A resource wiki just for the Atheosphere

April 27, 2009 Db02 Comments

Unveiling the Atheist Resources, a project which hopes to provide a valuable centralized resource to the Atheosphere. By Freethinkers, for Freethinkers.

Would you like to have a place where all information relevant to Atheist Blogging would be gathered and constantly updated for your benefit? Well for the last few months ((Well, more like days of actual work, as the whole thing stayed basically idle for most of its existence)) me and Larro have been working exactly on such project to provide some help for Atheists, especially the bloggers but not excluding those who take a more passive look.

I conceived the idea once I noticed the large number of resources, ideas and tips that existed and the many ways that bloggers had put them to user. For example, the simple concept of a blogroll had allowed the Atheist Blogroll to exist, from which many other stuff could be based on such as a search engine in atheist blogs or optimized reading lists. Furthermore, many atheists were blogging about ways to use the various tools online, such as Technorati, Reddit, Stumbleupon and the like.

But all this information was dispersed and difficult to find, especially for people who were just joinging the game. So it would be a great idea to have a centralized place where all such information would be gathered and through crowdsourcing improved over time to be as comprehensive as possible.

Thus, the Atheist Resources project was born.

At the moment, this project is still in very early infancy and up to now it’s been mostly me and Larro who’ve been adding to it. I’ve been concentrating on the Toolkit while Larro on the Blog Directory (and the site layout). The former is to allow people to discover useful stuff for their sites while the later is to add a bit of self-management to the Atheist Blogroll and easy updating.

The project is based on the excellent DocuWiki software with a theme that approximates the Wikipedia one (I guess to make the whole thing more familiar. The wiki format should allow us to easily add, remove and update information without fear of losing it and without having to go through a difficult approval process. Everyone is welcome to join.

Of course, this won’t go anywhere fast with only just 2 people on it, so I think it’s about time that I put out the word on the Atheosphere and invite y’all to join. Strangely I’m not the first to mention this as the Jewmanist somehow discovered its existence early and blogged about it already. Unfortunately this didn’t elicit much of a response.

So what is the current functionality? Well of course it’s a wiki so you’ll be able to quickly add and edit anything. I’ve also enabled pingback functionality which means that when the AR links to a blog, it will appear (if this functionality exists – yes, I’m looking at you Blogspot) and when a blog links tot he AR, this will appear on the site as well. This way if someone writes on a topic, say, Technorati, and links to the AR, theit entry will show on the Technorati page for people looking for this information to follow.

Then there’s tags, which is something I’m hoping might become useful for sites listed on the Blogroll. Through them, one should be able to see which Atheist Blogs write about a particular subject and visit them. Along with all the information that should be present on each Blog’s listing, this should enable people to find Atheist bloggers with similar interests easily.

And that’s just the begginging. I’m hoping that with all these brillliant Freethinkers out there, we can make this something unique and useful. So I hope to see you all there.

Site Hiccups

April 23, 2009 Db02 Comments

Sorry for the inconvenience. I’m beating the php gremlins as we speak.

: Image via Wikipedia

My site has recently been trying to emulate a yo-yo. Apologies to everyone who’s been trying to access it and seeing either 404 errors or Internal Server Errors. Believe me, I’m more annoyed than you are by this.

This is a really tricky issue. I wanted to blame my host but I don’t think they are the cause. Something is corrupting one of my database tables which ends up causing php5 processes to hang and eventually consume all my RAM. I don’t know what it is and it’s not easy to find, particularly since I’m without internet at home and have to troubleshoot from work. That means no ssh terminal access and only a web-based ftp access and the php webadmin. Fortunately they were enough for the restore.

I am nevertheless getting mighty pissed off from all of this, particularly since this is not something easy to troubleshoot. I was lucky to get a quick reply to my question on the Worpdress fora but I haven’t received any more help on this. For some reason I suspect Intense Debate as it the one with the most common connections to the DB. Particularly since after disabling it and repairing the tables, the problem mostly went away. I was about the write a very exasperated support ticket to them but I wasn’t very sure so I left it for a bit.

I fully expect this to happen again soon and hopefully I’ll have a better idea where to look then (and hopefully some ssh access).

Still quite exasperated.

Ska-P is on tour?! FFFFFFFUUUUUU

March 18, 2009 Db01 Comment

Ska-P is coming to Greece and I won’t be around. No vacation allowed in this period 🙁

: Ska-P (via last.fm)

I just realized I missed the Ska-P concert in germany after their recent reunion. Now I find out that in mid-May they’re going to be in Greece and specifically in my home city Thessaloniki. To say that I’d like to see them live would be an understatement. Judging by how awesome and dancealicious their songs are by default, their live shows must be amazing fun.

[youtube]4nmO54Tf5vM[/youtube]

So the title of this article goes to the fact that I will lose this concert unless I pull a brilliant plan to somehow be in Greece at this particular Fortunately for me, We (me and the gf) already plan to be there at around this time but we were planning for around June. I need to simply make pull it back a bit.

[youtube]Q-Iv7JqlTjw[/youtube]

I was totally hooked to Ska-P from a colleague a few years ago and I’ve become a big fan since then. By the time I learned about them they had already disbanded but in 2008 they rejoined and brought a new album (which I need to acquire post-haste). Not only do they make awesome music – combining folk, metal and punk in a wonderful mix of Ska – but they also have a very uplifting tone and lyrics centered around liberty, anti-capitalism and racism. Just perfect.

[youtube]cZhl8HU2WQI[/youtube]

So um, yeah. Other than a blatant opportunity for me to post some vids of them in an attempt to hook y’all. This was simply an exclamation on the fact that I may lose my last chance to see them. This must not be.

All your comments are belong to us

March 5, 2009 Db015 Comments

Intense Debate Comments makes a significant step towards outpacing the competition. Introducing Plugins

Just in case you missed it, Intense Debate just announced that their plugin system has gone live (most likely in direct response to their competitor’s major announcement). This is the kind of news that I’ve been waiting for a while now and I’m very glad this had now been released. At the moment there are not many plugins available, only integrated seesmic and youtube comments, smilies and polls. Of all these, I’m mostly interested in the smilies right now but that’s not the important thing anyway.

The important thing is that now the functionality of IDC can be improved at the whims of the community in any direction people wish to take it. No more do people need to beg the developers to implement the latest shiny feature, they can simply code it themselves. And thus the doors of innovation are now open wide.

It’s impossible to avoid seeing the hand of Automattic behind this latest release (or as I like to call it, the feature to end all features) as they are the makers of the most popular WordPress blogging platform who’s greatest power is certainly the ability for anyone to make plugins for it. Allowing users to extend the functionality of the program on their own is the single most important capability most modern succesful software have had. From Firefox, to WordPress and now, to Intense Debate.

So now all that’s left to do if for us to add the kind of features we want to have. There’s already quite a few wordpress plugins to extend the comment functionality which could not really work with an outsourced system and all those developers finally have a way to port their functionality natively.

Hopefully, this should free the hands of the IDC developers from getting tied into an feature war and let them focus on improving the stability of the platform and squashing many of the long outstanding bugs.

Imho, IDC has just pulled the rug out of the competition. I’m now very excited on what the future will bring and so should you..What do you mean you don’t have Intense Debate installed? What are you waiting for?

WARNING: There seems to be a conflict with the prototype javascript library (which is included with WordPress and can be activated through various plugins). If after activating the plugins for your blog you are not auto-logged in and your threading buttons stop working, this is probably the reason. Disable the plugins and monitor the support topic for updates. UPDATE: 2 hours later, and this bug is squashed. Activate at will. Now that’s some quick support 🙂

Gah, cracked again

March 1, 2009 Db015 Comments

The site got compromised yet again. This time through a cross-site exploit. More aggravation follows. Some more information about what happened is discussed.

Has anyone smeared honey all over my site while I wasn’t looking? Once again I find out the Division by Zer0 has been compromised and spam links are being inserted invisible into my content. And that’s only 10 days after the last time. Argh!

This time I didn’t discover it through a google search but rather when someone from NoState.com contacted me through IM to let me know. This time the spam links were not hidden from the normal source but rather simply invisible in the normal page. This at least makes them much easier to find out and know when you’ve removed them. Nevertheless, this always feels like a very nasty violation every time it happens.

However the exploit was better hidden this time. It wasn’t just a few files hidden in my subdirectories but rather code inserted in my actual wordpress and theme files. This seemed to have been done through some kind of xss exploit but I have no idea how it managed it as I’m running the lastest WP version. Fortunately Adrian was good enough to point out a wordpress support thread for my exact issue which helped me locate and rip out the source of the spam quickly. This is why it pays to microblog your aggravation I guess 🙂

Btw, I also noticed that the previous malicious cache.php file had reappeared in my wp-content folder. This time I saved a copy before deleting it and now you can all see what kind of crap they put in your server. Notice the quite humorous note telling you that “modified republishing is restricted”. Or what? Are they going to take you to court?

At least this later crack forced me to finally go ahead and lockdown my site even more. Now the site root, wp-content and my theme directory are read-only from my user as well. Let’s hope this doesn’t create any issues. Unfortunately I cannot make the plugin directory read only as very often they need to write in there as well but I don’t think this was done through a plugin so I think I’m good.I’ve also finally changed the prefix for all my database tables to avoid any zero-day exploits which I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

I also tried to install one logging plugin I saw mentioned in the wordpress forum but unfortunately it didn’t work for me. What would be really great however is a way to monitor all your site files for changes and whenever any file is modified or added, an email would be dispatched to the admin. Sure, you might get notifications for when you upload a new plugin or add new images through wordpress’ builtin function but you could easily ignore those. But when you see a change in your index.php that you didn’t initiate, then certainly something needs to be checked.

On a more positive note, I’ve gone ahead and integrated with Google’s Friend Connect. You can probably see it already on my sidebar where you can add yourself as a “member” of the site, whatever that is. I used to have Facebook but that requires you to add a FB application which not everyone cares to do. Everyone and their mother has a a google account by now however so hopefully this may give me a better idea of how many people like the site enough to register themselves.

But I swear, if I get compromised again, I’m going for a complete wipe and reinstall. It can only mean that I’ve got a trojan that won’t stop making my life difficult.

Microsoft is building the best products says Techdirt

February 27, 2009 Db012 Comments

Just because someone is gaining market share does not automatically mean that they have better products. Apprently the free market supporters of Techdirt are unable to understand that.

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I’d never imagine I’d see this argument by anyone, especially by someone who aims to be an authority in tech sector reporting but it seems that ideology trumps facts. See Techdirt’s Mike’s (I assume Masnick?) latest quote:

And, for that matter, I’d suggest that you’re wrong in your initial assessment. Microsoft beat all of the companies you listed above by creating a BETTER PRODUCT.

Lolwut.

Now let’s see

MS Word VS Wordprerfect
Exchange VS Lotus Notes
Internet Explorer 6 VS Opera
MS-Dos VS DR-Dos
Active Directory VS Novell Netware

There’s a lot of other products that suffered the same fate because of the way MS “competes” which has nothing to do with building better products. Indeed all tech experts were scratching their head how an upstart competitor with a clearly inferior product could be winning market share against his well entrenched opponents.

The answer of course is by anti-competitive tactics, which is to say, by doing anything else except building a better product. If there’s anything to be said about Microsoft products is that they have always been second class with a lot of bugs features that nobody wanted. And yet, they win.

Still, Techdirt seems unable to recognise this fact. This can only be because free market idealism has clouded their minds so much that monopolies and shady practices don’t even register. No, everything is fair competition as far as they’re concerned. But this is of course a fallacious reasoning as their argument goes like this.

Products/Companies in the free marketwho gain market space do so by building better products
Microsoft is gaining market space
Therefore Microsoft must be building better products.

Of course this is patently ridiculous, as the very first premise is wrong. Companies have many means in their disposal to gain market space that don’t involve building better products. From using your monopolistic market share to strong arm your allies to drop the competitor’s products, to setting fire to the other’s stores.

Wether Microsoft is gaining or losing market share is does not tell us anything about the quality of their products or their tactics from the very simple fact that correlation does not equal causation. To find out what is causing this, you need to look deeper into practices and product comparisons, something which Techdirt is apparently unwilling to do and much prefers the lazy way out.

The fastest caching combo for WordPress. Am I in a cached Nirvana?

February 20, 2009 Db035 Comments

Caching in Wordpress is the best way to increase your performance. This post reviews two new plugins, Hyper Cache and DB Cache and how they can work together

: Image via Wikipedia

I hope you’ve recently noticed a significant improvement in the speed of the Division by Zer0. I’ve done some further testing and I think I’ve discovered the perfect combination of tools which, at least for me, has made everything much snappier.

Last time I was playing around with Dreamhost’s FastCGI option ((Since disabled as it seemed to cause more problems than it solved)) as well as trying out a few newer caching plugins since Super Cache didn’t really play nice. Specifically I was testing Hyper Cache and DB Cache and trying to decide which one is better to keep. Well, in the end I figured out that using both is even better, and now I’m going to tell you why 🙂

Hyper Cache

This one is one serious mutha. It basically does the same thing as Super Cache but without requiring you to edit your .htaccess or other such hassle ((And removing it is simple too, unlike Super Cache)). All you have to do is activate and go. And the results are really stunning. With it activated, I routinely get pages loading in sub-second speeds (whereas before the average was 2-6 seconds) on cached pages with very low overhead, which means I can withstand traffic spikes.

I was so impressed I spent an afternoon just reloading pages to admire how fast they loaded 🙂

Of course this plugin will not help with javascripts speed so if you have a lot of ’em, you will still notice your site taking a bit. However you should notice that the loading starts immediately and then waits for each javascript to download and run (so you’ll see the page appear in stages) instead of waiting a bit until it even starts loading (while it’s gathering prerunning the php and quering the DB). As such, if you have most of your javascripts loading at the footer (as you should), your content will appear immediately for your audience to start reading, and by the time they’re one the second sentence, the page will have finished.

My main problem was exactly that incidentally, that the content took up to 5 seconds to even appear. As long as the main text is there, I don’t mind so much how long it takes for the rest of the “bling” to load.

Another good thing about hyper cache is that it will not activate if you’re logged in to your wordpress installation. This means that in order to see the speed of your site as it appears to everyone else, you either need to use another browser (I keep a konqueror lying around just for this) or to clear your cookies. On the upside, it means that you almost always see the current version when you make non-content changes, such as editing your theme (as the cache will be automatically cleared if you make content changes.) This really helps if you like to tweak your site layout a lot.

One last (bad) thing I’ve noticed is that if I go ahead and clear all hyper cache. My site will die with an internal server error. I’ve tried this twice now. I do not know if that is because my site would die if hyper cache was not there or because once the cache is cleared, there some heavy duty function running to repopulate it or whatever. I know it happens though. I don’t have to do this anymore however so it’s not really a problem.

Overall, Hyper Cache is an absolute win for people hosting their own WordPress, especially if you’re on a shared hosting plan and even more especially if you’re using Dreamhost PS, as Super Cache is not an option.

DB Cache

This plugin takes a novel approach to caching. Whereas all the other that exist simply save the html output of your content and then serve it to avoid running PHP code each time a page is requested, DB Cache saves database query output to avoid making SQL calls to it.

This has a few significant benefits. First of all, it helps with Search Engine crawlers such as the google bot. Where a normal caching plugin really shines when a lot of people access one specific page, it actually harms you when one agent accesses a lot of pages, since you add the cache-saving to your load, on top of the normal page loading. DB cache on the other hand, by caching common Database queries, can fill exactly that hole which significantly reduces the juice you need to serve all the bots crawling you.

This is becauseeach page of your site, other than the main content and possible some post-related queries (ie similar posts), has basically the same calls. Your recent posts, your tag clouds and category lists, recent comments etc, depending on what widgets and theme you use. These generally don’t change from page to page but for a normal caching plugin on a new page, they still need to be called so that the full html page can be saved.

So by caching all these common calls, you seriously reduce the time one needs to wait on a blank screen before a page can even start loading the content. You also reduce the load when a crawler does his daily thing and you even increase the speed of the occasional visitor from a mobile. While DB cache will not give you the awesome speed hyper cache will on a single page load, it will certainly reduce your overall server’s CPU & RAM load (much more important than bandwidth and disk space for shared hosting) and make visits to uncommon pages quicker.

Another plus which I’ve discovered is when you are using Gallery2 through the wpg2 plugin. Gallery is imho a database chewer because people don’t simply see one image and then leave, but rather switch quickly among a lot of them. As a result, DB Cache is perfectly prepared to grab those common queries done through wpg2 and save them for later, increasing the overall speed.

The caching combo of ultimate speed

Until now I’ve never mixed caching plugins as they all generally worked in the same or similar way. However the distinct way these two worked gave me the impression that they wouldn’t really conflict and might actually complement each other quite well. One of them is built for serving one page to lost of visitors in a short time period, while the other is perfect for serving many pages to one visitor. So I went ahead and activated both of them at the same time

And whatdayaknow, there was no explosion 🙂

What happens at the moment is that generally, a page always has at least a few queries cached by DB Cache. You can even see the cached queries increasing with each time it’s reloaded (when bypassing hyper cache). This in turn allows a non-hypercached page to load quicker which is then saved into hyper cache for further visitors.

So currently you see the results of this experiment. I’d like to believe that my speed at the moment is quite good and others who have followed my advice have experienced similar improvements. I really hope this is the last time I have to play with caches in the future and that the current speeds are not just an illusion.

Let me know of the results if you try the same combo on your own sites.

I feel exploited

February 18, 2009 Db07 Comments

The Division by Zer0 has been exploited with Spam Keyword injections. Aggravating! This post gives some more information on that.

Goddamnit! Someone, managed somehow to insert malicious php scripts into the site which were injecting invisible spam links to my content. Even more insidiously, those links were not injected to the html source of the page unless the browser user agent reported that it was a googlebot, making them all but impossible to see with a normal browser.

I was lucky to notice this because in the Google Webmaster tools I still had my site address added as www.dbzer0.com which was wrong as I’m not using the www. part anymore. Fortunately however, this allowed the site stats to show the keywords in the content instead of simply how people are linking to it, which made all the spam stand out.

When I saw that my fist action was to do a search just to see if I was possibly looking at outdated data. Unfortunately, the results were not uplifting.

This was not good. Looking at the cached copies of these pages, it was obvious that these links existed at least since the start of February which means that whatever is causing this, was added after my upgrade to WP2.7 or managed to remain active after it. The source code for the googlebot looked like this, when it should have been looking like this. The links were apparently pointing to redirection scripts in a cracked Movable Type based blog. I’ve fired an email to the author to advise him to take the site down but have heard nothing from him yet.

Take note people: If you’re not going to keep your site updated and patched, either take it down, or export it into pure html and let that stand. Don’t let your obsolete php and mysql setup running as that just invites people to turn your old site into a spam haven.

At this point I started looking around the interwebs in a bit of a panic as hate this kind of shit being associated with me. I couldn’t find anything exactly like what I had unfortunately. The only thing coming close that I found was this post which at least gave me some ideas on where to look.

I was able to discover 2 malicious php scripts residing in my wp-content folder. One was called cache.php and was on directy under /wp-content/ while the other was in the /wp-content/uploads and had a weirder name (can’t remember now). I summarily deleted them (although in retrospect I should have probably saved them for all of you to see) but I did notice the ironic comment inside, warning people not to copy them and pass them around.

I couldn’t find anything else after that but I was still not certain I was rid of the spam. A quick look through the google bot’s eyes showed me that the page didn’t return any spam results but that could also be because the script doing it is smart enough to recognise fake google agents. The only real way to find out if this still happens is to wait until Google indexes one of the spammed posts again and see if the spam links still appear.

As a precautionary measure, I also changed my WP password (as unlikely as it is that it would have been cracked through brute force) and looked around for anything that can help me discover such stuff in the future. I did find a plugin that looks very promising in this regard but unfortunately due to the way it asks for RAM and the setup of my host’s php, I can’t allocate enough memory for it to run. A last precaution was to add a search alert for these keywords appearing on my site which will, if I get cracked in the future again, give me notice within a few days.

On a more positive note, hopefully by removing these huge-ass scripts (many hundreds of line of code each) perhaps the load on my server will be reduced as well. But I’d be happy even if I simply see these keywords disappear from the Webmaster tools soon.

Who knew WordPress excerpts were so useful?

February 18, 2009 Db01 Comment

Did you know about the amazing potential of Wordrpess excerpts? This is a short description and a link to an excellent article explaining their utility.

: Image via Wikipedia

I’ve always wanted to put the excerpt field provided by wordpress to some good use but I never really realized what the best way to go about it would be and/or why I should spend the time writing an extra piece of information for the post. Until now I’ve sometimes used them for replacing the frontpage snippet in case it broke due to not properly close html code and the like but nothing more than that.

In the end, the utility of the excerpts was so obvious that I had to slap my forehead for not thinking of it myself. Thankfully, someone else not only went to the trouble of explaining why excerpts were useful but also provided links and information for the tools you can use to utilize them best.

From: The manual Excerpt in WordPress. What, why, how, tips and plugins

WordPress excerpts, which are not excerpts, make a WordPress site easier to browse and its content easier to discover. In addition, when also used as META descriptions, good excerpts bring more and better traffic from search engines.

If you’re using wordpress, especially if it’s self-hosted, this is the kind of article you should be reading right now. The insights and improvement ideas would certainly make you rethink the way you utilize this underused feature and the concice and structured way this is presented makes the whole thing easy to go through and understand. As one commenter put it

Heard a cling and a thud ?
Well, it was my awesomeness-meter crashing !

What a post. Dugg deep, very deep into something that’s insanely powerful, but not appreciated, the WP Excerpts !

As for me, I’m already going through my latest posts and adding descriptive excerpts to all. I’m not going to go back to all 3 years of blogging (almost 4 now 🙂 ) but I plan to go through the last year at least.

WordPress Themes and the use of Excerpts (hummerbie.net)

More copies of World of Goo sold when GNU/Linux version was released than any other day

February 16, 2009 Db07 Comments

The innovative physics game World of Goo was finally released for GNU/Linux and it managed to outsell the previous best selling day, via the developer’s website by 40%!

: Image by laurenipsum via Flickr

I just noticed a small update on the 2D Boy’s announcement of the GNU/Linux version for World of Goo.

Update 4: It’s only been 2 days since the release of the Linux version and it already accounts for 4.6% of the full downloads from our website. Our thanks to everyone who’s playing the game on Linux and spreading the word. Here are a couple of nifty stats:

About 12% of Linux downloads are of the .rpm package, 30% are of the .tar.gz package, and 57% are of the .deb package.

More copies of the game were sold via our website on the day the Linux version released than any other day. This day beat the previous record by 40%. There is a market for Linux games after all 🙂

(Emphasis mine)

This is the kind of update that deserves its own blogpost just to make this heard. It is excellent news and I believe sends out quite a strong message to anyone who is paying attention.

As it’s difficult to repost the same URL to social news sites, I’m making this new post just to raise attention to this factoid.

I’m quite excited to see how much of the total pie the GNU/Linux versions will grab. We have already passed an amazing threshold where 1% of the OS market (or so we’re told) has managed to buy the game almost 5 times as much. Here’s to reaching 10% and beyond.

A Division by Zer0

A bug in the code of the universe

Category: The Undefined Remainder

A resource wiki just for the Atheosphere

Site Hiccups

Ska-P is on tour?! FFFFFFFUUUUUU

All your comments are belong to us

Gah, cracked again