Observatorio de la Ballona

I have always considered my site maintenance practices to be quite safe. I try to keep code compliant, I stay on current patches, and so on. But probably quite a while ago, at least over a year, the main page on Obsballona.net was hacked.

Someone, somehow, edited the index.php file to include an obscure call. It was to include a file that was specified with the PHP function “urldecode.” It turns out that translated to a text file from someone who is supported out of the Netherlands. The text file contained a bunch of porn words with links to the porn sites.

I never noticed it because the inserted text was formatted as “hidden” and was therefore not visible. Search engines did see it, so I suppose that it helped someone’s Google ranking. I also never noticed the code because it was right at the bottom of the page. I did find it when I did the updates mentioned in the previous post.

So check your file versions, and beware of any “urldecode” with a nonsense string after it.

I’ve been under the weather the last several days and have been trying to take it easy. So I have taken the opportunity to do a little web searching.

I have been looking for a good open source HTML / PHP editor that runs on Windows for a while. I like Bluefish, but it does not run on Windows without Cygwin. I know that I should just set up a Linux partition and work from there, but I have found it too hard to go back and forth. And almost all the key software tools I use (The Sky, NexRemote, MaximDL, FocusMax, etc.) run only on the Windows platform. So I want a Windows or, ideally, a multi-platform tool. I believe I have found it in Eclipse.

I heard about Eclipse at work, where our Java developers would like to move to it as the preferred IDE platform. Eclipse is an open-source platform for building IDEs (integrated development environments) and has been primarily focused on Java®. They do have an IDE for PHP and the tool also understands HTML. I downloaded and installed it and it has been very easy to use. The HTTP context help isn’t great, but it is good enough so far. Finding the tool got me inspired to clean up the site.

All of the main pages (not the blog, gallery, or wiki) of the site have been updated to load the sidebar from an external file. The top bar is still static, as I would have to write some PHP to get that to load more flexibly, but that is on the table. Each page now also shows when it was last updated. I also have, with the help of the validator in Eclipse, made sure all the pages are XHTML compliant. I made major updates to the Equipment page, adding links to the products and putting software into categories.

I also updated the banner in the Astrophoto Gallery. The default color for the title text was too dark, so that is lighter. I also replaced the delivered background image from the theme with a bit of Mare Nectaris. It’s a bit more personalized now.

Perhaps now I’ll personalize the wiki. Or perhaps clean up Schlei.com

We went to the final regular season concert for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Disney Hall today. There were three more modern (1900+) pieces that were nice, if a little more avant garde then our preference, but still enjoyable.

One of the pieces was Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto. This is a new piece, composed in 2007, at its first performance by the Philharmonic. It being the last performance of the season, they introduced three retiring performers, each of whom had been with the orchestra since the early 1960s. The retiring french horn player commented that we needed to be tolerant of new music, such as the Piano Concerto to be performed that day. He said “Remember your favorite keys: C, F sharp, G. You’ll be hearing all of them. At the same time.” Very amusing.

Even more funny is the paragraph from Esa-Pekka’s own description of his piece:

Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds I (my working title)

I imagined a post-biological culture, where the cybernetic systems suddenly develop an existential need of folklore. Composing intelligence creates music that somehow relates to an area that long time ago [sic] was called the Balkans. All this is accompanied by bird-robots.

I take it he was being funny and it was a light hearted piece, but that description made my jaw drop.