As some - or perhaps none - of you will have noticed, this blog has been unreachable for the better part of the year.

I had neglected to upgrade WordPress from one of the dot releases and as a result was the target of those pesky hack0rz via an exploited security hole in WP. This in turn triggered a malware warning via various browsers and search engines, my solution: move the blog to a non-web accessible folder to be dealt with when I had a spare moment.

Fast forward 6 months or so and I'm just getting around to fixing all the problems - upgrading WordPress to the latest release, upgrading (and removing unused) plugins and sanitising all the PHP source files that ended up with malicious code embedded in them.

I'm confident that I've caught all the issues and that the security holes in the blogging software are all patched (for now). So back to some procrastinating whilst trying to dream up new blog post subjects.

Absent-mindedly present,
- Chris

LittleIpsum from Dustin Senos is a handy little tool for anyone doing design or programming work who's constantly in need of some lorem ipsum to pad out visuals.

I usually use lipsum.com which has a decent background on Lorem Ipsum as well as a configurable generator.

LittleIpsum on the other hand is a nifty little Mac OS X menu bar app that allows you to quickly grab a couple of words, sentences or paragraphs of lorem ipsum.

I've just installed a fresh copy of Lion on my machine and much to my dismay I have to set up all of my many mail filtering rules again!

Bugger that, instead I had a dig around and decided to copy across the rules from my previous installation. All the rules you've set up are stored in a .plist file within Mail's data stored in your Library folder.

In Lion you'll find the rules at:

~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/MessageRules.plist

Under Snow Leopard:

~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist

So all you need to do is copy/paste the relevant file from your old machine to the new one.

Something that really annoys me, annoys me to anger, is brain-dead password schemes for websites where I'm forced to adhere to some moronic schema for my password to "enhance" security.

Upper bounds on password length

The most common issue I see across the plethora of inept schemes for passwords is bounds on length. I'm all for having passwords with a lower bound, it's all about security after all and shorter passwords are much less time constringent to brute-force, 5-6 characters is the most oft seen bound. With that I'm absolutely fine.

But as soon as you start requiring that my password be no more than a certain number of characters a klaxon starts wailing in my head.

The initial suspicion is that if you have an upper bound on the length of my password, you must be storing it in plaintext. If you are storing my password in plaintext then you're either an idiot or a complete and utter fucking asshole, you can choose whichever you want.

For god's sake, salt and hash passwords before storing them.

I recently grabbed myself an 11" Macbook Air as I was in dire need of a laptop to use when away from home. The main attraction that I'd be able to work on any freelance projects when I have downtime regardless of where I am.

I use a brilliant piece of software called On The Job 3 to track time spent on jobs as well as generating and managing invoices. On The Job stores all your client and job data locally rather than in the cloud and doesn't provide any means to sync data between multiple machines. This provides a bit of a connundrum — how do I keep an in-sync repository of my timings and invoices across the multiple machines I potentially use for my work?

The obvious choice is to use Dropbox to keep the relevant application data in sync across multiple machines. As there's no way to specify to On The Job where to look for the data we instead need to move the data store into a shared repository in Dropbox then create a link to this data from where the original used to live.