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The need to shrink Detroit – and why we must do it now.

Nobody is perfect, mayor Dave Bing included. And making arguments for the need to downsize what was once America’s fastest growing city is, well, nothing short of radical. No surprise, people are getting angry and confused at a proposal that will re-locate residents and will change the structure of the city as we know it. It’s not going to be easy, but if we want any shot at saving Detroit, it has to be done.
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Got a problem with Ninjas? Then we’ve got the car for you!

Yesterday morning, I took my car in to get looked over. While the “Diagnostic Testing” was a little pricey, the upside was that they gave me a free rental car off the lot to have fun with while my 940 was under the microscope. I was pretty thrilled to be driving off the lot in a $40,000 swedish luxury sedan: The Volvo S80.

The S80 has an abundance of features that make it easy to fall in love with. And with the elegant dashboard, the blind spot warning system (aka, blinking lights), and the absurdity of putting 6×9 speakers in the front doors, it’s pretty hard not to.

As I was discovering more and more things about the car that were just common sense, I discovered an extra feature: The Personal Car Communicator (PCC).
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Michigan Central Station Status Updates

The following is being re-posted with permission of John Mohyi, the chap heading up the efforts at Michigan Central Station. I’m glad to report that great progress is being made, ideas are coming into the fold, and more people are getting involved.

Since our strategic grassroots restoration effort to save the Michigan Central Station (MCS) began on June 30th 2009 volunteers have eliminated nearly three dumpsters worth of debris, planted over 1,000 flowers, and inspired a sense of hope in the heart of Detroit.

I have been working closely with the station owners, students, residents, businesses, elected officials, organizations, and volunteers to secure the future of the station. Many individuals have come out of the woodwork and needless to say we could never have made it this far without them.

To me the Michigan Central Station is a symbol for the city of Detroit. At one point it was known for its greatness and then slowly it slipped away into the decrepit state that exists today. It seems as if the more debris we remove from the building, the more corrupt and incompetent politicians we remove from office in the city of Detroit. After we remove the debris is when the real work begins.

After this Friday, July 10th, the MCS project will move into its next phase. In addition to various skilled volunteers, Home Depot corporate has expressed interest in sponsoring our efforts by providing equipment and professional volunteers to help us achieve our objectives. Assuming everything goes according to plan it will not be very long until the station comes to life. For this part of the volunteer effort we will need volunteers who are 18 and older with a decent background in construction.

Once the building is safe and secure, we will need skilled artists to help with the aesthetics of the building. I envision the second main room with the metal roof as a giant mural. As you can imagine this will be an enormous project and the College of Creative Studies (CCS) will likely play a key role.
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Extreme Makeover: Depot Edition

***NOTE***
To all that are finding this page through a link, there is an update on what’s happened with more information and insight here. So once you’re done, check it out.
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There’s something brewing over at the Michigan Central Station train depot in southwest Detroit. The depot sits as a gateway in between Corktown and Mexicantown. While Mexicantown is picking up somewhat, Corktown is still experiencing the economic hit of the Tiger Stadium loss when the team moved to Comerica Park in 2000. The station is one of the first things you notice when you cross the Ambassador Bridge from Canada into the United States, and there’s no question that while it’s an architectural masterpiece, it remains a tremendous eye sore and a black mark for the city.

On April 7th, the City of Detroit decided it was time for the building to come down, and entirely too many people disagree with that decision. So with the help of Wayne State student John Mohyi, state Senator Cameron Brown, Dan Stamper and the Detroit International Bridge Company (who owns not just the Ambassador bridge but the Train Station as well), an effort was put underway to try and find a use for this iconic relic of Detroit’s past.

Numerous times since Amtrak moved out in the late 1980s, there have been proposed solutions for what to do with the building.

• Before the Casinos opened in Detroit (Greektown, the MGM Grand, and Motor City Casino), MCS was a possible location for a casino / hotel.
• There were talks of it being an IT hub for the massive cables that connect the internet between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit.
• The Kwame Kilpatrick Administration pitched the idea of using it as a police headquarters or FBI regional hub for the area.

All of these project ideas and more have fallen through, and the depot sits idle, with the exception of the urban exploration and the occasional movie shoot (such as the first Transformers film) or photo op. The razor wire around the front perimeter does little to deter visitors, and the cement rises up ever so as if to dare people to try and jump over it. This all despite the fact that the back of the building is completely and entirely wide open.
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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 .