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Greatest news coverage ever!

Reenactments were never so accurate. Ohio is for bears. Check it out.

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Lord of the Dance: A Challenger Appears

…and he was discovered in Mount Clemens, Michigan at the Stars and Stripes Festival.

Music is “All She Wants to Do is Dance” by Greenstreet. I shot this on Saturday, June 27th around 3:50pm

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New Login / Comment System

Due to request, I’ve changed the way people leave comments and log into Conveniently Misplaced.

The first is the comment system, which uses Disqus. This allows for a prettier display, guest posting, better conversaion / replies, and syncing up with all other blogs that use the Disqus system. So it should be fun and much more interactive for you guys, which I’m excited about.

Second is the login system, which has been integrated with Clickpass. I had openID set up for a long time but it didn’t catch on. With Clickpass you can login using an MSN, AIM, Facebook, OpenID and more. So it’ll be easier to login and connect.

Enjoy B-)

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The “Up In Smoke” Version of Obama’s Tobacco Bill

Just what we need: More government control over another aspect of our lives. As a former smoker (still a hookah smoker), I can tell you up front that this bill is a complete joke and abuse of power.

How you ask? Well lets just look at the “findings” by congress right from the bill itself.

1) The use of tobacco products by the Nation’s children is a pediatric disease of considerable proportions that results in new generations of tobacco-dependent children and adults.

That’s all well and good. However Childhood Obesity (up to 33% of kids) is much more rampant than the number of high school seniors that smoke (up to 24%). Not to mention that studies are showing that teens are smoking at substantially lesser rates than in years past, and this figure continues to fall yearly. Other problems facing kids, such as childhood obesity, all the nonsense on the television and in the media, and the glorification of anti-culture culture is on the rise, and much more dangerous.
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Badass Punk / Pirate VW Rabbit

Another fun find while driving. Note the spraypainted skull and crossbones on the door.

This is the last of the “random weird cars I see while driving” for a while. I promise. But this was too sweet to not post up.

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Bumper Stickers….not always smart

While I don’t really consider this a “car’ blog and don’t plan on making it one, there’s been enough interesting car coverage to warrant a new category.

Anyways, on my way home I encountered a car with one of those pro american, save your job bumper stickers. The ironic bit being that it was on a Chevy HHR and this immediately threw up some red flags.

Behold, the car.

Chevy HHR: Made in...

Behold, the hypocracy.
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Lack of updates courtesy of PHP security issues

So I have all kinds of stuff that needs to get posted on here, including pictures of the half torn-down Tiger Stadium as well as the Packard Pant and whatnot. However, it’s been screwy getting in to make any updates before recently.

Here’s the story.

I’ve been working on a small freelance project where the most time consuming bit was going to be the photo gallery. So I wrote something up to show the pictures, browse directories, make image previews, etc. Instead of being ghetto-fab and just using CSS to set the width of the images, I found a nice thumbnailer script that uses PHP’s GD library and even had an image cache so that it wouldn’t be ridiculously slow every time it was run. It’s called Smart Image Resizer from Shifting Pixel. I was excited and decided to test it.

Well, the script was set up to search all directories in the folder “galleries” and take the first image from each folder and use that one as the preview image. Simple enough, right?

Well, not when it encounters an empty directory.

It tried passing something like “array index[2]: Invalid” to the PHP script as an argument for the image. This, unbeknownst to me, caused my web server’s security to freak out and give errors like the following:

2009-06-10 21:33:23 XX.XX.XX.XX  /thumbnail.php?/.?width=350&height=350&cropratio=1:1ℑ=/gallery/test1/. HTTP/1.1 domain.com Access denied with code 403 (phase 2). Match of “rx (\\.(?:gif|jpg|png|bmp|jpeg)|^http://$|^[0-9]+$)” against “ARGS:image” required. [file "/usr/local/apache/conf/modsec2.user.conf"] [line "825"] [id "340161"] [rev "14"] [msg "PHP Injection protection for Image ARGS (S)"] [severity "CRITICAL"] 403

Except like I said, I had no idea that this has happened. So from where I sit, I’m just trying to FTP some files and go about my day. Then it locks me out. No big deal right? Server’s getting rebooted or something, I’ll just try again later.

Still can’t get in. I check the server from my phone, it’s fine. Eventually, I get back in, go back to testing, and get locked out again. I proceed to go down to my girlfriend’s house, assuming that it’s blocking my IP address for whatever reason, and it locks me out there.

So I’m pretty bothered and confused at this point. Keeping mind that this has happened over the course of a few days. Eventually, I get in touch with my hosting people and figure it all out. But that still won’t stop the server from kicking me off if it doesn’t like the image value to pass.

So I patch my gallery to only pass something to the script if there is a file there, and all is well again.

On top of that, I worked till almost 730 today, put in almost a full day on Sunday, had to rebuild my home network setup and have had random day to day stuff to deal with.

Updates are coming soon. Till then, there CAN be a thing as too much security .

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Hookah HDR (Neon Sign)

Snapped this earlier in Downtown Mount Clemens. It’s a neon sign at the Heads Up Boutique.

Hookah: In HDR

Taken with my trusty Samsung NV15. View a larger size here.