FYI: My How-to Sites Hacked... Fixing

Just wanted to drop a quick note to the readers of this blog. My blog has not been hacked, so if you are linked to http://blueskyworkshop.blogspot.com there are no worries, everything should work fine. However, thanks to Bill Jirsa, I found out all of my content at http://blueskyworkshop.com and my other hosted sites has been hacked. My web host had an intrusion in January 2012 and I was unaware of the extent of the damage.

Unfortunately, my real job take precedence so I'm am trying to repair things in my copious spare time. :) I just reinstalled the back of blueskyworkshop.com early this morning and now am getting 404 errors on the site. So if you run into any problems let me know.

As hacks go it seems to be fairly harmless. Occasional redirects to some racy sites. So what the hackers did was append a short bit of HTML/JavaScript code to every HTML file on the server. So your web site does not break. Everything continues to look fine and seems to work fine. However, every 10 or 20 times a page is clicked, instead of loading your page, it redirects the user to the hackers desired site. Very clever. Because most of the time, a user is gonna think that was just some sort of glitch and not really notice what happened. PHP pages were also targeted, but I think that was less successful as it broke a lot pages thus making it easy to detect.

Update 03/2012: http://blueskyworkshop.com is back up and fixed.

Update 10/2012 - How to Fix your Site: I have been getting a lot of hits on this blog entry in the last month and I'm guessing folks are looking for information on what to do if your site gets hacked. If that is you, check out this write up by Web Monkey: What to do if your Site gets Hacked which refers to this write up by Martin Sutherland. Also, Matt Smith has a nice writeup here.

In my case, I simply had to delete everything and restore from backup. Always make sure you have some kind of back up of your site. If you don't, it makes things a heck of a lot more difficult to fix.

Also note, that I have completely rewritten the backend for abbeyworkshop.com and that site is now completely fixed.

Cyberduck Drag and Drop stops working

Problem: Using Cyberduck on Windows and suddenly drag and drop does not seem to work. When I drag a file or folder to Cyberduck, I get a "Not Allowed" icon and nothing happens.

Cyberduck is a great SFTP, FTP, and WebDAV client for Windows and Mac.

Solution: Have you been using VPN? In my case I had just used Cisco's VPN software to connect to the corporate network. Depending upon how the VPN software is configured, it may cut off all access to the local network. That should be cleaned up after you exit VPN. But apparently, it does not clean up everything. Just reboot your machine and that should fix the problem.

Windows 7 Updating a Read Only Directory/File

Problem: You need to edit a read only file located in the C:\Program Files. However, you cannot reset the read only status of the file.

This is the problem I ran into when trying to edit C:\Program Files\NetBeans 7.1\etc\netbeans.conf. This is a NetBeans configuration file. The file is read only and so is the parent directory and the parent directory above it. I tried turning off the read only bit using File Explorer, the command line, you name it. Running as administrator had no effect.

Workaround: Do the following:

1. Copy the file to a directory that you have write access to.
2. Edit the file and make the changes you need.
3. Rename the original readonly file. You can do this with Administrator privileges.
4. Copy the edited file back to its original location.

Your read only file should now be edited.

My GMail IMAP just stopped working, what do I do?

My GMail IMAP just stopped working this week. It was definitely an issue on the server side since none of my machines could log in. There had been some suspicious activity on my account and I had to change my password. Apparently when that happens, a bit gets flipped turning off your IMAP. Well I asked a question in the Help forms and found out a CAPTCHA gets turned on which is preventing my IMAP from working. To clear it, follow this link.

Clear Your CAPTCHA

It is a mystery to me why GMail doesn't send me an e-mail or something telling me to do this. But anyway, problem solved. Thanks bkennelly from the help forums.

3 Great New Tech Sites on the Web

Three cheers for corporate bureaucracy! Thanks to a few buyouts and mergers a few web sites have been spawned much to our benefit.

The Verge
Josh Topolsky and these Engadget refugees have set up a really nice gadget and tech web site. A different kind of design for their site, but I like it. It sort of melds a newspaper layout with a web page. I like the look and the content.

PandoDaily
Sarah Lacey left TechCrunch to create this site. The focus is on cool new web sites and businesses. A nice clean interface and a lot of good information.

ANewDomain.net
Gina Smith left the new Byte.com to start this site. Thanks corporate overlords for unleashing Gina and gang. Lots of good writers (including John C Dvorak and Jerry Pournelle) and good stories.

Latest ATI Video Cards

AMD has some new 7700 series video cards out. The Verge has a summary:
AMD ATI 7700 Round Up

Add Windows Update to Your Start Menu on Windows 7

I found a tip on how to do this on anewdomain.net.

The only thing I had to do was create the shortcut to begin with. Just click Start and then search for "Windows Update". You should see a program entry for it. Right drag that to the desktop. A popup menu should allow you to create a shortcut. Once you have done that, follow everything in the tip.

This is an awesome tip, because I hate having to wait 5 minutes after a reboot to see if there are any new patches.

Combine Multiple Commands on one Line with Windows

Can you combine multiple command one one line with a Windows command prompt? You bet.

Just separate each command with a semicolon (;) and precede the command with two ampersands (&&).

For example, the following line performs three directory listings with one command line:

dir;&&dir /w;&&dir /b

No Start Button for Windows 8

According to this CNET story, Windows 8 will not have have a start button:

Microsoft Removes Start Button from Windows 8

Instead, the lower left corner will be hot and will popup the menu.

I don't know about some of this stuff. Microsoft seems to be really emphasizing a touch interface. But 99% of their customers use desktops and that does not seem likely to change any time soon. Looks like another Vista disaster is on the way. At least we can live with Windows 7 while Microsoft figures things out.

Apple and eBooks

Well I posted earlier about Apple's eBook announcement. And I have been waiting to get more information before I posted. The best and most thorough discussion is from the MacBreak Weekly 1/24/12 podcast.

Leo and gang do a great job of covering all the different angles of the announcement. So if you want more information on the text book angle and iTunes University, check out the podcast.

So let me see if I can summarize what I consider the highlights:

• Apple has announced a new ebook authoring tool, iBook Author.
• Available for free from the Mac App Store
• Creates books in a proprietary eBook 3 format
• Only works on OS X 10.7 Lion
• Publishing options are a tad limited
• To publish a book for sale, you can only use the Apple iTunes store. Also, Apple must approve your book. If they don't approve it, you have no alternative for sale.
• If not using the iTunes store, the book can only be released for free. Going this route, you can publish to PDF or the proprietary format.

My take... this is a bit of a blunder. Apple has shown its hand to competitors Amazon, Adobe, and Barnes and Noble in regard to its eBook strategy. Limiting the publishing options and the app to only OS X Lion, also prevents wide adoption. Thusly, competitors should have time to respond and should be able to take the moral high ground if they support actual standards.

From what I have heard, the books produced from the tool are fabulous and very cool.

But is it my book? Not really. It seems to me, if you were to write your own book, I would use another tool and maybe port it to iBooks Author if I think it would be worth it.

Anyway, I would like to spend some more time with ePub3. It looks like the content is just HTML5 with some special packaging rules. Hopefully I can post more on the subject.