is very different from the one they were taught to believe in. While members of the first country act, these people are acted upon.

Thankfully, that was almost 14 years ago and my family has moved on. For others, the situation is only getting worse.

I believe there are those in the “first country” who are willing to help (I like to think I’m one of them), but the current political climate makes this almost impossible.

» America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People

I’m paid to spend my days staring at a softly glowing LCD. In the midst of writing code and attending meetings, I also browse the web. Most people would consider me an old-school web surfer. I still follow blogs and read posts in an RSS reader (Feedly if you must know).

I realize that long-form writing has mostly fallen out of favor, but I still enjoy it. As a matter of fact, I frequently come across articles that I feel need to be shared with the world. In the past, I’ve posted these articles on Facebook or Twitter, but I find that the less time I spend in the social media cesspool, the better I feel.

Having said all that, I plan to start adding links to articles that I particularly enjoy to this site. I’ll probably include a pithy comment along with a qoute or two. My interests are fairly varied — I still read a lot about programming, but trending towards more Python for data science and machine learning. I’m also interested in the current political situation and its effect on economics and the world.

If your interests overlap mine, you might enjoy some of the same articles. If not, feel free to keep on scrolling.

If you’re reading this, then the migration from WordPress to Jekyll is complete. WordPress is a great blogging platform, but it just doesn’t fit the way I work anymore. I spend my days using git and GitHub and everything I write is plain text in Markdown.

With Jekyll I can write posts using Markdown in my favorite text editor, Byword on iOS or Atom on everything else, then commit to GitHub to update the blog. Hopefully this will result in more frequent updates, but no promises…

Where Are The Comments?

I’m very grateful for all of the awesome comments I’ve received over the years. Unfortunately, comment spam is still a big problem. Even with tools like Akismet to filter comments, some manual labor is still required. Here are the numbers for my blog as of today:

That’s right – there are 123 comments on the site and 170,348 were blocked as spam. There are also 94 comments that might be spam. Those need my attention. I exported all of the non-spam comments from the old WordPress blog. Those may come back someday, but probably not. In the mean time, you can find my contact information at the bottom of every page.

A few readers have also asked me to add an Unfollow button for the sample social network in Rails Crash Course. Here’s how I made that happen:

I created a new branch called unfollow-user and added the Unfollow button.

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Update config/routes.rb to include a route for unfollow_user. Since this removes a row from the database, I used the DELETE HTTP verb.
2. Add an unfollow! method to app/models/user.rb, similar to the follow! method.
3. Add an unfollow action to app/controllers/users_controller.rb, similar to the follow action.
4. Add a Unfollow button to the view at app/views/users/show.html.erb. I also added some logic to show the correct button.

The changes are in this commit: 29fa67a

Hope this helps!

A reader asked if I could add the destroy action to CommentsController for the sample blog in Rails Crash Course. The changes are summarized below.

I created a new branch called comments-destroy and then added the destroy action.

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Update config/routes.rb to include a route for comments destroy
2. Add a destroy method to app/controllers/comments_controller.rb
3. Add a Destroy link to the comment partial at app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb

The changes are in this commit: f410496

Note this is the same as Exercise 3 at the end of Chapter 5. The answers for all exercises are in the back of the book.

Hope this helps!

The Getting Started with Ruby on Rails workshop has been cancelled due to lack of signups. That’s a shame, I was really looking forward to this one. Obviously I didn’t do the best job of getting the word out about this event.

Let me know if you were also looking forward to it and I’ll see if I can set up another session in the future. Another alternative might be something like a screencast or Google Hangout.

I’m giving the beginner talk at this month’s Austin on Rails meeting. Come to Capital Factory at 7:00pm on January 27 to learn about Active Record Associations. After my talk, Steve Madere is covering Hobo. Austin on Rails is always a lot of fun. The Rails community in Austin is great, there’s free pizza, and drinks and socialization after the meeting.

I’m also leading an evening workshop called Getting Started with Ruby on Rails for General Assembly on Monday, February 2 from 7:00pm – 9:00pm. General Assembly is new in Austin, but the company has been around since 2011. Today they teach classes all over the world.

This workshop covers the tools used by Ruby on Rails programmers, the basics of the Ruby programming language, and the components of Rails and how they work together. If you know the basics of web development, and are curious about building web apps with Rails, come spend the evening with me and see what Rails is all about.

I spoke at Austin on Rails on October 28. I talked about new features coming up in Rails 4.2. There’s no video of that talk, but the slides are available on Speaker Deck.

I also gave a live webcast for O’Reilly called Rails 4 Application Security on November 12. The video will be available at the previous link. The slides for this talk are also on Speaker Deck.

I remember September 9, 1999 like it was yesterday…

Paige and I were living in a tiny upstairs apartment. Thanks to a friend of a friend, we were some of the first people in town to have a cable modem.

Back then it was uncapped and since we were officially helping to “test” it, I think it was free for the first few months. Going from around 50k dial-up to at least 5,000k cable made the internet a lot more enjoyable.

Also around this time I discovered a new program called Napster. It was a friendly place where people got together and shared music.  While you were downloading songs from other users you could chat with them about their collections.

The generosity of others, combined with the cable modem, meant I was able to download music faster than we could listen to it. It was fun to have friends over on the weekend and let them pick what they wanted to hear from my endless jukebox.

This was also around the time of our complaint to Domino’s Pizza.  Our pizza arrived cold, and Paige called to tell them about it.  The person on the phone replied “No problem Ms. Lewis.  We’ll get another pizza out to you right away.  You’re one of our best customers.  You’ve ordered over 100 pizzas this year.”  Apparently we ate a lot of pizza in those days.

The big news story at the time was Y2K.  Many people believed that at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999 every computer in the world would stop working.  This would cause a world-wide black out, stock markets would crash, dogs and cats would live together, etc.

I set the clock on my computer ahead to December 31, 1999 at 11:59 PM and watched it roll over to January 1, 2000.  Nothing bad happened so I wasn’t too worried.

In an effort to make Y2K seem a little scarier, some news outlets also reported on the 9-9-99 bug.  Supposedly, four nines was the code that told some mainframes to end the currently running program.  The theory was that when the mainframes encountered this date, they would stop working.

This sounded as ridiculous to me then as it does now. So, on September 9, 1999 I wrote my first ever blog post about the 9999 bug.  (That’s right kids, I was blogging when blogging wasn’t cool.)

I had a few web pages before that date, but this was the first thing I ever wrote in the “blog” style.  It was a title with a few paragraphs of text, posted on a certain date. I didn’t call it a blog, of course. I had seen a few people set up their web sites like this before and I wanted to try it out myself.

Things have changed a lot since those days.  Back then I updated the site by editing the HTML in notepad and using WS_FTP to upload the pages to a web server.  I’ve moved on through several different programs to write blog posts, but I made sure to preserve that first post through all of the moves.

Do you have your own blog?  Is it full of spam?  Are you sure?

A while back a friend of mine asked me a question about her blog.  Everything looked normal in every newsreader except for Google Reader.  In Google Reader every post appeared to be nothing but pharmacy spam.

I looked for the spam in view source, I downloaded the feed and checked it, I even crawled through the PHP code looking for a clue.  Everything looked perfectly normal.  It wasn’t until I started digging through the database, that I discovered what was happening.

Somehow, the spammers replaced two plugins on her site with their own malicious plugins.  These new plugins changed the contents of each post based on the referrer.  That’s why spam only showed up when viewed by Google.

The clue was in the “wp_options” table in a field called “active_plugins”.  I noticed a couple of plugins that started with a dot.  For example, instead of “akismet/akismet.php”, the name was more like “akismet/.akismet.php”.

In Unix, file names that begin with a dot are hidden by default.  The initial dot is so subtle that most people won’t even notice it in the database.  Especially since there’s lots of other information in that field.

Discovery

Here’s a simple way to check your site for this kind of spam.  You can restrict a Google search to a single site by adding “site:domain” to your query.  For example, to search for the word Vaigra on my site try something like this:

viaghra site:anthonylewis.com

This should only show one result for my site – this page.   Put your domain name in place of “anthonylewis.com” to see the results for your site.  If you get lots of results, then you have a problem.

Removal

The first thing I did to remove the spam was change all of her passwords – WordPress, Database, and FTP.  We used much more secure passwords.  I have another post in the works that addresses secure passwords.

Next, I made sure she was running the latest version of WordPress.  Updating WordPress is getting easier all the time.  It’s always been a simple 2-3 step process, but now it’s almost automatic.

Finally, I removed the plugin files with the initial dots and cleared the “option_value” from the database for “active_plugins”.  This disables all of the plugins.  Don’t forget to enable the ones you really need.

Aftermath

Unfortunately, the spam on her site still shows up in Google’s cache.  It’s been over a week now.  I’m not sure how long Google keeps pages in their cache, but this should go away soon.

One option I would recommend if you’re having a problem with stale data in Google’s cache is the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.  This plugin maintains an XML file that lets Google know where to find things on your site and when they were last updated.

Help

Let me know if you’re having this problem.  I have a lot of experience working with WordPress and I would love to help you out.  Leave a comment below or click the Contact link at the top of the page if you’re shy.

I provide advice and guidance for free.  If you’d rather I log on to your site and completely remove this mess, I’ll do that for a small fee.