When I got up this morning and checked my email, I thought I smelled a faint hint of that acrid smell that means that the “magic smoke” has escaped from something electronic.  I checked everything and all seemed ok, so I figured it was something that had wafted in from outside.  When I got home, I quickly determined that the magic smoke had escaped from the power supply in the Linux server that runs Asterisk (my VoIP server), the DHCP server for my network and one of the DNS servers.  So most of the things on my network at home weren’t happy because they didn’t know who they were because the DHCP and DNS servers were down.  I don’t think it was down for that long because the last entry in my Asterisk server’s CDR was 15:40 localtime when I called in to check my voicemail and I got home around 17:15.  Fortunately, my local computer store is open late and I was able to get a new power supply and had everything back up and running by about 19:00.

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So, CSS Naked Day on gordon.dewis.ca has finished.  For 24 hours, my blog didn’t have its usual fancy trappings because the cascading style sheet (CSS) was disabled.  I was quite impressed how it looked sans CSS, so kudos to the WordPress developers for creating such a robust system.

As of the time of this post, there were 1983 sites listed on the CSS Naked Day site.  Congrats to the organizers!

A few months ago, I wrote about encountering a spam injection exploit affecting my WordPress blog and what I did to expunge it from my system.  A few days later, I wrote a short entry about how to identify sites affected by this particular exploit using Google.  There were a lot of sites at the time, but now it looks like the list is shorter, which is a good thing.

But, there are still a lot of similar exploits affecting WordPress blogs and indexing services, like Technorati, are starting to react.  Mark Ghosh over at the Weblog Tools Collection and Dougal Campbell at Geek Ramblings both wrote about an announcement from Technorati, one of the larger blog search engines, announced in their blog that they are going to stop indexing sites that have been exploited by things like what I wrote about because it’s polluting their databases.  This means that a lot of sites are at risk of dropping off the radar, so to speak, because they haven’t stayed current with the latest version of WordPress.

Currently, anything before WordPress 2.3.3 should be upgraded immediately to version 2.3.3 or later.  Ideally, upgrade to WordPress 2.5, which also offers a bunch of cool new features.  I upgraded at the end of March and haven’t had any problems as a result.

What’s stopping you?

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m celebrating CSS Naked Day today by disabling the cascading style sheets on my blog.  Don’t worry, they’ll be back in about 24 hours or so.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy it in all its nakedness. 🙂

The third annual CSS Naked Day is going to be celebrated on April 9th. Its goal is to promote Web Standards, including proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, and a good hierarchy structure.

How it works is this: A webmaster registers their site at http://naked.dustindiaz.com/ and then on April 9th they remove all CSS (cascading style sheets — the things that make the web pretty) from their website.

There were at least 580 sites listed on the CSS Naked Day website when I registered my blog. In 2006, there were 763 sites that participated. 2007 saw 1689 sites participate. They’re expecting a lot more sites this year. Some sites go naked for longer than 24 hours to ensure they’re naked for 24 hours in all the various timezones around the world. I’ve installed the WordPress CSS Naked Day plugin, which offers a local time mode (just 24 hours) and a 48-hour mode, which is the “recommended” setting.

So, when you visit my blog on the 9th it’ll be naked for all to see. 🙂

This just in from the Everybody Votes Channel available on the Nintendo Wii.

Question: Do you want to live in a foreign country?

Worldwide Prediction Accuracy: 51.7%

According to the results, about two-thirds of Venezeulan Wii players want to live in a foreign country.  Most Japanese Wii players, on the other hand, are quite happy where they are with only a quarter wanting to live in a foreign country.

Canada ranked second from the bottom, just behind Japan, with about 30:70 in favour of not wanting to live somewhere else.  The United States was about 40:60.

Of course, the Everybody Votes Channel is not scientific, but it’s still interesting.

I sat on the patio at a local pub and sipped cider in the sunshine with a friend this afternoon! Such a nice change after having to hide inside all winter. 🙂

The weather forecast for the next few days doesn’t have a low below 0°C, so hopefully the remaining snow will disappear.

This means cycling on the bike paths isn’t far off!