All Things New
you make all things new you make all things new
come redeem and come transform
come renew and come restore
you make all things new
you make all things new
and forever we will watch and worship you
now and forever you are making all things new
—Steven Curtis Chapman, All Things New
The end of the year puts us just moments from a new beginning. I have big hopes for 2005, we'll see if they come true. 2004 has been an interesting, if not always great year. On the other hand, there were plenty of highlights this year too. Did you have a favorite event of the year this past year?
See you in 2005!
Cracked... Sort of
My server was attacked via a php vulnerability today. I had overlooked that I was still running 4.3.9, which can be broken into by the Santy worm. As it turns out, I was instead attacked by the “Anti-Santy Worm” (ASW), which doesn't seem to be wide spread enough to come up in Google yet. The ASW was only ability to obtain nobody privileges on the server, which — best as I can tell — allowed it to do nothing other than replicate. The server was not rooted, fortunately, if it had… well, I don't want to think about that. Ya know what I mean?
Again, its still somewhat speculation at the moment, as I've found my mind too muddled to read Perl fluently today, but I think it looks like a worm that actually tries to repair the vulnerabilities it finds on phpBB boards (the main mode of attack for the Santy worm) rather than doing anything destructive. Interesting, but disturbing that it was able to execute itself on the server, even with virtually no privileges — I thought I'd taken care of such things. Now I've upgraded to the latest Apache 1.x and PHP 4.x which is suppose to fix these problems (note, that like most production servers, this one does not run Apache 2.x or PHP 5.x yet).
Unfortunately, I've killed all of the WordPress blogs on the server in the process. I'm recompiling Apache again in hopes of fixing that. If not, I think I'll just jump off a cliff — that's the easiest solution.
I can't take any more this week. My mind is too muddled. Well, I shouldn't say that, but I have found that for the last day or two I've been having a hard time bringing words to mind at times. I need a few uneventful days. Just a few.
Update (2004/12/30 11:33 PM): It seems I fixed the problem. I didn't upgrade Zend Optimizer after doing the PHP update necessary to secure things. The latest PHP was incompatible with the older version of Zend I was using. Now things work again, hopefully in a much more secure fashion.
Out and Back
I'm getting to know the ER really well. They released dad at 3:30 this afternoon and he was back in at 8:30 with the same thing that brought him in Sunday night (only this time he didn't wait until the pain was so bad he needed paramedics). I got home a little over a half hour ago.
I wonder what tomorrow will bring…
Madness
I just heard from the hospital. They are releasing dad, they decided about an hour ago. They have no idea what brought on the abdominal pain, nor the second heart attack. They did not run a stress test, they have not given him solid food for two days. Are they nuts?
I think they are trying to drive this family nuts. My two uncles haven't slept much for days, nor has my mother nor myself. And they're sending him home without testing his heart first!?!?! Are they insane?
I tell you, this could drive someone to drink!
Update (2004/12/28, 17:17 PM): The general practitioner was doing a discharge on the advice of my father's normal doctor, who is presently on vacation and not credentialed at this hospital anyway (hence the need for the temporary general practitioner who is credentialed at this hospital). My mother just talked to me after she heard from the doc again, who apologized for overstepping his bounds. Seems that the good doctor was relying on the said normal doctor's advice rather than the cardiologist's. After talking to the cardiologist, they have determined to wait until tomorrow when they can have dad run a stress test. Thank-you!
Dad's normal PCP is a jerk. He's released my dad early once, was trying to do so again, did not call for an emergency angiogram two weeks ago when the chest pains first occurred, and previously put my dad on statins (step as far away from cholesterol medicine as you can, it does far more harm than good from what I've seen, although I'm no doctor), which — it seems — have caused the vein growth that requires a rare procedure in the future to keep them from stealing blood from the heart. He also screamed at my mother over the phone before seven in the morning yesterday for having my dad at the wrong hospital (which was the only choice, given the severe pain, but the doctor didn't care about that).
At least this doctor apologized for the misstep, I know that's hard for an M.D. to do.
More News Tomorrow
Lots of stuff to post about today, but I need sleep more than I need to post, so I shall do it tomorrow. Hope y'all had a good day.
On the Second Day of Christmas...
we return to the hospital. Deciding to spread things out we had a family Christmas party tonight. By the end of the night dad had a bad stomach ache. And it got worse until we called 911. The ER thinks its “pancreatitis,” which seems to be able to be caused by post-surgerical medicines, trama, etc. I just got home, its 2:13. I need sleep. Hopefully, I'll be back sometime tomorrow.
Prayers, as always… would be appreciated. Thanks.
Merry Christmas Once Again
Hope you had a great Christmas! Remember, today is just day one of the twelve days of Christmas…
Welcome to the Other Side
Welcome to SAFARI 2, codename “Alexandra.” The more I use SAFARI 2, the more convinced I become it is really still alpha quality rather than beta. Here is what is still broken, ordered in two lists, one that contains “soon to be fixed” stuff and one that contains later stuff.
Soon- RSS will return in the next few days.
- Lingering display problems will be corrected.
- Blogroll will return ASAP.
- Topics will work again.
- Problems in admin panel will be fixed.
- “Remember Me” cookie for comment will function.
- Friendly URL's will return (in backwards compatible way, no need to change your links to any post on asisaid, it will work again ASAP).
- Posting a comment pages will retain look of asisaid.
- Proper rendering of trackbacks.
- Trackback support.
- Pinging of Weblogs.com/Blogrolling.com.
- Tons of other stuff.
If you see problems on these pages, please let me know in the comments below so that I can try to put it on the list of things to fix.
This will likely be my last post before Christmas, so have a very merry one. Blessings to you on the day of the celebration of Christ's birth. “Immanuel Hath Come to thee, O Israel”!
Progress as Promised
It looks like my new blogging software might be able to be unveiled later tonight or, at worst, on December 26. At least that's how I'm thinking at the moment. Right now, there are a number of key things missing, such as listing the proper number of comments on the front page, but that's more of a cosmetic issue than a serious issue that should be a showstopper. It's still better than no blog, right?
By the way, I want to give a really big “thank-you” to Christopher for offering WIT as a “home away from home” that I could post at temporarily. While I don't think I'll need it, given the progress I've made, it was nice just knowing I'd have a place to go, need be.
I wasn't sure how successful transfering the data from a flat file (plain text) database to MySQL would be, but it worked after spending a few hours hacking together a script to do so. The rest can come later, I figure. The big remaining job is to copy SAFARI 2 over onto the asisaid domain — right now I have it on a test domain and I'd like to keep that domain a test domain so that I can continue to work on progress to a “gold” 2.0 version of SAFARI without breaking asisaid (right now, I'd consider SAFARI 2 somewhere between late alpha and early beta stage — it works, but it still has some problems).
Anyway, just thought I'd give an update. I don't think I'll be done in time to do the Christmas post I wanted to do, but I'll just do it in a belated fashion. The other, really good news that I didn't have time to discuss yesterday is that the hospital released my dad yesterday. On Wednesday, he had sung “I'll Be Home for Christmas” to my mother — I'm glad he wasn't disappointed. The doctor seemed quite optimistic about the way things are going.
Buh Bye
The old blogging software I've been using seems to have given up its ghost. It's dead. As a doornail. Gone. Bit the dust. Bought the farm. All the entries now refuse to appear, although all the data is intact on the server. I have no idea why.
Fortunately, I've been planning a blogware update to my new SAFARI 2 Content System. Unfortunately, I discovered some bugs in it this afternoon as I was considering migrating it (this was all before I realized my blogware had died). Fortunately, I've fixed most of those bugs. Unfortunately, I haven't fixed all of them yet.
My big hope is that I'll return to the blogosphere within the next few days, at worst, maybe tonight, at best. In the mean time, I'll update this page, but I don't want to put too much effort into this static page.
I've placed a place holder article on OfB.biz where you can comment on this “entry” if you'd like to. Click here to read and post comments.
In the mean time…If you have not visited all of the sites on my blogroll before, why not visit one of them right now?
