Monthly Archives: December 2012

A new look / Death to spies

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[6 December 2012]

This blog has a new look, courtesy of the crackers who broke in and rendered it necessary to delete the blog, reinstall WordPress from trusted media, re-configure things, change passwords, and re-import the posts and comments. The old theme wasn’t part of the new installation, and while I kind of liked it, I didn’t like it enough to spend any time trying to retrieve it. The old theme was the then-current default theme for WordPress blogs; the new theme is (again) the default for WordPress blogs.

[“Are you kidding me? You can’t even be bothered to change the _____ theme?” hissed my evil twin Enrique at this point. “I did look at alternatives. Really. I just happened to like the default pretty well. It’s not like I’m lazy.” “Not just that you’re lazy, I think you mean?” sighed Enrique. “Oh, hush,” I said.]

The new theme seems to want a header image; I am grateful to Flickr for providing search qualifiers that allow one to search only for photos licensed under Creative Commons and allowing commercial use. The image above is drawn from a photo published on Flickr under the name Glass Bead Game by the photographer Darren Kirby of Edmonton, Alberta, to whom thanks (and an acknowledgement in the footer).

[“Wow,” said Enrique. “His blog photo makes him look way too young to be a reader of Hermann Hesse. Has there been a Hesse resurgence while I wasn’t looking?” “Not sure, but I think I heard that in fact there has been. It’s not the 80s anymore, Enrique.” “Are you sure? The House majority does not agree with you. And haven’t you heard anything about higher education in the UK lately? Sure sounds like Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain to me!” “Oh, be quiet, and leave politics out of this.”]

On the minus side, the links to other blogs have been lost, at least for the moment (I do have a list; it’s just a matter of typing them in again). And of course, I’ve lost a few days’ work (and counting), cleaning up after the Viagra hawkers.

On the plus side, I now have nicer blog backup utilities and more convenient tools for intrusion detection (on the theory that making them more convenient is a good way to increase the likelihood of their being used regularly). It turns out that when a web site is just a checked-out working copy of a Subversion repository which gets updated automatically when things are checked into the repository using a commit hook (as this Web site is), then just logging in to the server and running svn status gives you a nice list of things that have been placed on the server by intruders coming in the back door. So for those who do manage their sites this way, and who have never managed to get around to installing tripwire or similar tools, a local shell script reading, in its entirety, ssh hostname 'for d in *.com ; do (echo; cd $d; pwd; svn status); done' may be able to serve as at least a poor, partial substitute.

Still, while it’s almost always nice to learn new things, there are other things I’d rather have spent the last few days on. I find I have new sympathy for the motto Death to spies.