Thanksgiving day. I bought a bottle of Sazerac Rye and drank it neat all day Thursday. Justin’s family may now think I’m an alcoholic. Especially because I brought it in, and took it back out. I’m not a whiskey fan but I know what I don’t like, and I don’t not like this:

Black Friday. I slept in and wiped and updated/jailbroke my iPhone to 3.1.2. What a colossal pain in the ass. I had to borrow Sam’s SIM card 4 times before I got a clean install and activation. Also I made this for my bootup and  lock screen:

Saturday. Migraine,but only a 4 on the Jake scale. Ask me what that means sometime. Also, watched Singing in the Rain:

Understatement of the week: Gene Kelly and Don O’Conner were talented. It’s on Netflix streaming if you’d like to watch.

Sunday. Farmer’s market. Out to Sea with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Not great, but funny enough for a Sunday. Makes me want to watch “The Odd Couple” and call everyone a moron.

Just received this email from Media Temple:

Recently we witnessed some malicious activity on our (gs) Grid-Service platform where a hacker redirected some customer websites to a 3rd-party advertising website. This attacker appears to have illegally obtained some older customer data, which included usernames and passwords stored in clear text. Our newer systems now have this same data encrypted. An investigation into this illegal activity is ongoing, with full details forthcoming.

My reaction upon reading? “THEY FESSED UP! NOT MY FAULT! ”

Except they’ve only sort of fessed up. It’s not referenced on their blog or their status page, which sucks. They do have a KB article which describes the same attack my sites and some client sites experienced. Also, there’s Twitter, I guess. There better be a sweet espionage book deal out of this, and I want my name in it. 4pt font is fine.

They’ve reset the admin passwords on a bunch of my client’s accounts, yet no where in the emails do they tell me which account they’re referencing. Let’s play “Try the login!”

At least now when someone asks what happened I can say with confidence, “Don’t worry, it wasn’t my fault, it was the fault of the hosting company I recommended. Your invoice is due on Friday.”

1. Good news! The Expression Engine HTACCESS nightmare was my own fault. I accidentally uploaded an htaccess file to the parent of all the domains on my shared hosting account. So it propogated down to every site unless that site had a specifically defined its own rules. Sorry everyone.
2. Our sites were hacked! Probably by some drive-by Wordpress exploit but still, it hosed nearly every site on our hosting account and embedded itself into our Wordpress database tables in case it wanted to come back for more.
3. I’ve setup Amazon S3 sync with Media Temple using this guide. It’s slightly intimidating but completely doable. Don’t get discouraged by terminal errors,double check your typing and that you’re in the proper directory for each command, (use ‘pwd’ to find out your current location.) I estimate that backing up this site and its database shouldn’t cost me more than a dollar a month. Allow me to explain using complex maths:
   
   2GB data uploaded @ $0.17/GB + 2GB stored @ $0.10/GB = 54 cents.
   
   I believe that’s called “worth it.”

Those are the questions still dogging me over this Expression Engine URL business.

I can’t ascertain why EE has stopped behaving on my site and other sites on this Media Temple account, the same one I should note, hosting Mr. Domanico. This person, who at this point has what I can only describe as technological Stockholm syndrome, has somehow evaded this curse.

Further, and I ask you directly EE, how can you receive the perfectly reasonable request of www.jakemauer.com and serve http://jakemauer.com/jakemauer.com/html/index.php?/http://jakemauer.com/jakemauer.com/html/ as your response? I asked for a hamburger and you gave me a party sub made out of toothpicks and mayonnaise.

This window into insanity only occurs if I remove my recently duct-taped htaccess file, something I won’t inflict on you the reader because I know that would only result in the harshest of gazes, which is to say, no gaze at all.

The weirdest part in all of this as that at some point overnight, EE healed itself partially, allowing me to log into the admin interface without using the specific url. To this I can only say, “???????”

Honestly Expression Engine, I don’t mind that you require your modrewrite woobie, but at least explain to me why I should continue let you suck your thumb when there are perfectly mature alternatives.

It has just occurred to me that my life is currently boring.

From The Sting:

Now look at my nerdiness!

I want to mention that although the content of this post took me 5 minutes to put together, Expression Engine decided to be a huge jerk about a week ago and stop redirecting certain URL strings, which made posting this take 3 hours. I still haven’t figured it out, which is especially frustrating since domanico.net seems to redirecting URL’s fine. (By redirecting fine I mean a URL like http://domanico.net?URL=http://google.com works fine.)

It turned from minor annoyance into a bigger problem when it prevented Windows Live Writer from working properly.

Digging around I found that adding the following line to my htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^(ACT=.*)$ [NC]

fixes Live Writer and adding this fixes my URL redirect problem:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^(URL=.*)$ [NC]

So that my redirect block ends up looking like this:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^(ACT=.*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^(URL=.*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5})$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/({ee:template_groups}|members|P[0-9]{2,8}) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

I’m still trying to get my admin panel redirect to work properly. I’ll update when I do.