Daily Archives: November 5, 2015

November 5, 2015   Uncategorized

Hacking and Leaking . . .

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 I don’t even want to talk about the weather anymore. Either the weather or the weather forecasters can’t make up their minds. Actually I suspect a little of both.

I think I’ve solved my problem with people (well, bots) trying to hack into my blog. I bit the bullet and installed a CAPTCHA program on the login page. In case you haven’t come across it online, CAPTCHA is that program that shows you weird, twisted letters and numbers like this.
CAPTCHA

Hopefully you can figure out what the letters are and type them in better than a bot script can. At least it worked in my case.


I went from over 250 attempts a day to 3. That’s a big difference. And I’m not exactly sure where the 3 attempts came from, because it won’t show a ‘failed login attempt’ unless it gets pass the CAPTCHA program. So maybe this was an actual person trying to get in, or trying to see why his bot wasn’t getting anywhere. But’s it’s a big improvement.


‘Billy Claus’ dropped off our Amazon stuff yesterday, so it was almost like Christmas. Besides a couple of tools and stuff I needed, the main thing I got was nine more sets of the Super Bright LED Light Strips. It looks like they’ve actually come down a couple of dollars, since they’re now $5.99 a set.

 

LED Strips

This will give me enough to do all the rest of the fluorescent lights in the coach. I have two of the small fixtures in the bedroom and two more in the living room. That will take four sets, but since those are all working OK with the fluorescent tubes, I’ll wait a while on those.


Things You Never Knew Existed Home Page

The other 5 sets will be to finish up the big fixture in the kitchen where I was short one strip, and then remount the strips on the top of the fixture instead of the glass.
Ceiling LED Lights 1
 But even with only 7 strips it’s still brighter than the fluorescent tubes that they replaced.
Ceiling-LED-Lights-2a

Then I’ll  do the other big fixture right next to it over the dining room table. That will leave me one strip left over for a spare, I guess.

 

Around 4pm this afternoon I went around back to check the level in the water tank and discovered that we had a diesel leak in the generator where the line comes out of the fuel filter. Not good.

So I put in a call to Todd, our GGS service guy, to let him know about the problem. He was supposed to be here tomorrow or Saturday anyway to top us off with diesel and change the oil, so maybe he could swing by a little early.

Turns out he was almost two hours away, so it was a little more than a ‘swing, but he got here pretty fast and fixed the problem. I assume it was just a loose fitting since I was asleep by the time he got here.

I’ve been having a lot of fun the last few days, doing something I haven’t had a chance to do in a while. No, not that.

What I’m talking about is ‘hacking code’. Specifically someone else’s code. As in the guy who designed the theme that I’m using on the new blog I debuting in the next few weeks. I’ll let you know more about that later.

But the code I’m ‘hacking’ is the style sheet, the ‘style.css’ file that pretty much determines the size, look, and feel of the theme. It looks like this.

#sidebar-secondary {
overflow: hidden;
float: right;
width: 220px;
margin-left: 15px;
}

/* =HEADER
————————————————————– */

#header {
height: 66px;
padding:22px 0;
}

.logo {
float: left;
margin-left: 15px;
}

.logo h1.site_title {
margin: 0;
padding:0;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif;
font-size:48px;
line-height: 40px;
font-weight: bold;
}

.logo h1.site_title a, .logo h1.site_title a:hover {
color: #404040;
text-decoration: none;
}

.logo h2.site_description {
margin: 0;
padding:0;
color: #4040FF;
/* =LAYOUT
————————-#A0C20B————————————- */
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif;
font-size:14px;
line-height: 14px;
}

.header-right {
float: right;
margin-right: 15px;
}

/* =MENUS
————————————————————– */

/* Menu Primary
—————————-*/

.menu-primary-container {
padding:0;
position:relative;
height: 34px;
background: url(images/menu-primary-bg.png) left top repeat-x;

 

This new theme is very similar to the one for this site. In fact it’s written by the same guy. And although it has some nice features, I didn’t like some of the layout, and the green and black color scheme just had to go. So my job is to comb through this code, figure out what’s doing what, and then change it to do what I want.

Sometimes it’s just trial and error. And a lot of error. You make a small change and then see what happens.

Oops. That’s bad.

But after a while you get a handle on how this guy does things, and figure out what you need to change.

Fun!

As I said, more about the new blog later. As a hint, it is related to this blog, but with a lot of new stuff. Stay tuned.

Tomorrow is Wal-Mart / Whataburger day, and I really hope my Whataburger experience is better this time. But I’m not holding out any real hope.
It is amazing what I’ll go through for a good burger, though.
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Thought for the Day:

It’s amazing how much ‘mature wisdom’ resembles being too tired. — Lazarus Long
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