Random thoughts on art, technology, stuff, and occasionally Real Estate: May 2010

As reported yesterday, one of my self-hosted WordPress sites, http://www.QueenOfKludge.com fell victim to a virus attack.  The virus infected all of the .php files residing on the host server.  (GoDaddy in my case).   The site has now been rebuilt using Active Rain posts imported with Jeff Turner's excellent Import Active Rain Posts plugin.

I highly recommend visiting the WPSecurityLock blog http://www.wpsecuritylock.com/blog/ and reading all of the blog posts about this recent wave of attacks.

I got WPSecurityLock's eBook, too, which contains a lot of good information.

Here are a few more links with information about Losotrana:

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/old-wordpress-versions-under-attack/  

http://mashable.com/2009/09/05/wordpress-attack/

(These articles mention older versions of WordPress -- but Queen was running 2.9.2 !!)

Please don't think I am dropping any of my self-hosted WordPress sites.  I am not.  And I am not moving off GoDaddy either  (that would involve WAY too much time and effort right now)  :-). 

I am going to implement some of the security suggestions in the WPSecurityLock eBook.

The 5th Annual Lummis Day Festival will be held on Sunday, June 6 at two locations: Lummis Home (200 East Avenue 43) and nearby Heritage Square Museum (3801 Homer Street). The opening poetry gala begins at 10:30 am at Lummis Home. Art Exhibitions will open at Lummis Home at noon and continue through 5:00pm. Music, dance, food, comedy, and community activities take place at Heritage Square Museum, from 12:30pm-7:00pm.

Ruben Martinez and the Border Balladeers will appear at 3:30 PM on Stage 1. 

From Martinez' MySpace Page:

Rubén Martínez is a fixture on L.A.'s cultural & political landscape. Writer, musician, spoken-word artist, intellectual, activist-he likes stirring the pot, mixing the genres, breaking down the borders.

Joe "City" Garcia is Rubén's longtime musical partner, conjuring vibes as varied as flamenco and r&b on acoustic & electric guitars. John Schayer and his blues-inflected bass have livened up acts like Bob Welch and Jay Gordon. Drummer Ruben Gonzalez is a native of East L.A. and of its music scene, including a stint with R&B legends The Blazers. Dennis Gurwell is a connoisseur of all things Americana, bringing his zydeco-flavored accordeón.

Lummis Day takes its name from Charles Fletcher Lummis, who joined the L.A. Times as the newspaper's first city editor in 1876. A prolific writer and photographer, Lummis was also one of the city's first librarians, founded the Southwest Museum and helped introduce the concept of multi-culturalism to Southern California.  The Lummis Day Festival was created to celebrate the patchwork of cultures that enriches the city of Los Angeles. 

This year's Lummis Day Festival is sponsored by the Arroyo Seco Neighborhood Council, the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council, the Highland Park Heritage Trust, City Council Districts 1 and 14, Eagle Portables Inc. and Home Depot Cypress Park. The Festival's poetry events are sponsored by Poets & Writers Inc. through a grant it has received from the James Irvine Foundation. Media sponsors include KPFK public radio 90.7, Univision KMEX-34 and the Arroyo Seco Journal.

Sometime in the last few days, one of my blog sites, http://www.queenofkludge.com fell prey to a virus.  The virus inserts code into each and every .php file on the host ... the code starts with "/**/eval(base64_decode" followed by a long string of letters.

If I had been feeling more patient yesterday, I might have taken the time to work on fixing the site ... after all there is no shortage of advice on the internet.

Instead, I figured "screw it", and I deleted the entire F**ing site.

Fortunately, Jeff Turner and partner Steve Zenhqut released their WordPress Plugin to Import Active Rain Posts just in time.

So after a new clean install of WordPress, I used the Wordpress Plugin to Import ActiveRain Blog Posts to repopulate the site with posts.

I also installed the feedwordpress plugin to automatically copy my AR posts to http://www.queenofkludge.com from here out.

Couple of quick notes: 

BitZipper is great for unzipping all sorts of esoteric compression formats, including .gz files.

If you have over 1,000 Active Rain posts, your file .xml file will exceed the default 2MB WordPress import file size limit.  In WordPress MU, this can be changed in the Admin Options panel.  In single user WordPress you will need to insert this line in your php.ini or php5.ini file:  upload_max_filesize = 64M

I have now changed the FTP password for all my sites, and changed file permissions for several of them.  I don't know if this will help prevent future malicious attacks, but I figured it was worth a try.

Now, if I could only remember what it was I needed to do before losing a day doing this.... :-)

(The origianal Victorian image is from LunaGirl Images)

Lummis Day takes its name from Charles Fletcher Lummis, who joined the L.A. Times as the newspaper's first city editor in 1876. A prolific writer and photographer, Lummis was also one of the city's first librarians, founded the Southwest Museum and helped introduce the concept of multi-culturalism to Southern California.  The Lummis Day Festival was created to celebrate the patchwork of cultures that enriches the city of Los Angeles. 

Catch the Dime Box Band at 2:15 on Stage One at Heritage Square:  Delightful, rockin' good country:

More about the Dime Box Band here: Dime Box Band Web Site

The 5th Annual Lummis Day Festival will be held on Sunday, June 6 at two locations: Lummis Home (200 East Avenue 43) and nearby Heritage Square Museum (3801 Homer Street). The opening poetry gala begins at 10:30 am at Lummis Home. Art Exhibitions will open at Lummis Home at noon and continue through 5:00pm. Music, dance, food, comedy, and community activities take place at Heritage Square Museum, from 12:30pm-7:00pm.

This year's Lummis Day Festival is sponsored by the Arroyo Seco Neighborhood Council, the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council, the Highland Park Heritage Trust, City Council Districts 1 and 14, Eagle Portables Inc. and Home Depot Cypress Park. The Festival's poetry events are sponsored by Poets & Writers Inc. through a grant it has received from the James Irvine Foundation. Media sponsors include KPFK public radio 90.7, Univision KMEX-34 and the Arroyo Seco Journal.

More about Lummis Day here: Lummis Day 2010 Web Site

Thanks, JEFF!  Very useful!

Lummis Day takes its name from Charles Fletcher Lummis, who joined the L.A. Times as the newspaper's first city editor in 1876. A prolific writer and photographer, Lummis was also one of the city's first librarians, founded the Southwest Museum and helped introduce the concept of multi-culturalism to Southern California.  The Lummis Day Festival was created to celebrate the patchwork of cultures that enriches the city of Los Angeles. 

The 5th Annual Lummis Day Festival will be held on Sunday, June 6 at two locations: Lummis Home (200 East Avenue 43) and nearby Heritage Square Museum (3801 Homer Street). The opening poetry gala begins at 10:30 am at Lummis Home. Art Exhibitions will open at Lummis Home at noon and continue through 5:00pm. Music, dance, food, comedy, and community activities take place at Heritage Square Museum, from 12:30pm-7:00pm.

This year's Lummis Day Festival is sponsored by the Arroyo Seco Neighborhood Council, the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council, the Highland Park Heritage Trust, City Council Districts 1 and 14, Eagle Portables Inc. and Home Depot Cypress Park. The Festival's poetry events are sponsored by Poets & Writers Inc. through a grant it has received from the James Irvine Foundation. Media sponsors include KPFK public radio 90.7, Univision KMEX-34 and the Arroyo Seco Journal.

Opening at 1:00 PM, on Stage One at Heritage Square:  The Elliot Caine Jazz Quintet.  Trumpeter and band leader Elliot Caine has performed or recorded with a wide range of artists, including Bobby Matos, Beck, Teddy Edwards, Wyclef Jean and the Beastie Boys.  Inspired by 60's-style Blue Note Jazz, his group plays original compositions as well as the work of Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley and Donald Byrd.

The fifth annual Lummis Day Festival will move its main stages to a new location, Heritage Square Museum (3800 Homer Street) this year, where the best of home-grown Northeast L.A. music, dance, food and community resources will be presented amid the historic and architecturally significant buildings that have been preserved on the Heritage Square site.

The two-part Festival's opening morning event will take place at Lummis Home (200 East Avenue 43), where the day begins at 10:30 am with readings by L.A.'s most critically acclaimed poets along with music, art exhibits and refreshments. Art exhibits will continue there throughout the day while performances and all other activities shift to nearby Heritage Square Museum, beginning at noon.

As always, admission to all events is FREE !!!

For updates, including parking information and performance schedules, visit www.lummisday.org.

Now in its fifth year, Lummis Day celebrates the patchwork of cultures and ethnicities that enriches the Northeast Los Angeles community. The Festival is organized by the non-profit Lummis Day Community Foundation with support from Northeast L.A.'s neighborhood councils, elected officials and community groups and busineses.

http://www.lummisday.org/

It's taken me a week to figure out the simple process of copying photos from a desktop computer to a new iPad; mainly because most of the instructions I found online left out a one obvious step.  Obvious, now that I know what to do, but not obvious the first time I tried it.

So, in case anyone else needs a hand, here are my notes on How to Copy Your Photos from Your Computer to Your New iPad:

Connect your iPad to your computer, open iTunes, allow iTunes to run its initial Sync.

After the Sync is finished, look in the iTunes left column, and under "Devices" you'll see "iPad".  Click on "iPad".  (This is that obvious step I kept missing.) 

The iPad Management screen will display, and you will see a tab labeled "Photos".  (You will not see the "Photos" tab unless you are at the iPad Management Screen.)

Click the "Photos" tab.  Check "Sync Photos from:"  iTunes will display a drop down list of locations on your computer containing images; you can browse to a specific folder.

Check to select any folders in the list containing images that you want added to your iPad.  Then click "Sync" in the lower right corner.

iTunes will begin copying all images in the selected folders from your computer to your iPad.

When the photo sync is finished, you can then access your photos on your iPad by tapping the photo icon.

YAY!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!!!! WOOO HOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

I picked up my new iPad on Tuesday, and I've spent ~~days~~ searching for a way to send text messages.  I tried a bunch of different apps, and fought off the urge to try "jailbreaking" with a jury-rigged, hacked sim card ....

And this morning, I found an app that sends TEXTS from my iPad instantly and intuitively and for FREE!!

The app is textPlus

If you like to communicate by TEXTing, this is probably one of the first apps you want to install on your new iPad.  Search the App Store for textPlus.

I've sent a number of test messages between my iPad and iPhone.  When I get to the office later, I will test sending messages to a NON-iPhone Phone. 

Please don't misunderstand:  I am enjoying my iPad. 

But I really want to be able to blog from my iPad on occasion.  Not everyday....  but sometimes ... for example if I am at a seminar or class, iPad on the desk in front of me, I may want to publish a blog live and direct from the classroom.

All of the major blogging platforms:  Blogger, WordPress, TypePad and ActiveRain use a web function called contentEditable ...   That's the function that makes the visual, easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor possible.  ContentEditable is what makes it possible to type up your blog posts in regular language, without having to add HTML tags for paragraphs and line breaks.

The iPad operating system does not support contentEditable.  That means I can not simply open up the browser on the iPad, navigate here to Active Rain and start typing up a post in WYSIWYG mode.  Without contentEditable, the iPad does not recognize the "Entry" area as a user-editable area.

But, there's an app for that.

BlogPress by CLT Studio  (It's $2.99 in the App Store.)

If you go to the app's web site you will see it currently supports Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Joomla.  I've been using BlogPress for just a couple days now, so I am still learning all it features, but I am liking it alot.

ActiveRain is not on the list, and I suspect it it because the folks at CLT Studio do not know ActiveRain exists.   But, look, they also say "Want more platforms?  Send us an email if you wish us to prioritize your blog platform."

I'm going to send off an email requesting support for ActiveRain a little later today, maybe if a few other ActiveRainers checked in, the CLT folks would put "Working on ActiveRain Support" at the very top of their to-do list.

The developer's email is:   fenghuajun  (AT) gmail  (DOT) com