Archives for August, 2005
Surfrider Foundation Celebrity Surf Jam
The Surfrider Foundation and Propaganda Headquarters are proud to announce the roster of well-known musicians and professional athletes set to participate in the first ever Surfrider Foundation Celebrity Surf Jam. The event will take place at Orange County’s famed Huntington Beach Pier on Sunday, September 11th, 2005 from 8 AM to 2:00 PM.
High profile musicians taking part in the event include Brandon Boyd, Mike Einziger and Ben Kenney of Incubus, Peter DiStefano (Porno for Pyros) and Jim Lindberg (Pennywise). Four-time Olympic medal winning swimmer Aaron Peirsol will also be competing in the event. The event is being chaired by X-Games and ABC Sports commentator Sal Masekela.
Professional surfers include event Co-chair and co-star of the Endless Summer II, Pat O’Connell, Rob Machado, Jeff Deffenbaugh (Former WCT competitor and local surfer who is also helping to co-produce the event), and rising professional surfers Alex Grey and Dane Reynolds. “We have been surfing our whole lives, so protecting the oceans and beaches is especially important to us,” says Incubus’ Brandon Boyd. “It is our honor and privilege to participate in such a worthy cause.”
Go to Surfrider Foundation’s special Celebrity Surf Jam web section for more information.
Okay, So I’ve Changed My Mind
You know, pondering further on my decision to make a CMS app change, I’ve decided that I’m just going to stick with Wordpress; at least for the time being. When I thought about how much time I’ve invested in what’s already been done, it was clear to me how stupid it would be to throw it all away in order to start again from scratch. I just don’t have the energy to do that right now.
I do, however, still think the WP development team pulled a HUGE Bozo-No-No by covertly updating their application tarball without any kind of announcement. I had to download and update again, and I’m not even sure it was necessary. I sure hope they don’t pull something like it in the future. They may find lots of us rats jumping ship.
More WordPress Shenanigans…
WordPress - developers totally nuts: It turns out, that the WordPress developers are not only slow in dealing with security holes, but totally irresponsible. It has come to my attention, that after I had disclosed to them, the obvious flaws in their security fix, they have silently replaced the release tarball of WordPress 1.5.2 with a fixed version at an unknown point in time during the last 2 days.
This means everyone who upgraded within the first day is most probably still vulnerable to the exploit. It is hard to guess how many people are affected, because the change of the tarball was performed without any notification of me or their users. - Continue reading “WordPress - developers totally nuts”
And this is why I plan to make the change from using Wordpress. When developers (even open source) behave in this manner, it’s hard to take a product seriously.
I’m pleased to share that my Drupal tests are going very well, and that I’ve already begun working on a new style format which will somewhat resemble the site as it exists now. Onward and upward…
File This Under ‘Society Gone to Heck’
People injured in cheap iBook sale: A rush to purchase US$50 used iBooks turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over, according to a Fox News report. The story adds that one woman went so far to wet herself rather than surrender… [ read more ]
Um, yeah… How totally absurd is this? People beating the crap out of each other for four-year-old iBooks? I’m totally speechless. How the heck did the organizers of this silly sale think this wasn’t going to happen? Someone should be held liable for injuries & damages, don’t you think?
As sad as it is, who wants to bet that we’ll wind up seeing a clip from this on Real TV or America’s Funniest Home Videos in the near future?
[UPDATE] This photo sequence shows just how nuts the thing became. Kind of reminds me of a Who concert…
Site CMS Application to Change
When I first started this site, I used MoveableType as my weblog application. It was okay, but I ultimately found it was way too vulnerable to comment referrer spam. It was almost a daily battle to get rid of the crap generated by the lazy scum who think it’s all about a Google ranking. On top of that, MT was dependent on Perl libraries that were difficult to install under OSX.
Because of that major hassle, when I moved hosting from a pay-to-host service to my own box, I decided to make the switch to Wordpress. For the few months I’ve used it, WP has been an okay solution. However, based on some disturbing news that I’ve read lately regarding vulnerabilities in some of the code, I’ve decided that it’s time to take a look at a more comprehensive Content Management Systems (CMS) to run the site.
Right now, the front runner is Drupal. Mostly because it works so nicely with ecto, which I have found to be an indispensable application. Drupal is easy to configure, and the templating system is fairly simple to deal with. Plus, it pretty much has all the modules I need in order to produce my site. I’ll be experimenting with it on my alternate site for a couple of weeks, getting all the tweaks down. Keep an eye out for “the change” that’s coming soon.