He installed a solar water heater and 14 PV panels on his roof. Still waiting to hear how much energy he generates, but it’s still a very cool thing to do. When I eventually own a house, I anspire to follow in the good example that Sam has set in installing solar water heat and energy creating PV cells. Way to go Sam, I salute your forward-thinking eco-evangelism!

I met a few coworkers yesterday to do a 5-mile Mt. Lemmon approach and the first 5 miles of climbing for a total round trip of just over 20 miles. It was a great ride, but boy are my legs killing me! I’m not sure how people do all 25 to 30 miles of climb to the top! I did, however, greatly enjoy the ride down.

Apparently, my website was hacked a while ago (I suspected it previously, but couldn’t find any proof or evidence) and it reared its ugly head this morning in the form of text spam injected into my RSS feed.  Thanks to Lance and Face, who both emailed me about the problem.

After a few hours of hunting for the problem looking through MySQL entries, users, comments, and file permissions, I found an old plugin that had a file that was 2 years newer than all of the other files in the directory and the directory itself.  On top of it being newer, the payload of the php in the file was encrypted.  Encrypted php?  Really?  That’s possible?

After a few WordPress-hardening changes (recommended here and here); nuke the admin account, verify the permissions on files and directories, remove stray _rss_* entries in the wp_options table of my database, rename the wp_* tables of my database to a non-standard name, remove all non-necesary Plugins and Themes, and install WP Security Scan to hunt down vulnerabilities; I think that my site is fixed.

If anyone sees anything fishy coming out of the site from hence forth, please feel free to contact me!  My website maintainence email is webmaster [at] geoffkerr [dot] com.

It was a few years overdue, but I’ve finally updated the theme of my website to something a little more simple and easily customizable. Along with the fresh new coat of paint, I’ve updated to the latest WordPress build, updated all plug-ins that I use, and have been updating the layout to better support some projects that I’ve been putzing around with both on paper and in my head.

Stay tuned for one of those projects, a long-term (with lots more work to go) project of mine to develop a weather monitoring system.

I was originally gunning for 16 to 20 miles, but just kept going to the end of the Rillito path. Great ride! I’ll probably feel it tomorrow.