Sorry guys; this site has been hacked (1x1 transparent .gif with a spam link in the footer of every page) and I'm still not sure how they did it.

After noticing that, I checked my logs for the first time in a while, and saw a bunch of suspicious requests from Ukraine, among other places, trying to exploit holes in the MT security model.

I am not interested in investing the time to track all the possible exploits and keep my MT install patched, and I think it would be irresponsible to leave those vulnerabilities in place.

So, this site is read-only from now on. Posts and comments are here for posterity's sake, but there are no new ones. If you want to see what I've been up to, you can check me out on Twitter.

Thanks to all who've read this blog; it's been a fun ride, but I'm moving on to other projects.

$ history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head (via Fallen Rogue)

233 cd (and aliases that do a cd)
154 emacs
125 svn
83 grep
72 sdiff (alias to svn diff w/ coloring)
67 sst (alias to svn st w/ coloring)
58 ll (alias to ls -l)
29 rake
20 ssh
13 ./start.sh (for starting mongrel, to work on Rails apps locally)

Here's my most frequent UNIX commands in September 2006.

"Nixon was gambling millions of lives on the Soviets being the rational players in this game. Next time you are told how a madman threatens the world remember the greatest threats have come from our own mad men."

On the morning of October 27, 1969, a squadron of 18 B-52s — massive bombers with eight turbo engines and 185-foot wingspans — began racing from the western US toward the eastern border of the Soviet Union. The pilots flew for 18 hours without rest, hurtling toward their targets at more than 500 miles per hour. Each plane was loaded with nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the ones that had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This was so me, for years:

Dr. Ron Paul apparently rejects the "theory" of evolution. Given that he's an MD and all, I wonder if he also believes in "germ theory", or feels that the Creator endowed some people with bad humours.

Starting around 2:45 is the relevant Q&A, where an audience member asks Ron Paul whether he believes "the theory of evolution" to be true:

I think that there, it's a theory. It's 'the theory of evolution.' And I don't accept it, you know, as a theory. But I think, it probably doesn't bother me, it's not the most important issue for me, to make a difference in my life to understand the exact origin. I think that the Creator that I know created us and every one of us, and created the universe, and the precise time and manner. And, you know, I just don't think that we're at the point where anybody has absolute proof on either side ... I think it's a theological discussion.

I agree it's not a directly relevant issue, but — especially in Paul's case — such irrational thinking is reason for concern.

update Reason mag has an analysis of the candidates' positions on evolution vs. creationism/intelligent design.

According to Giles Bowkett, documentation is, ideally, by and for computers:

• generated from code, not written by hand
• intended for an audience of software (e.g testing suites) and not developers

I don't think human-readable documentation should be allowed ... it's just irresponsible.

I agree, to an extent. The "what" comments can be often be replaced by clear variable, class and method names.

The problem is that the "why" comments — i.e. any comment that has the word "because" in it — would get lost.

Let's say the "address 1" field is limited to 255 characters, and a customer wants one that's 275 characters. Can you make the change? If the design decision was motivated by the desire to save space, you can. But if that's the limit set by the printing vendor, you can't.

I suppose that (instead of a comment) you could take the RSpec files and add in some it "should comply with printing vendor specifications" do ... test, which is run against the database schema, but that's still human-readable.

The software doesn't care why you have that particular constraint. But the people maintaining that code do.

Bribery.

Jim Moran's district has gotten more federal contract money than the next three combined.

Mike Huckabee literally believes in Adam and Eve.

And it's Mitt Romney's crazy religious beliefs that are a campaign issue?

Religion and politics, in one post. I'm back. My return can be credited to, or blamed on, my blogsister Karol "YOU SHOULD BLOG THAT" Sheinin.

If you have the awesome AdBlock Plus Firefox extension installed, you may have noticed this unfortunate UI feature, which lets you block annoying Flash or Java with a click (since they have their own right-click context menu), but makes pages look like shit:

The documentation refers to various settings for AdBlock Plus, in addition to the whitelist/blacklist rules, but I don't see this on my Mac.

So here's how you solve the problem:

Type about:config into your browser's address bar.

In the top input, labeled "Filter:", type "adblock".

Look for the entry called "extensions.adblockplus.frameobjects" (below) and double-click it:

It should now be boldface, and set to user set / boolean / false instead of default / boolean / true.

Voila! No more ugly, grey tabs.

ESPN columnist John Hollinger ranks all 328 NBA players who played significant minutes last year, according to his Player Efficiency Rating (PER) formula.

That's pretty damn interesting for any sports geek, but what's truly spectacular is his colorful commentary on the guys, especially as you reach the end of the list:

• "LeBron James is the biggest obstacle to Kevin Garnett reaching the Finals, but [Brian] Scalabrine might be a close second."
• "[Jeff] McInnis began the year as a Net in theory, but was told to stay away and eventually traded to Charlotte at midseason. Maybe the Bobcats should have told him to stay away, too."
• "[Yakhouba] Diawara may be the worst offensive wing player to enter the league in the past decade -- he is truly, utterly talentless at that end of the floor."

My favorite, though:

[Nets center Jason] Collins last year shot 36.4 percent, averaged 3.7 points per 40 minutes, and turned the ball over on more than in one five of the possessions he used; those were just the highlights. I could go in far greater detail about how gory his offensive numbers were, but there are women and children around.