Vinh Pham

I wrote I hate sex in the city and it was a big hit. Let’s try to reproduce that success here.

Let me tell you what I’ve learned from Grey’s Anatomy:

1. The hospital breakroom is for sex – be careful next time you go in there – clean it well
2. All  doctors are gorgeous people, especially the male doctors – Mc Dreamy, Mc Steamy, Mc Donalds
3. When you’re a doctor, you can sleep with anyone – seriously – anyone
4. Being an attending means you can sleep with any intern, resident, or patient
5. During surgery you can yell at the each other
6. When there is a medical emergency you can disobey your supervisors and cut people open because that’s how you win approval and praise
7. Alcoholic? schizophrenic? No problem.
8. The third date is the sex date.
9. Having sex with random strangers is a perfectly good way to solve all your problems
10. …. Add your own in the comment section

In all honestly, I do not know enough about this woman to say she is crazy. But I just saw 6 of her commercials attacking Steve Poizner, in 30 minutes of “My name is Earl”. That is a crap load of commercials, and a crap load of money she’s got there.

Not only that, the messages in her commercials are extremely “partisan” — for lack of a better word. Now, if you read my other blog post, I am not a fan of bi-partian politics either, but attacking a person because they are not “conservative” enough, is like those people who attacked Obama because he was not “black” enough.

Her key points were something a long the lines of “Poizner did not vote for tax cuts”, “Poizner supported Al Gore”, “Poizner miss church last Sunday” (kidding on the last one). Well sheesh lady, maybe he had a good reason for making those choices? Can you tell me something concrete about the man, rather than trying to convince he’s the anti-Chris because he supported Al Gore? And for goodness sake, according to the news, you haven’t been politically active your entire adult life.

Perhaps I am just more politically aware this election, but those are my early observations and the campaign season hasn’t even begun yet… Well, good thing I don’t watch TV that often..

So if you found this page then you are in luck, because you probably landed on this page first:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55527

And if you tried what is written on there, you know that it DOES NOT work. I still can’t figure out why Google offers that as their official advice when it clearly does not work. Here is why:

1. Your link will redirect before Google finishes the logging call to their server.
2. _trackPageview does not offer any callbacks, so there is no way to detect completion

Here is how I fixed the problem using jQuery, but you can do this with any JavaScript you want.

1. _trackEvent has a callback so we are piggy-backing on it to log _trackPageview
2. You can set the _trackEvent to whatever, I am just using what makes sense to me here
3. Degrades nicely in case the user does not have JavaScript enabled.

Anyways — Enjoy, I hope this helps someone out there. If I am wrong, or if you know a better way to do this, please let me know!

BEGIN Update (3/2/10)

Thanks to Frank Farmer we have found that this seems to be a MediaTemple + Wordpress problem. Try the following.

1) Get this: Firefox User Agent Switcher
2) Select: Yahoo Slurp
3) Visit: http://clintoon.com/zguda.php?p=hawaii-beach-report – I don’t know who’s site this is, I am just using it as an example so be kind to whoever this is.

So what you see here is a link-farm of affected sites. I been chasing this all morning. If you have MediaTemple and Wordpress, check your site for malicious code now!! I have to get back to doing some real work now. If someone has the time, please help notify the domain owners that their site has been compromised.

The farm is endless pretty big. Sometimes it gets circular, but trust me, it’s endless it’s big. You just have to keep going down further.

END UPDATE

I run a lot of Wordpress installations because it is easy to install and a lot of people are familiar with the platform. However, in the last month, one of my Wordpress site has been hacked twice by the same people using an attack vector I still do not know yet.

The first attack wrote some redirection code to the wp-blog-header.php file:

Notice how it points you to inii.info — Anyways I deleted this code and a couple of weeks later the blog was hacked again.

This time they wrote a file named “…” (three dots) to my /etc directory and included the file through index.php. It’s a hidden system file: Link.

This one was a bit more interesting. Notice how the file was base64 encoded. I had to decode it 5 times before the actual code revealed itself.

Again, this was telling the blog to redirect itself to inii.info — Interestingly, it only targeted search engine bots. So here are my conclusions:

1) This is probably a Wordpress vulnerability that has not been discovered yet since it only targets my Wordpress files.
2) This is probably just a spam/link-farming operation because it just redirects search engine traffic to a link-farm page
3) The website I am running is on some sort of list that gets pinged once in a while to make sure the hack is still in place.
4) Although the attacker has access to my system files, ie they were able to write new files to my system, it does not look like they have done anything else.

Surprisingly one of the most useful tool that aided me in finding these code injection is Git. Git allowed me to find changes to my files that I had not made. So it’s one cool side effect of using Git that I am grateful for.

Been looking at a lot of photographer’s websites lately.

Here is one piece of opinion for all you photographers out there

Please, for the love of humanity, stop using flash.

Using flash is a terrible way to display your photographs.

1) It takes forever to load.

2) The photos are small and often cannot be resized.

3) You cannot link to a photo to you like

4) The user interface/interaction your flash designer created is horrible

5) Your creative flash intro/effects are not that creative and I don’t really care for it.

What you should do:

1) Use a popular image gallery like flickr or picasa if you are not paranoid about privacy

2) Show bigger photos if you have them

I have spent many posts railing about how much I hate Muni and Bart, but today I want to say something positive. This is very rare, so pay attention closely.

I actually enjoy taking the commuter bus and the commuter ferry. I also like taking the Amtrak train. There is something about taking the commuter bus that makes me feel like I am a part of a group of hard working people.

You see, the commuter buses cost a lot to ride. It’s about $10 each way. So most who gets on one of these buses are hard working people, and not likely to be stupid thugs who jumped over the railing like on Bart or Muni.

Also, people who get up in the morning at 6am to hop on a 1 hour bus ride are probably not here for fun. We are here because we have work to do, a paycheck to make, families to take care of. Not like the bums who hop on Muni to ride from one street corner to another to sell their drugs.

On the trip home, people on these commuter buses are trying to get home to their families, to the people they love and care about. That is probably why everyone sits quietly and patiently as the buses and ferries drag their tired bodies home.

It is out of shared suffering, that a sense of community and sympathy is born. Everybody here has something to do, someone to care about, and the last thing they want to do is cause trouble for all the people around them experiencing the same thing day in day out.

I think maybe that’s how we can improve Bart and Muni. Build bigger metal bars that goes up to the ceiling, raise the price to ride the train, and do not allow standing. Being packed in a sardine can with gate jumpers would make anyone mad…

As a web developer, I have to work with many hosting companies. Here is my list of hosting companies that you should avoid like the plague.

1) Register.com – They have a horrible control interface. And there is virtually no way to set up a subdomain.

2) Hostway – For the life of me, I could not find any way to access their database. Then they locked me out of SSH. They have an equally horrible control interface.

3) MediaTemple – They have a pretty good user interface and SSH access, but they also have a ton of down time. Although this company is huge, their gridservers go down almost once every two weeks. It’s a tragedy really.

4) Web.com – Decent interface, but the security is horrible. They put your password in the url params.

That’s all for now. Will add more later.

When people say things like, “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about [him/her]“, I have always thought that they are exaggerating. However, lately I am starting to believe that it is possible.

Although I don’t think about my dad everyday, I do remember him more frequently than I expected.

And one of the most bitter sweet thing about this whole experience is his physical manifestation in my life even now.

You see, my dad was a freak about heaters. He gets cold easily, and blamed being cold for almost every disease known to man. So not surprisingly he had a huge collection of portable heaters. One of his most recent and favorite acquisition was an oil heater. After seeing it at someone’s house, he searched high and low for one bought it.

When we were cleaning out his things, I took the oil heater back home with me because Uyen was also someone who always gets cold. Needless to say, the heater has become one of our most treasured item through this abnormally cold winter. It is an irreplaceable part of our room that keeps us warm through the bitter cold nights.

It’s kind of funny because every time I look at it now, it reminds me of my dad. I can’t help but think that even now, he has a presence in my life, keeping me and my fiancee safe and warm.

No offense to the lady in the photo, but this makes 1800Flowers look like a porn site.

When I am out buying flowers for my lady, I don’t really want to be advertised to like this. Try a happy looking old woman, or a gay man.

I am happy that you got elected. It’s nice to see an intelligent person in control, rather than a team of retards. Although, I must say, I am rather not fond of your long winded speeches. Many people are impressed by your oratory skills, I’d prefer it if you cut the crap and get to the point.

Anyways, I am writing you today to let you know that you should stop this conciliatory, team effort, bullshit. The idea of working together sounds great, and stupid people love it because it makes it seem like you care about them, and that they are being heard. But the reality is, people are stupid, and it is your job to basically protect them from themselves.

I am tired of hearing about WallStreet bonuses, tea parties, homophobia, death panels, warrantless wiretaps, torture, pro-life, illegal immigration, etc, etc, etc…

I know you are to blame for many of these atrocities, and continuing many of Bush’s agenda, but shit man, at this point I don’t really care where you stand, I just wish you’d do something.

Stop playing footsies with the Congress and just kick some ass already. If I disagree with you, I’ll protest or vote against you. But sitting around waiting for you to make a “collaborative” effort happen is extremely annoying.

Listen dude. I don’t agree with you on my things, but I know one thing for sure. I hate the way Republican party is ruining America. And your democratic buddies are just as bad. Can you please get off this “team work” bullshit and do something?