Security FTW

Email I received today: Here is the link to the application: http://alinkonourintranet If you get a prompt for a user id and password, you close the link and start over keep opening and closing the link until you are not prompted for a password

Phishing Emails Aren’t Trying Anymore

Got this in my inbox today: Dear Customer As part of our security measures, weregularly monitor the Bank system, will add $200.00 credit to your account just for taking part in our quick 5 question survey Bank Of Montreal. Information you have requested for the following reason: Our system detected unusual debit on your account [...]

Smugmash: Turn your SmugMug pics into a YouTube video

Recently I came across Pummelvision, which takes your photos from Flickr and other similar sites and creates a video out of them. Being a loyal SmugMug user for years, I was a bit disappointed that they hadn’t thought of SmugMug when making this app. So, I put my dev skills to test and came up [...]

View Unread or New Comments in Disqus – WordPress Hack

The job here is to highlight unread or new comments that a visitor to your site has not seen. This is especially helpful when you have a blog with lots of threaded comments where it becomes difficult for a reader to get a grip on just where they should look to read new comments. This [...]

Free World Cup 2010 Office Pool Software

Thanks to Haroon Rafique and Cris Diaconu for their contributions. This pool is much like the last one. You are free to download the software. It’s basically one index.php script which does everything. The SQL script is also in there, all you’ll need to do is put it on a PHP enabled server somewhere and [...]

How does Microsoft Exchange NOT send this to SPAM?

This was a message sent with “High Importance” and our Exchange server let it through. It’s like their spam filter checks for the word ‘viagra’ and that’s it. Anything else passes. Subject: ©Ð«Î¶U´Ú¡C©Ð«Î¥u n¦³´Ý È¥i¶U¡C©ã¼Ðª÷¥N¹Ô¡CThu, 13 May 2010 18:50:14 +0100 ¤uµ{¥N¹Ô´Ú¡C©Ð«Î¥þÃB¶U´Ú¡CªA°È¹q¸Ü¡G¢¯¢¸¢´¢·¢´¢µ¢¸¢¯¢²¢´¡E¤¤ªø´Á¶U´Ú¡C¥Á¶¡1¤À3°_¡CThu , 13 May 2010 15:43:14 -0200 [da_che@xuite.net] Message: ¦U¤¤¤p¥ø·~¡B¤¤¤j¥ø·~©ñ´Ú¡C¦UºØ©Ð¦a¶U´Ú.»È¦æ¶U´Ú¡C©Ð«Î¥þÃB¶U´Ú¡C¦Xªk¯²¸î¤½¥q’«È²¼¶K²{‘¦~®§17%¡CªA°È¹q¸Ü¡G¢¯¢¸¢´¢·¢´¢µ¢¸¢¯¢²¢´¡E»È¦æ¦X¬ù¶U´Ú¡CThu, 13 May 2010 14:41:14 -0300 [...]

DB2 is so lame

So I’m trying to change the size of a column in DB2. Nothing fancy, just expand a varchar from 100 to 200 and in DB2 Control Center I get the following message: The current column attribute change may take some time to complete, as it requires re-creating the table, loading the data, and restoring the [...]

Using SQL queries to read Excel files in macros

I’m doing my Masters in Geographic Information Systems at U of T and found the need to do this in my research. You can treat Excel sheets as tables and perform SELECTs and JOINS like you would against a regular database. The language is Visual Basic (VBA to be exact). You can put the following [...]

The optional secret question – #SecurityFail

This is lovely.

What files changed in WordPress 2.8.4? The proper way to upgrade patches

I run raptorsrepublic.com which uses WordPress with some pretty heavy customizations here and there so every time WordPress releases an upgrade I’m very wary of doing it because I just don’t know how it’ll effect the platform. Partial file copying with FTP can really throw you a curveball and if one file gets corrupted it’ll [...]