jonmagic.com - Blog

Summer in a nutshell

2008-08-21T01:31:00Z

Last year I got married. Natalie and I had bought a house in Elkhart Indiana, and we moved there the same week we married and have been making a home here since then. My memory is so bad I can’t remember what we did last fall, winter, or spring, but I do remember most of this summer :-)

Natalie started a new job this summer and is loving it. Late spring I picked up a bad habit, gaming, and it has stuck with me thru the summer. More notable is our vacation in June, where my brother in-law and sister in-law came up to stay with us, and we rocked Elkhart AND Chicago :-)

But the most important thing that happened this summer in our lives, wasn’t even something that happened directly to us. My parents finally got all their support (to become missionaries), spent a couple months getting ready, and flew to Argentina to start new lives as church planters (these events did not necessarily happen in that order). This has affected us though, now neither Natalie nor I have parents close by. The closest immediate relative is my sister, an hour away.

As summer closes up we reflect. It was a good summer, full of life changes, some surprises, many blessings, and a few hard times.

What is my passion?

2008-08-21T01:23:00Z

I’ve had a hard time with this question lately, and it has been coming up time and time again. I’ve been praying about, asking for guidance, trying to figure out what I should be pouring my heart into.

While nothing really jumps out, here are a few things that I enjoy doing and do a lot:

My job, fixing people’s computers, making people happy
My family, doing all the little things that make Natalie happy, even if she doesn’t realize it
Programming, for fun, for work, for side projects

So according to this article I should blog about something I’m passionate about. I guess I’ll have to redefine that to somethings.

Wiring Rails to use Datamapper

2008-08-10T21:09:00Z

Well, I will write an article here shortly, when I actually figure this out… Currently I can find no howto’s for getting rails to use datamapper instead of ActiveRecord. There is no gem, however there is a rails plugin, rails_datamapper, in the dm-more gem. I haven’t figured out how to use it yet though.

More soon!

Getting hacked

2008-06-20T21:47:00Z

My worst nightmare happened last night, and I didn’t even know it until late this morning. I was hacked…

Sequence of events:

June 19th

10pm EST – hacker figured out my email password, logged in, and sent out a mass email to the top 20 people on my contact list (most contacted people), thankfully gmail calculates this list only when you use the web interface in gmail, which I haven’t used in quite some time since I switched to using Apple Mail.app. Most everyone on the top 20 were family or friends. Mysteriously the hacker does not send the mass mail to Sam or Xian, who were both on my top 20 list. The two people who would have known to call me (rather than email me) and tell me to take immediate action.
10:16pm EST – Hacker? tries logging into my blog admin section from this ip 90.194.192.57 unsuccessfully
10:20pm EST – Hacker? successfully logs into my blog admin section from this ip 88.191.47.11
10:23pm EST – Magically whoever logged in at 10:20 is now logged in under a different ip 128.197.11.30 and figuring out my blogging system
10:29pm EST – Hacker figures out my layout management system and starts adding javascript to my template files, first my tag.liquid file
10:31pm EST – Hacker find my layout.liquid file, the master layout, and adds several javascript lines in there. They cause anyone who visits my site to get forwarded to a nasty porn storm site, and installed some sort of tracking js linked to cetrk.com and crazyegg? Keeps updating the same layout file until almost 10:33pm
10:34pm EST – Still updating the same file, but from a different ip now, 91.97.75.15, keeps updating the same file until 10:36pm.
10:36pm EST – My mom emailed me that someone had control of my email. Unfortunately the email never got to me, because the hacker also setup my gmail account to forward all my mail to him, and then archive my messages so they bypassed my inbox (I do still have access to them, they went to the gmail archive folder)

June 20th

9:05am EST – Sam calls me and leaves a message as I’m in the shower
9:30am EST – I call Sam back and find out that a customer had contacted him about an email I supposedly sent, an NASTY email
9:22am EST – I log into my gmail and change my password
10:02am EST – Finally I get to spot with my work where I can start investigating. Investigation shows me that the person had logged into my gmail and I believe only sent to the top 20 people, which was later proved true, at this point I just decided to start changing my password everywhere and send out an apology email to the people I believe got this nasty email
11:30am EST – I call my dad to see if he and mom had got the message. He said he was just emailing me to let me know they had.
11:35am EST – Dad calls me back to tell me my website has been hacked too. And its bad. He just held down the power button on his computer to get away from the horrible stuff that came up on his screen
11:43am EST – I fix my layout.liquid file the first time, turns out I left one line from the hacker still in there
11:53am EST – I get back into my website admin and fix the other line in layout.liquid
around 1:00pm EST – I’m still not getting any emails, and its really getting to me… Finally figure out in my gmail settings that the hacker set all my mail to be forwarded to a spam.la address, where my emails were visible to whole world, and skipping my gmail inbox.
3:38pm EST – I figure out that my tag.liquid file also had a js line in it, so I fix that and thoroughly check the rest of my templates.
3:41pm EST – I find the 128.197.11.30 address in my mephisto logs, track it down to Boston University, and immediately call their network operations center. I talk to one guy, then get forwarded to their network security department and talk to Eric. I explain to Eric who I am and where I’m from, and that our server had been hacked (my blog is on the company server) from an ip address in his network. I started to rattle off the ip address and he stopped me, and said “yeah yeah I know, we got the guy”. I said thanks and hung up.

Moral of the story. Use a good password.

Note: 90.194.192.57, 91.97.75.15, and 88.191.47.11 all belong to a company in England called RIPE

Hoyt update

2008-06-01T01:00:00Z

Here is a slideshow of the things in our life that we think are cool right now.

Hope you enjoy…

...nuf said

i'm stoked by the waybackmachine

2008-05-29T00:52:00Z

Man, I was just thinking the other day about all the content I’ve lost over the years switching blogging platforms. Then I listened to a podcast (most likely from Leo Laporte’s TWIT network) and found out about the WayBackMachine on archive.org… I know I’ve heard of it before but always thought “what is that good for anyway???”

Well today I checked it out, and all my blog posts from 2004 and 2005 are on there :-) There are tons of other sites I’ve lost, most of which I probably won’t ever find not because the way back machine doesn’t have them, but because I can’t remember the urls…

Anyways, it was just fun reading some of the stuff I wrote a few years ago. I actually sounded smarter back then :-P

Summer Project #1 - Build a desk

2008-04-21T16:03:00Z

I’ve been using laptops for almost 7 years now, which means I haven’t really had the need for a desk in the last 7 years (I travel a lot for my job). I’ve been building my gaming rig over the last 2 months (since I’ve only started gaming again in the last few months) and its been living on an old dining room table in one of our bedrooms upstairs. While functional its kinda wobbly and just doesn’t have the look and feel I want.

So today I started building a desk from scratch (well, from wood actually). Its gonna be a nice corner desk with one side dedicated to my gaming rig and the other side my laptop and work related stuff (i.e. printer etc)...

I’ll post photos of my current setup and then my new desk as building progresses. All I’ve started today is the tower cabinet that will hold the gaming rig, basic construction is done and trim has been cut but not attached.

You can see the whole set of pictures on my flickr

...nuf said

New parts coming

2008-04-19T14:59:00Z

Ok, I broke down and purchased the next couple of upgrades for my gaming PC… The first is actually one I linked to on the last gaming pc rig post, the PNY Geforce 9600 GT with 512mb… The second is this little puppy , so I don’t run out of juice :-) I’ll post how things work once my parts arrive!

I'm back! into games that is

2008-03-11T01:05:00Z

Ok, so thats not quite true, I did play some Counter-Strike and stuff last year, but last night and today I really got back into gaming.

What better way to get back into things than play Portal by Valve… Part of the Orange Box this game is a strategy game from a first person perspective, and it was fantastic… I don’t know if I’ve ever enjoyed a game that much. The story was simple but interesting, the narrator/boss was hilarious, and it had the best game ending I’ve ever seen (I kinda knew how good the ending was before I played it though cuz of Jonathan Coultan’s jump into fame).

Anyways, I guess Wednesday Xian is going to get me into Team Fortress 2 which he plays a lot and speaks very highly of…

...nuf said

I'm building a computer

2008-03-07T04:22:00Z

I know, I know, thats not a big deal considering I’m part owner in a computer store. But it IS a big deal to me, cuz this computer is going to be my tech/gaming machine for my house. Here is the spec list:

Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2ghz with 2mb of L2 cache
2gb of DDR2 667mhz memory
80gb 7200rpm hdd
plain old black computer case
Lite-On 16x Dvd-burner
MOST IMPORTANT: Nvidia 9600GT video card
“Acer 19 LCD monitor
best keyboard i can find lying around
Logitech MX-518 gaming mouse

I’ll also either be setting up some nice speakers, or get a nice little usb headset for talking in my games :-) Fun fun…

Did I mention I’m stoked?

Macbook Air smells like

2008-01-16T04:01:00Z

Nah, I know, its pretty . But has anyone else noticed that they are switching back to IDE ? I thought that everything was going to SATA. I guess after reading up that it doesn’t make much difference, but, whatever.

Ok, so I’m upset because I wanted a new laptop, and they didn’t come out with one I want. Guess I’ll have to wait for the Macbook Pro updates.

...nuf said

Dan has done it again :-)

2008-01-11T22:20:00Z

We are working towards integration between our web apps and quickbooks at our office, and Dan has pushed ahead and made it work… Today he released version 0.0.3 of his quickbooks gem . Previously on rubyforge as version 0.0.2, Dan took the previous authors work, completely rewrote it, added in OLE (I believe) for connecting, instead of having to go thru Quickbooks other API designed for web developers (because it is limited in what it can do), got in contact with the prior author which let him post the new work under the same name, and gave us 0.0.3…

So thank you Dan , keep up the good work!

Gravy of life

2007-11-28T16:56:00Z

A must read on my mom’s blog. Who knew she could take 15min of thanksgiving table fun and turn it into something worth reading :-)

Due South pilot episode

2007-11-22T02:45:00Z

Wow, I’ve been looking for this for years… Its been under my nose for over a year, right on youtube!

Click on the this article title to see all ten parts (the person who uploaded it had to split it up due to youtube file size restrictions)...

SabreTech Employee blogs

2007-10-26T04:09:00Z

My team at SabreTech has been busy building their own personal blogs!

Sam Sallows has his new blog up at www.samtheslacker.com

and Dan Parker has had his up for awhile at blog.behindlogic.com

Sam already has an excellent bit on what we can do for clients that need to run older windows apps that will only run on an old OS like Windows 2000 or Windows 98…