Dear Readers, I had dropped some hints last month that I’d be slowing my output considerably (as like last summer). I wanted my sleep back… But I’ll be, gettting up again at this ridiculous hour in one week when I catch a 6am flight to Portland by way of Dallas/Fort Worth (!), to get to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention for a reasonable fare. I’ll be helping out the Drupal booth and otherwise getting to know some of other folks who help develop this fine software. Unfortunately I won’t be making the BlogHer conference, but I’m still appreciative that my early contributions to it have been recognized by the conference organizers.

What keeps me up this evening is my mending a little rift in our author-reader relationship. I’ve been on such a summer break, I didn’t even notice that the webserver was hacked on Monday night at 8:47pm EDT. Somebody at 201.19.29.111 exploited the xmlrpc.php vulnerability which I hadn’t closed up. Fortunately they were just screwing around, and just replaced the text on each page with four nonsense words, which were mercifully not defamatory or pornographic; no data was lost. I have restored it just now. It appears that 214 hits got the false page; half of them coming from search engines) (By coincidence I was hunting around my work desktop earlier this evening– installing Drupal, as it is– and I discovered that it was hosting the ToxBot worm, which paid no intention to Symantec’s supposed virus removal utility.) So it’s a day of cleaning house.

Literally– I’m moving across town. (and thanks to Speakeasy DSL I can transition the IP and have no interruption in service.) It was a good time for me, personally, to buy a place– the housing market bubbles be damned– and I’ll be back in the city of Boston, in the neighborhood of Brighton. A month ago, as I was closing in on the closing date, I got wind of the release of GoogleEarth and spent an evening in space flying around. I took some snapshots along the way, and I’ll post them tomorrow– along with a riff on the magic letters G-L-O on how they might just change the world. I’ll also weave in a number of conversations I’ve had over the last month.