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. :>

Just a quick note: I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot today just because I READ this article. Nice bomb drop. We’ll see what I do with it… I think it’s a bit too crunchy to put into use – I don’t feel like dealing with any gotchas on all the versions of all the compilers I’m using, as there are a LOT these days. But it has lead me to research other progress in the C++ standard. The boost function library, which has been accepted into TR1, is already available in some compiler spaces, whoop.

I started down this path because I wanted to store a predicate function in my sorted_vector class. For now I can get by without this stuff, always passing in a functor to the function calls that need it, but that’s not as elegant.

Meanwhile, it’s upwards and onwards with QT slots and signals – QT is getting the job done for me in a major way. There are boost::signal and boost::bind as alternatives to that, but I’m really kicking out the jams with QT, so I’m not stopping now. More to come soon, hopefully.

UPDATE: C++0x is hopefully coming soon. Wikipedia, as usual, gives a nice overview and some nice guidance. In particular, I need to avoid std::auto_ptr and function object base classes (std::unary_function, std::binary_function) which are slated for removal(!). Sounds like I need to keep my eye out for polymorphic wrappers for function objects, they may be just the ticket I need. Check out the whole standard, it’s juicy! :>

UPDATE 2: Here is a nice rundown of options for the sort predicate function, leading into the C++0x solution.

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.

A recent mysql update from portage requires this to get it back up and running:

mysql_upgrade -p
/etc/init.d/mysql restart

The article is on the wiki, check it out if you have a minute and see what you think.