Alias » Blog

Wordpress – Meet deepest sender

Administrator — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 13:43:21 +0000

Another reason for the lack of posts lately has been the fact that I spend most of my time on Livejournal these days. However, it seems that Deepest Sender now supports wordpress, so I can post much more easily!

Yay!

Joshua Davis workshop

Administrator — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 22:03:48 +0000

So the Josh Davis workshop was really awesome. I had this horrible fear that he’d be some egotistical asshole, but he’s really down-to-earth, personally accessible, and just generally a very fun guy to be around.

After meeting him, and talking to him about his work, and the processes he uses, I’m inclined to say that Joshua Davis isn’t really the same as the old school Algorists. I’d say that he still very much uses a painter’s methodology, and that the random generative process is still very much subordinate to the composition. A lot of human intervention and critique goes into his work – writing the algorithms is only a small part of the end result. This is in stark contrast to the more formal Algorists, whose creative process is essentially over by the time the algorithm is finished. Davis’ process, however, is a highly evolved cycle of critique, disposal, and experimentation, marked by a constant jorney of deterministic self-appraisal.

He also says ‘fuck’ a lot.

I’d most definitely recommend his workshops if you ever get the chance to go to one. Also – if you’re in Barcelona next month, check out his show at the Maxalot gallery, where he’ll be exhibiting some of his Maruto & Once Upon A Forest work, and some other cool stuff as well.

Blog back up!

Administrator — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 12:24:14 +0000

~~PENIS ENLARGEMENT XXX PILLS CHEAP!~~

I’ve moved my blog over to the WordPress platform, which seems (so far) to have eliminated all the random comment spam. So after a long hiatus, I’ll be blogging again.

Yay!

BBC UI Component Set?

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 16:30:49 +0000

Rob Bateman, who works for the BBC, (who worked on the BBC’s excellent US Elections Map) posted this on the flash components mailing list today:
“The flash development
team at bbc news interactive (which i am a part of) is planning to
release the component set we currently work with on our interactive
content. This will be on external website(s) such as macromedia
exchange, but the release will be under GPL license, and will cost
absolutely nothing!! Not only that, but we will be supplying FULL
flash documentation and diagrammatic uml of ALL classes and
structures, again, completely free of charge. The component set is
called smx, and feature highlights include Proper Re-skinning (ie. all
components, all elements, all from the same base classes, all from
library objects that follow the same rules, etc etc), Properly
Functioning Livepreviews, compatible with Flash 6 AND Flash 7,
Optimisations to provide the same functionality of mx components in ~a
quarter of the filesize with ~double the speed, DataComponents like
XmlLoader and NodeBinder that are much more streamlined than their mx
counterparts whil retaining the same functionality, and useful
standard components such as tabpanel and slider that are still
(amazingly) omitted from the basic mx set.
“

You can read the full text of Rob’s email here. It sounds like a very promising prospect, and knowing the BBC, there’s going to be lots of good documentation. I wonder though – if you haven’t paid your TV licence, can they stop you using these components?

Translation

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 02:41:58 +0000

I’ve been getting a lot of traffic in the last few days, thanks to everyone who’s been linking to me – I noticed, however, that some of the visitors were looking for content in languages other than English – so to try and help out with this, I’ve added the “translate” box on the right hand side. This will automatically feed the page through a translation web service, and *hopefully* it will make some sense in the language it gets translated into. Hopefully this will be useful to people!

Blog spammers up their game

Alias — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 22:59:59 +0000

So, last week, I noticed Stopbadware.org were blacklisting my site. Annoyingly, the software guidelines on stopbadware.org, which, although fine for a catch-all legal document as to what is or isn’t viruses/ malware / spyware / adware / annoyanceware / evilware / marketingware / whatever the hell we’re calling it this week-ware, don’t give you a great deal of help as to what to actually do about it.
Fortunately, a few conversations with a couple of my learned colleagues set me off on the right track, and it turned out that by exploiting a vulverability in one of the older versions of the Wordpress XMLPRC library, it’s possible to hack an older wordpress install and inject malicious iframe code into the various blog posts.
Fiendish.
And I thought I was safe now that I’d turned off commenting completely – which was not an easy decision, let me tell you.
Clearly we’re dealing with an organised criminal group here.
Anyway, apologies if you’ve inadvertently been exposed to anything unsavoury due to viewing my site.
The attack was exactly the same as the one discussed here. The long and the short of it is that I’ve cleared all the infected posts, and upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I would urge fellow WordPress bloggers to install the Wordpress Automatic upgrade plugin as it makes patching and updating very easy. To be honest, the thought of exporting my database and reinstalling wordpress manually on a regular basis makes me cring. The whole point of it is to reduce the amount of work involved.
Anyway… nothing to see here. Move along.