I could not live without this hack. Placing the Windows taskbar on the lefthand side, with auto-hide on, gives you more screen real estate AND more taskbar width when it pops out when needed, via Ctrl-Esc. I’ve been configuring Windows this way for decades. How can people stand that little strip at the bottom flashing at them all day? Seems like a little thing… but to me it’s huge. It actually determines who’s in charge – am I sitting at my computer to be told what I should do via little popup notifications, or am I there to get something done, checking on any notifications when I’m ready to address them? Sure, my friends can get annoyed that I take an hour to respond to an instant message, but I’m getting stuff done. Anyway, I’ve gotta keep this thing handy… (or just resist the urge to boot into Windows to play games…) :>

UPDATE: the original hack hasn’t kept pace with Explorer updates, and hasn’t been open sourced so others can do it. On page 17 of that forum post, another hack was provided that seems to be working.

Qt’s Phonon library has an awesome goal: abstract video and audio services to simplify cross-platform development. It has worked great for me out of the box using Qt 4.7 on linux and Mac OS X. Windows setup took a bit of elbow grease. Here are the cheatnotes to get you through it quickly.

NOTE: The Qt mingw setup worked fine for me when I was setting up my first Windows development environment, do not hesitate to go that route. All you need is the Qt SDK for Windows. Free is good!

But this time around, I opted for using Visual Studio 2010, since I already had it installed and I wanted to compare. I’ve read that there is no support for using the open-source-licensed Qt with Visual Studio, but the official Qt download page for the Visual Studio Add-In clears things up – it says the add-in “can be used for development together with all Qt licenses”. Let’s fire it up and try it out! (continued…)

msysgit sucks.

Here‘s how to get it to work with your ssh key.

Google implemented my results preview concept. You’ll start seeing integrated previews now in your google results – they did a great job! It’s nice to be validated, and frankly, nice to have the monkey off my back as far as trying to repeatedly resurrect Google Results Walker. Re-engineering someone else’s web site is fun as hell, until you’ve over-committed, and then the original website exits stage left on you and invalidates all your work.

It sure was a fun ride while it lasted – 50,000 downloads in its heyday, when I was knee-deep in the Mozilla Add-ons developer community. That’s the most successful software I’ve ever written, in terms of users. Coupled with the joy of a completely cross-platform solution!

So to sum up, thanks Google for improving your search in exactly the way I thought needed it to be done. :>

I love my websites and servers and applications. I expose a lot of my toys on the internet, because it’s FUN and USEFUL. I try to apply the 80/20 rule in getting things done, doing 20% of the security I should to achieve an 80% benefit. I don’t have time to “do it right”, if that’s even possible. I know this is a terrible approach to network security, but it is my conscious choice. There is fun to be had.

The approach burns me on occassion, but I get by. I’ve been hacked twice in 10 years, not a bad record considering my approach. The second hack occurred recently. Some poor bastard in backwoods Russia or God-knows-where has been scanning and hacking WordPress sites with a backdoor approach to adding admin accounts. Once the admin account is set up, they inject redirection scripts into the php template code.

I have not taken the time to install all the WordPress updates the moment they come out – classic example of my slacker approach to security. So at some point in time, I got hacked. The sad part is that I did not even notice it until much later, when Firefox’s automatic malware detection kicked in and Google and StopBadware.org started denying me access to my own site.

Apparently the injected code had the capacity to install malware – not that I would know, being a linux user. The cleanup involved purging all the injected php code, which was obfuscated with “eval(base64)” wrappers, and removing the hacked WordPress admin accounts.

The fact that I was potentially adding malware to the computers of people visiting my websites is enough to make me physically ill. Some of that paranoia and obsession required to achieve a moderate level of security has surfaced. My WordPress and Mediawiki sites are too rich and chock full of functionality for me to personally do any real level of guarantee of security – I have to rely on the popularity of their code base and assume issues get caught quickly. But the least I can do is upgrade them whenever a new stable release is available. Generally speaking, this is what keeps me on the internet, and it is no longer an optional activity.

The only other flaw in my setup of which I am painfully aware is due to virtual hosting restrictions. I do a LOT with my one little IP and my one little server (including truly free truly legit SSL), but I cannot host more than one SSL virtual site on port 443. Just “the way things are”. I need to be diligent about redirecting secure traffic through the one configured SSL domain. But this is never easy.

The silver lining: the WordPress iPhone app now works! The pace of blogging should now improve from glacial to very infrequently. :>

Peace out.