This thumbdrive hacks computers: Holy Fuck.

Or, if you prefer more words (quoting ElectricBlue in the article’s comments): This is a terrible security flaw but it’s also kinda awesome from the perspective of a “cyberpunk dystopia is now” point of view.

The American Room: I read this as part of my procrastination routine, and was surprised to be reading about myself. (*exaggeration)

The way of the future

I upgraded my server from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 this weekend. It took forfricking ever, thanks to one little file that got added to my Apache configuration files. I never found anything about it online, either; the only way out was through prolonged cussing.

So (search engines!), if you had a working Ubuntu 12.04 server that you upgraded to 14.04, only to discover that your PHP files are no longer processed by PHP (i.e. your server just spits out the PHP code as the page): check if /etc/apache2/conf-available/php5-cgi.conf exists. If so, try disabling it in the commandline (a2dissite php5-cgi.conf) and restarting Apache.

Otherwise there were a mess of issues, but they were pretty easy to address: find a service that’s broken, check the error log, fix the error, repeat until the service works. It’s pretty much the sysadmin equivalent of Shinji’s “Target in the center; pull the switch. Target in the center; pull the switch.” training in Evangelion.

I know I’m getting old when I am well-aware that the Yosemite public beta is now out, but have absolutely no interest in testing it out. In my younger days I would have been all over this sort of thing. (And I was, once—improbably—when Avery and Josh gave me a copy of Mac OS 8’s beta release.)

What *I* did on my summer vacation

Been a while, eh?

First, in the grand tradition that Siracusa started, follow-up. Despite setting a calendar reminder, I forgot about .moe domain registration day and lost the one domain I would have been tempted to buy: moemoe.moe. (There’s nothing there, yet, but maybe someday.)

After TextDrive sank into the abyss, I set up my email and web hosting on a $5/month VPS from DigitalOcean. I still have no complaints; my little server has served (ehehe) me well. [I have to write this now, because I’ll probably try—and blow—upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 sometime soon.]

I’m surprised by how privacy-conscious I’ve become, in the wake of both the NSA and the more general realization of just how much data companies can collect these days. I’m using far less Dropbox and far more Bittorrent Sync… and I’ll probably switch from that to SyncThing, once that hits 1.0. (That said, I’m not under any illusions that my data is secure or private—but maybe people will have to work a little bit, and their reward will only be my data.)

As far as where I’ve spent my time so far, this year: I’m pretty good at wasting my life. My job continues as ever, despite some truly dark days around the turn of the year. I’ve begun exercising again, after some random pain encouraged me to stop, and Marin and I are slowly working through our backlog of recorded TV shows. (We’re now halfway through Person of Interest season 2. Season 3 ended this June.)

I just finished reading a book—my first of the year […]—and am working on my second. (Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): a great read, and highly recommended.) I don’t know why I don’t read more; I have a ton of really interesting books on my shelf.

I recently bought a TV mount, and so over the weekend Marin and I had the pleasure of manhandling a heavy, expensive, holy-crap-how-does-this-have-that-much-dust television. Once I get a couple longer cables, I think the thing will look downright snappy. (As an added bonus and/or primary motivator, my frickin’ heavy center speaker is no longer balanced on top of some spacer bricks, themselves balanced on top of a bookcase, behind the TV.)

At WWDC in June, Apple announced that they’re creating a new programming language called Swift. That’s thrilling news to me; I’ve never liked the look of Objective-C, and have always wanted to learn how to write programs for my Mac (and, more recently, iOS devices). (The closest I ever got was back in the days of Mac OS 8: I had code that would create a window, had a menubar, and employed an actual event loop… not especially impressive, but you have to consider that there wasn’t much of an internet back then.) I’ve been slowly working my way through Apple’s The Swift Programming Language text ever since.

The bulk of my non-wasted time, though, has been sunk into another Rails app that I’ve been hacking on since March. I thought it’d take a month or two, but feature creep has extended that—and I still have some annoying problems to face down, still. (Hence this post: procrastination at its finest!)

Moon Animate Make-Up!: I’m pretty sure that this is the first full episode of Sailor Moon I’ve ever watched, and it explains SO MUCH.

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