I’ve just read today that my favorite game, EA Sports NBA Live, will not return to the pc platform this autumn. Apparently this news has been up since April 8th this year, as can be seen on this posting at the EA forums.
I guess sometimes it takes a while to catch some news. 
The big buzz today is the release of Adobe Lightroom 2.0. I’m not going into details about the software, there are better blogs out there (*cough*Scott Kelby*cough*) so I leave it up to them.
I do want to say I feel again ripped off. An upgrade in the US will cost $99 dollar (VAT might apply, depending on location). An upgrade from the Netherlands will costs 118 euro (incl. VAT). Without VAT it would be 99 euro.
Somehow I figure Adobe as the wrong conversion rate for dollars to euros. The last time I checked (1 minute before writing this post) it wasn’t 1:1 but more like 1 dollar equals about 0.65 euro. What can I say? It sucks, but I’ll be upgrading anyway.
There comes a time you absolutely have to do a complete reinstall of your system. Obvious, back in the day with Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME this time would be every other month. However, this hasn’t been the case with Windows XP.
Let me explain my personal situation, about two years ago I reinstalled my system from scratch, building it up to a state I was more than comfortable with. It has been running rock solid ever since (much to my surprise I might add).
Yesterday I decided to do it all again. Why you might ask would I go to the trouble of rebuilding my system from scratch again? Well, mainly because I had tested a lot of software, and some install routines where below par. Not all traces where removed while uninstalling the packages. This leaves a system with extra baggage and I felt after two years the time had come to start fresh.
Luckily I have learned from earlier experiences: no matter how hard you try, you’ll always forget to copy some important stuff. It might be some documents not in the ‘My Documents’ folder, it might be some settings from a particular program, but you always will forget something.
So I decided to make a image. What I needed was a small program, simple to use and most important: it should be able to let me browse the image and copy the files I needed. I’ve found such a program in IRestorer. It is small and does what it promises: making a diskimage on another drive. And best of it all, it is free.
Sure enough I found a couple of things I missed after install:
I managed to fix it all by using the IRestorer software which mounts the image as a drive so you can copy stuff from it. I’ll bet it will save me some more in the next few days.
For those of you wondering what HDR really is, here is a quick introduction, courtesy of Wikipedia. Basically the best program for this has been Photomatix. It has been around for some time and we all thought the world of it.
Luckily for us, Imaging Luminary, LCC thought a bit different and started to create their own software for producing HDR images and apply tonemapping to the result. The beta versions of the program created quite a buzz at Flickr, allowing me to jump on the bandwagon. We’re allowed to test the software provided we gave detailed feedback about what we liked, disliked and issues we came across.
With each beta version the program got better, supported more files, more export possibilities and a superior algorithm for creating HDR and applying tonemapping. After some months (and some late night debugging sessions) I got an email announcing the release of the final version. So here it comes: a shameless plug: If you’re into HDR, try the community version for free. If you dig it, buy the program. .
It is faster and superior to Photomatix, but don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.
In case you’re wondering: yeah, I own a copy.
Thanks to Dave we found the mentioning of an exploit for the Pixelpost Copy Folder addon. This exploit consists of spoofing some fake administrator credentials so the hacker can try to get the login info from the file “pixelpost.php”. It was uploaded about a month ago (June 9th) by someone called Charles F.
Obviously we patched the svn version as soon as possible but I wanted to comment on the actual chance of getting hacked. To get hacked your server has to have the following options:
Well, let’s comment on the first option, the register_globals setting. In my opinion any host that has set this setting on should be shutdown as soon as possible. Default setting of this option has been off since PHP 4.2.0 and for good reason!
Most hosting companies have setup different users for both PHP and FTP users. The PHP user is the user under which the PHP compiler runs, the FTP user is you uploading the files through FTP. With PHP Safe mode set to on, the PHP user cannot create files in a folder owned by the FTP user (assuming you’re on Linux and Apache). You can test this easily: did you need to set your images and thumbnails folder to CHMOD 777 upon install of Pixelpost? If the answer is yes, there is no way this hack could work on your server.
If the answer is no, you might be vulnerable (especially when register_globals is also enabled). In that case remove the Copy folder addon (“copy_folder.php”) from your addons folder. Chances you do get hacked are small, but better safe than sorry.
