Archive for the 'Personal' Category

I’m Addicted To Halo 3

Published
by
Tyler
on October 11, 2007
in Games, Internet, Personal and Xbox
. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I’ve been playing a lot of Halo 3 lately. I have yet to finish the campaign on Heroic or Legendary, but I have completed the campaign on normal. I’d say it took me roughly 8 hours of playing to finish on normal, but I did a lot of exploring around the levels.

After I beat the campaign on normal, I started in on multiplayer on Xbox Live. That may have been a mistake, multiplayer on Xbox Live is horribly addictive. It’s not just the online gameplay that’s addictive though, the ability to watch movies of yourself playing is equally, if not more addicting.

Halo 3 records video of all the games you play, weather it’s an online multiplayer game or a single player campaign. You can watch all your videos and choose which ones to save in the Theater, the place in Halo 3 where you can access all sorts of Halo 3 media.

Death on SnowboundOne really neat feature is the ability to take screenshots from your movies. So, if you had an awesome looking kill or something else that you want to remember forever, you can take a screenshot of it and it’ll be sent to your Bungie.net profile for you to download and save later. I’ve been saving all my screenshots and uploading them to Flickr for permanent storage. You can have a look at them here, under my Halo 3 tag at Flickr. The quality of the screenshots is pretty good, they’ve all got a resolution of 1536 x 1152.

My Spartan As Of 10/11/2007Another cool new feature is custom armor for your Spartan or Elite multiplayer character. You can choose from roughly seven different armor styles. You can set different styles for your helmet, left shoulder, right shoulder, and chest plate. The Halo 3 Player Model Generator site lets you see what your Spartan or Elite would look like with all the available types of armor. According to that site, there’s 187,947,000 different armor combinations possible in Halo 3. Some of the Armor styles on that site are available only to Bungie employees, such as the “Flaming helmet” chest plate. Supposedly, using this chest plate makes the players helmet appear to be engulfed in flames. Seems like it’d make a nice sniper target to me…

Popularity: 20% [?]

Unwakeable: The Future And WordPress 2.3

Published
by
Tyler
on October 9, 2007
in Internet, Noteworthy, Open Source, PHP, Personal, Unwakeable and WordPress
. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I’ve waited far too long to post an update on Unwakeable 2.0 and it’s status, so here it is, almost. First, I’d like to address the issues with the current Unwakeable release (version 1.2.1) and WordPress 2.3. There’s a few issues, although most of them are fairly minor.

1. Tags: Unwakeable 1.2.1 does not support the new tagging system in WordPress 2.3. If you’re using the new tagging system, your tags will not be displayed. Ultimate Tag Warrior still works just fine with Unwakeable 1.2.1 and WordPress 2.3.

2. Prototype: Livesearch (and probably rolling archives) don’t work with WordPress 2.3. I really have no idea why, it’s probably a combination of a few things. One major contributor is probably the fact that WordPress 2.3 likes jQuery instead of Prototype, and Unwakeable relies heavily on Prototype for it’s ajax effects, such as livesearch, rolling archives, and live commenting. I only use livesearch, so I can’t say for certain if rolling archives and live commenting were truly broken. All I know is Firefox CPU usage skyrockets when loading this site when livesearch is enabled.

3. Archives Page: The archives page is slightly broken, it displays an error similar to this at the top:

WordPress database error: [Table 'tlongren_wordpress.wp_categories' doesn't exist]

That happens because Unwakeable 1.2.1 doesn’t know about the new taxonomy schema in WordPress 2.3. WordPress 2.3 does away with three tables, categories, post2cat, and link2cat. Those tables are replaced by three new tables that, when combined, offer much greater flexibility in handling post categories and blogroll categories. I think this new schema handles tags as well.

4.Tag Archives: This may be unique to this site, I haven’t tested, but whenever you try to visit a tag archive (my unwakeable tag archive for example), a 404 is received. Obviously, it should display all the posts with the given tag. Can anyone using Unwakeable 1.2.x confirm this is also broken on their WordPress 2.3 site?

5. Unknowns: There’s probably lots of broken things I’m not aware of. K2 Sidebar Modules may very well be one of them. I really doubt they work 100% because they make some use of categories. If you’ve got anything I’ve missed, please let me know about it so I can make sure it’s working in Unwakeable 2.0. One thing that DOES work that I entirely expected to be broken are the category archives. I was ready for all sorts of errors when trying to view a category archive, like the Unwakeable category archive, but they display exactly as they did with WordPress 2.2.x. Please let me know if you’re aware of any other incompatibilities between Unwakeable 1.2.x and WordPress 2.3.
Continue reading ‘Unwakeable: The Future And WordPress 2.3′

Popularity: 18% [?]

WordPress Theme: Unwakeable 1.2.1

Published
by
Tyler
on September 4, 2007
in Internet, Noteworthy, PHP, Personal, Security, Unwakeable and WordPress
. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

I hadn’t planned on releasing another version of Unwakeable in the 1.x series, yet here it is. The release of Unwakeable 1.2.1 was prompted after the discovery of a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Unwakeable search functions.

The vulnerability makes it possible for people to run malicious code that could, for example, steal all the cookies from your domain. You can download Unwakeable 1.2.1 from the official Unwakeable page. There are no new features in Unwakeable 1.2.1. The only difference between 1.2 and 1.2.1 is the fix for the XSS vulnerability.

If you’re already using version 1.2 and don’t want to bother upgrading, I’ve put together a post describing the steps to take to patch the vulnerability in Unwakeable 1.2.

I apologize for the inconvenience and please let me know if you have any issues with Unwakeable 1.2.1.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Unwakeable XSS Vulnerability

Published
by
Tyler
on September 3, 2007
in Internet, Noteworthy, PHP, Personal, Security, Unwakeable and WordPress
. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

It was brought to my attention a couple days ago that Unwakeable 1.2 contains a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the search piece. To test to see if you’re vulnerable, search for this on your Unwakeable site:

<script>alert('XSS Vulnerability!');</script>

If you see a javascript popup after searching, you’re vulnerable to attack and should follow the steps below to fix the vulnerability in Unwakeable 1.2. I’ve already taken steps to fix this vulnerability in Unwakeable 2.0, which will be released shortly.

To fix your installation of Unwakeable 1.2 you need to edit three files: serchform.php, theloop.php, and header.php.

1. searchform.php

First, open searchform.php and change this piece on line 8:

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>">

to this:

<form method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php echo htmlspecialchars($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']); ?>">

2. theloop.php

Next, open theloop.php and change this piece on line 42:

printf(__('Search Results for \\'%s\\'','k2_domain'), $s);

to this:

printf(__('Search Results for \\'%s\\'','k2_domain'), htmlspecialchars($s));

3. header.php

Finally, open header.php and change this code on line 6:

Search for <?php echo $s;

to this:

Search for <?php echo htmlspecialchars($s);

That’s it, once you’ve made those three changes you should no longer be vulnerable to this cross-site scripting attack. To make sure, just perform the search I mentioned above. It should no longer produce a javascript pop-up.

You can find out more about this vulnerability at blogsecurity.net. They have a tool called WordPress Scanner that will scan your WordPress installations for security problems.

Let me know if this fix doesn’t work for any of you.

Popularity: 16% [?]

TendonUSA Cables

Published
by
Tyler
on August 12, 2007
in Internet, Noteworthy and Personal
. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

A company called TendonUSA contacted me the other day offering me the opportunity to try out some of their products, all of which are cables of various types. They have a fair number of cable products, from ethernet cables to HDMI cables. The one product I wish they had but don’t (it’s not on their website at least) is retractable ethernet cables. I’m hoping they have some in development for release sometime soon, they’re so cool!

Their CAT6 ethernet cables immediately caught my eye. Their ethernet cables have a feature called EasyConnect, which, if I understand it correctly, replaces the little clip found on traditional RJ-45 plugs with a simple push button. That’s excellent for me, because I have to replace the traditional RJ-45 plugs far too often at work due to broken clips. The EasyConnect feature sounds like it would totally put an end to that little nuisance. No little clips to break on ethernet cables would be dreamy.

The representative from TendonUSA who emailed me compared the quality of their cables to that of Monster Cable and Belkin. Both Monster Cable and Belkin are way overpriced in my opinion, which could have something to do with lack of competition in the high quality cable market. TendonUSA has much more reasonable prices on all their cables, which is great, assuming the quality and performance is there. Hopefully they can bring some competition to the high quality cable market and drive prices down a little. I’m sorry, but $30 for a simple USB printer cable is just madness.

On the TendonUSA about page, they describe why Tendon cables are cheaper and how they can maintain such high quality in their products while selling them for quite a bit cheaper than the competition. Here’s a little piece from their about page:

Why buy TENDON?
Lets make it simple. Tendon connectivity cables are higher quality.
All audio, video and computer cables that fall in the same category (5, 5e, 6, high-speed USB, fire wire, etc) all perform to the same standard. So why are you spending the additional 15% to 25% more on other brands of cable?
What makes Tendon cables better and why should we buy them? The only differences between our cables and theirs are:

From there, they describe the differences between TendonUSA cables and “theirs”. The “theirs” being Monster Cable and Belkin products of course.

I’m hoping to get a few different types of cables from TendonUSA, all of which I will review here. I can’t really compare their performance to that of Monster Cable as I’ve never owned a Monster Cable product. I do have some friends with Monster Cable products for their Hi-Def setups. I plan on purchasing my first Hi-Def television later this month. Perhaps I can talk one of them into loaning me their Monster Cables for some testing. Cuz I sure as hell can’t go out and purchase a $150+ cable for testing purposes. :) As for Belkin, the only product of theirs I’ve really used are their USB 2.0 cables, and their performance was matched by many generic USB 2.0 cables.

I can’t really say much more about TendonUSA and their products until I actually try them out. One thing I can say with 100% certainty though is all their products look very sleek and sexy, all look to be very well designed. Hopefully TendonUSA cables live up to consumers performance expectations. I’d love to see more competition in the high quality cable market, it’d drive prices down and would probably bolster the market as a whole. It’d open the market up to people who won’t pay ~$30 for a simple USB 2.0 cable.

Anyway, I’ll post reviews once I’ve spent a little time with the products. If you’ve ever used any TendonUSA products, I’d love to hear your experiences. From what little exposure I’ve had to TendonUSA, they seem to be a very honest, enthusiastic, no B.S. sort of company. I’m guessing their products will all be top-notch, I just have to wait and see.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Unwakeable and Vacation

Published
by
Tyler
on August 2, 2007
in Internet, PHP, Personal, Unwakeable and WordPress
. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Ashley and I both managed to get a week off work for vacation this last week. We spent the week (7/21/2007 - 7/28/2007) in Northport, Michigan with the Davis family, that’s Ashley’s mothers side. I can’t even begin to explain how nice it was to have a week off work. We both had a great time in Michigan, except for the visit to Mackinac Island. I could not believe the number of people on that island, way too many for me to deal with.

We stayed the entire week at Northport Bay Retreat, a gigantic property that’s owned by Mike Anton (Anton & Co). Anton owns another property on Spider Lake, also in Michigan, that we’re hoping to get for the next reunion. We actually tried to get the Spider Lake location for this reunion but weren’t able to. The Spider Lake location is a much better fit for our group than the Northport Bay location, for multiple reasons that I won’t go in to here. Ash and I took a few pictures while in Michigan, but not nearly as many as I would have liked.

I did a little work on Unwakeable 2.0 while we were in Michigan. I’ve continued work on 2.0 since returning and have it very close to being ready for release. Unwakeable 2.0 will include some new styling options. For example, you can choose custom colors to use in the header and you can also customize sidebars. Unwakeable 2.0 includes the ability to choose from no sidebar, a single sidebar, or dual sidebars. Unwakeable 2.0 can also be set to fixed or flexible width. Flexible width will let Unwakeable adjust itself to fill most of the browser window.

I’ve also built sidebar modules for Gregarious, WP-PostRatings, and WP-PostViews. This will allow you to use those plugins in your dynamic sidebar provided you have the plugins installed and activated. Also, support for the LMB^Box Comment Quicktags plugin is included. All you have to do is download and activate the plugin and it will automatically start working with Unwakeable.

I expect I’ll be releasing Unwakeable 2.0 within 2 weeks, need to get some more testing done before releasing it to the wild though. Please note that Unwakeable 2.0 can only be used with WordPress 2.1 or later. If you’re using WordPress 2.0, Unwakeable will not work.

Popularity: 12% [?]

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