Recently my ancient Hotmail account has seen an uptick in (supposed) porn spam with subject lines bearing subject lines sounding suspiciously like their author relied heavily on an English-to-whatever dictionary: “Whisky becomes stepdaughter easy of access” or “Fascinating son executed stemothers desire to be filled”. While crudely translated, the gist is certainly clear. Today, however, the result was amusing: “Teen nymphomaniac gets all holes hardly fucked”. With a disappointing lead-in like that, I can’t imagine their clickthrough rate was very high.

I’m not dead, and neither is this blog. Honest. Cross my heart. This summer has just been proving to be a lot busier than I ever expected it to be. It also didn’t help that I forgot my recently-changed admin password to Wordpress. D’oh.

For the last few weeks I’ve been baffled by Safari complaining that this site was a malware host. The most puzzling aspect of the whole ordeal was that the Safari/Google malware warning referenced the IP address 74.222.134.170, and not 208.97.175.192, where it actually resides. A direct
Google malware query on the domain came back clean, too, so it didn’t seem, on the face of it, that my webserver had been compromised.

A perceptive fellow on the Google Webmasters forum noticed the following bit of fun in my source code that looked like this:

Thinking it was a result of an injection exploit like this person found, I went over all my WP files (plus my theme directory) with a fine-toothed comb, but found nothing. A further bit of digging turned up other Wordpress users who were encountering the exact same problem. The iframe code was inserted directly into posts, but by what means, nobody seems to be sure.

I will—shamefully—admit that both my WordPress admin and FTP passwords were pretty weak, and could have been brute-forced pretty easily. They’re much stronger now, and I’ve updated to WordPress 2.8, and the three posts here that contained the offending code have been cleaned. I haven’t seen any new malicious insertions since taking those steps, but I remain suspicious. If you see anything even remotely weird in the next couple of weeks here, let me know.

This year’s cherry crop is in, but a good quarter of the fruit this year shriveled and rotted just as it began to ripen. Some of the cherries on the edge of this rot zone had tiny little holes in them, which were being exploited by opportunistic ants, gnats, and beetles, as well as providing the entry points for the rot.

Argentine ants and gnats don’t bore into healthy fruit, and there was no trace of any larvae that might account for the beetles being the culprit (the mature ones being far too large to make the holes). I had no idea what was causing those initial punctures, until I saw this bug I’d never encountered before:

I took a few pictures and a short video over to the very helpful senior scientist Steve Heydon at the Bohart Museum of Entomology and he had the answer for me almost instantly: the “leaffooted bug”, or Leptoglossus, most likely to be specificically either L. clypealis or L. occidentalis, which apparently has very wide tastes and has arrived in my yard (or, perhaps, is simply in larger numbers this year; when I worriedly told Mr. Heydon I’d never seen the pest before he just shrugged and said, “it’s around”).

Working at the University has its unique perks every so often. Now all I have to do is figure out how to keep the bastards out of the upcoming plum and apricot crops.

While I admit I don’t recall the North Koreans specifically making noise specifically about tearing up the armistice in recent memory, but I have to admit that I’m rather exasperated that the DPRK’s saber rattling gets as much press as it does.

Granted, when a nation-state starts issuing threats of war, it is newsworthy. On the other hand, Kim Jong Il’s Glorious People’s Unicorn Fantasy Playland does this every week. The ultraparanoid DPRK sees everything that happens outside its borders as a “warlike act”, “hostile”, or otherwise unwarranted belligerency that their army is supposedly poised to smash at a moment’s notice. Ho hum. An American President could mention he’s switching his morning routine by putting his pants on his right leg first instead of his left, and North Korea would pitch a hissy fit over it.

I’m not saying that they should be ignored militarily—U.S. and South Korean forces should definitely be on constant alert—but I’m tired of the press treating North Korean tantrums as politically meaningful. In that vein, just once I’d like to see the President, Secretary of State, or some foreign equivalent stand up in response to the latest bluster from Pyongyang and say “whatever, man. Either throw down or shut the fuck up. Seriously.”

I know I haven’t been posting nearly as prolifically as I once did, and certainly these last three weeks or so have been something of a particular nadir (thanks to house renovations, the dojo, and the thrice-cursed vortex of time men know as Facebook), but this week it will sink to an all-time low of zero posts; I’ve got the week off and am heading out with the family to Disneyland. Catch you all on the flip side, at which time I promise to be a little more verbose.