I just spent an afternoon watching Smallville: Season 6×11-14 (my boyfriend and I are working through this season for the first time), the new Season 7 episode from this week (Apocalypse), and then the very first 2 episodes from Season 1. I remembered the pilot being two hours and much more dramatic than it actually was. But wow, it was a nice breather from all the uber-angsty, insane-o-drama of Season 6 (which I am finding to be an absolute TRAINWRECK as far as the Lana/Lex plot goes). I actually really liked the early episodes. I hadn’t watched the first season since it first aired, and I realized something afterwards: Clark is actually *smarter* at the beginning than he is today. He gets progressively dumber as time goes on. It’s really refreshing to not see him acting so big ‘n’ dumb after the stupidity of the most recent seasons, but why the dumbing down? Maybe it’s because Chloe and Pete aren’t in on the secret yet, so he’s forced to act and making decisions on his own more. Or maybe his IQ dropped as he bulked up… Something else my boyfriend and I both remarked on is that Lana is such a happy person when the show starts. For a girl who talks to her dead parents in the graveyard, she’s remarkably positive about life. It’s so sad to see that picture of her as a little girl crying her eyes out upon seeing her parents killed, and realizing that’s what she’ll be doing for the rest of the series >_< It’s like everybody’s lives just spun out of control in increasingly horrible ways after a very optimistic beginning.
Site all fixed
I’ve finished upgrading the Coppermine and Wordpress installations - all that work and not a thing looks different from the outside =) But wow, upgrading from Wordpress 2.2.2 to 2.5.1. (eek!) makes for a huge difference on the administration side! The upgrade for the Coppermine gallery was just from 1.4.16 to 1.4.18, but that update fixed an SQL injection vulnerability that will hopefully protect me from this particular hack in the future (that and completing wiping the site). I deleted a number of new user registrations from the gallery, because one of them was likely the hacker (unless they registered and then waited a few weeks to strike - doubt it). So some people will need to re-register there, although at the moment there’s not a big reason to register at all. I have disabled the ability for non-admin registered users to upload images: I want to see if I get hacked again before opening that up.
Thankfully Dreamhost, my site host, keeps site backups dating back 2 weeks and separate database backups for 5 days, so once I figured out how to access the site backup (ended up using WinSCP, a secure FTP program that is free and way easier to use than the shell command-line), restoring the site was a breeze. Relatively speaking.
Now I’m off to do something fun for a while, like search for MP3s on one of these MP3 search engines I found listed on techie-buzz.com. Neat! I’d be even happier with an Ogg Vorbis search engine ;-)
Site back up
Supergirl: Maid of Might has been offline for the past 2.5 days: I took the entire site down Tuesday evening when I discovered that it had been hacked so that all the HTML and PHP pages had been overwritten with scripts (manifesting in what appeared to be a tiny graphic at the bottom of the page) that attempted to redirect users to another domain which would attempt to install a trojan (see this and this for just two examples: it’s been happening to tons of Coppermine and Wordpress users this month). The attack took place sometime around 07:17am CST on April 22, so if you visited any part of the site on Tuesday, especially if you were using IE, I’d advise you to run a virus scan. If you don’t have antivirus software, ZoneAlarm is a free one that CNET recommends.
I still need to upgrade my Coppermine Photo Gallery and Wordpress installations, so I have taken the gallery offline and turned off comments to the blog temporarily. Just wanted to let you know what was going on :-) If you find some things broken on the site, don’t worry, they will be fixed eventually. There’s no need to e-mail me about anything.
Smallville 7×16 Initial thoughts
I still have to post the review for Veritas, but this can’t wait!
Spoilers ahead!
.jpg "My X-RAY VISION detects trouble -- at sea!")