/dev/random

My Last Two Hours Enduring Mac OS 9 (Apple-X.net)
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Mac OS 9 for the last few weeks, since I’m now porting a product backwards from Mac OS X to 9. My PowerBook G4 won’t boot 9, but my G4 minitower still does. I haven’t used Mac OS 9 [...]

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I haven’t written a cat post for a while, so I guess it’s time for one.
Midnight has gone through a remarkable transformation from wild stray to affectionate lap cat. When I saw him for the first time last May, he seemed completely wild. He would run away if anyone approached him. Most likely he was [...]

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Via Metafilter:

Howard Stern yanked off six Clear Channel radio stations The kingdom of the self proclaimed king of all media has been trimmed after Clear Channel dropped the Stern show on Tuesday after he allegedly aired sexually obscene and racist material.
The offensive exchange reportedly occured when a caller asked ex-Paris Hilton boyfriend (and sex-tape [...]

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Rosyna points out this issue with OSX’s prebinding at unsanity.org:
Prebinding could be a security risk. Not in of itself, but indirectly. You cannot use the checksum of an executable to determine if it has been modified by another or not on OS X. Incidental, yes. Not very important, indeed. But it is one wall that [...]

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I’m now changing my Mac OS 9 code to use pre-Carbon APIs since some features I need to use aren’t available in Carbon.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Going back in time”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/02/25/going-back-in-time/” });

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I just discovered The String Cheese Incident in iTunes Music Store and bought a few of their songs.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “New music”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/02/24/new-music/” });

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Eminem is suing Apple, claiming they used one of his songs in a television advertisement without permission. The ad in question featured a kid singing “Lose Yourself” while listening to his iPod.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Eminem sues Apple”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/02/24/eminem-sues-apple/” });

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My D-Link DI-624 router has been freezing at random or spontaneously rebooting for a while. I finally got disgusted with it and bought a Netgear WGR614 yesterday. It has almost the same features but is about half the size. So far it seems to be working nicely.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “New Router”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/02/22/new-router/” });

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I now have shareyourmusic.com and worldbeatplanet sharing a single Drupal installation with separate databases. The way it’s done is very simple & elegant: have a separate conf.php file (named shareyourmusic.com or worldbeatplanet.com) for each domain.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Two sites sharing code”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/02/20/two-sites-sharing-code/” });

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Not satisfied with repeatedly predicting the death of Apple, the clueless Rob Enderle is now predicting the death of Bluetooth [via Slashdot]

At the Intel Developer Forum on Wednesday Intel announced the company was giving up on the deadlocked Ultrawideband IEEE task group and going it alone with a derivative offering they are calling Wireless USB. [...]

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I received 6 Nigerian spams today, a new record. One of them was sent via the feedback form on this website.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “A new record”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/02/19/a-new-record/” });

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Cool! Someone has ported the old Torgo screensaver of Fate to Mac OS X. If you’re not familiar with this, Torgo is a character from Manos: the Hands of Fate, believed to be the worst movie ever made. It was one of the most popular episodes of MST3K.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “tHe mAsTeR wOuLd aPpRoVe”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/02/18/the-master-would-approve/” [...]

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Comment spam seems to have been increasing lately.
Yesterday I got a comment spam for an online pharmacy from the bogus address hrie@yahoo.com. Today I got two more comment spams from the same address for a different pharmacy. I just added some very aggressive filters to mt-blacklist in an attempt to deal with them.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “More [...]

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I’ve completed my conversion of WorldBeatPlanet from PHP-Nuke to Drupal. I was able to convert most of the content (I’ve saved the reviews but haven’t had a chance to convert them yet). Several people have said they like the new site, and I think it will be a lot more flexible than the old PHP-Nuke [...]

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The Drupal version of WorldBeatPlanet is shaping up very nicely. Rather than using the song & review modules, I’m using a taxonomy to select song lyrics or reviews. I defined a required vocabulary with the terms story, lyrics, and review. To find all items of a specific type, I use the following SQL query:

SELECT n.nid, [...]

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Thanks to a suggestion from Kitt at drupal.org, I figured out how to move most of the content from worldbeatplanet’s Nuke database to Drupal. I plan to switch over worldbeatplanet completely in a few days and shut down the Nuke site.
I also plan to merge worldbeatplanet with shareyourmusic.com. Since I can now modify my hosting [...]

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I’m still finding some remnants of the hack at WorldBeatPlanet. Right now I’m pretty disgusted with PHP-Nuke. It has more security holes than Windows.
I’m considering switching WorldBeatPlanet to Drupal and I’ve even set up a test site here. The only drawback is there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to move over the old [...]

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BoingBoing pal (and former guestblogger) Todd Lappin points us to yet another food fight between copyright and Remix Culture.

DJ Danger Mouse remixed Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with the Beatles “White Album” to create… The “Grey Album,” of course.
The New Yorker had a little Talk of the Town piece on this, Apparently, Jay-Z created a vocals-only version [...]

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SlashDot reports that Windows 2000 & NT source code has been leaked [original report here]
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Windows goes Open Source :)”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2004/02/12/windows-goes-open-source/” });

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I just installed PHP-Nuke 7.0 at WorldBeatPlanet.
This seems to be how the luser was able to hack the site.
When I checked my access logs, I found a few items like:

modules.php?name=Your_Account&op=gfx&random_num=604071

The security graphic engine takes the random number and makes an MD5 encryption of it concatenated with other elements such as the $sitekey, $datekey, and the [...]

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