Archive for January, 2007
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Your friend is being cheated out of hundreds of dollars. Help him make things even again!
In Realistic Mission 1 of Hack This Site, you need to help your poor friend out a bit in Uncle Arnold’s Local Band Review.
From: HeavyMetalRyan
Message: Hey man, I need a big favor from you. Remember that website I showed you once before? Uncle Arnold’s Band Review Page? Well, a long time ago I made a $500 bet with a friend that my band would be at the top of the list by the end of the year. Well, as you already know, two of my band members have died in a horrendous car accident… but this asshole still insists that the bet is on!
I know you’re good with computers and stuff, so I was wondering, is there any way for you to hack this website and make my band on the top of the list? My band is Raging Inferno. Thanks a lot, man!
Follow the link to Arnold’s site. Apart from the ugly design expected from a small personal bussiness, the first thing that you should notice is Imposing Republic’s rating of 23 — on a 1-5 scale! This hints that you should be able to give ratings which are higher than five in some way. Take a look at the source code. More specifically, the several identical forms for voting.
<form action="vote.php">
<input type="hidden" name="PHPSESSID" value="abcaeadfc31a5c53b2534bf995d0553f" />
<input type="hidden" name="id" value="0">
<select name="vote">
<option value=1>1
...
<option value=5>5
</select>
<input type="submit" value="vote!">
</form>
This is the code for the Raging Inferno’s voting form. As a hacker, you should intuitively think about sending unexpected values to every form that you encounter. In this case, what about a number greater than 5? Try it:
http://www.hackthissite.org/missions/realistic/1/vote.php?id=0&vote=1337&PHPSESSID=abcaeadfc31a5c53b2534bf995d0553f
Obviously, you should substitute the PHP session ID in the URL with your own session ID, which can be found in the source code. This code votes “1337″ for band #0, which happens to be HeavyMetalRyan’s Raging Inferno.
Mission accomplished.
Some time ago, I was looking for a MediaWiki extension to generate statistics for a wiki of mine, but found no solution. Today, though, I was looking through the source for FireStats, the statistics plugin for WordPress that I use for this blog. There was a file named firestats-mediawiki.php, and apparently, it has native support for MediaWiki. Do like this to install FireStats on your wiki project:
- Upload FireStats to the wiki folder (
/wiki/, /w/ or something like that)
- Edit line 3 of
firestats-mediawiki.php (the require_once() statement) to correspond with your directory structure.
- Upload
firestats-mediawiki.php to the extensions/ directory in the wiki root directory.
- Add the line
include("extensions/firestats-mediawiki.php"); somewhere in LocalSettings.php.
- Enjoy!
Note that you will have to create the stats table. You don’t have to do it manually; but you have to start the script by going to the FireStats subdirectory (usually /wiki/firestats) and inputing database information. The only problem that I ran into during the installation was that the main page kept displaying the following error:
FireStats is not installed in the database, go to the Database tab to configure FireStats
It kept showing up, even after I had created the tables. The cause for this was the MediaWiki caching — after I edited the page and refreshed, it showed up like it should.
I recommend this plugin a lot.
Happy birthday, me! I just turned 17.
To err is human
I thought that Google was not
Vanessa revealed
Even Google can make mistakes, although not that critical ones. A certain Vanessa Fox forgot to close a tag in the an offixial Google blog. I don’t know whether it’s nice to know that the Google employees can make mistakes or not, especially considering the future of this planet probably lies in their hands.
I wrote this as a timed essay with a limit of 90 minutes. It got a 10 in all criteria: response to the question (A), presentation (B) and language (C).
“Courage” is a charged word with the power to induce strong feelings, and thus many strive to use it. Through constant use, though, the meaning of the word has changed. I will compare instances of courage in three literary works in an attempt to show the different kinds of courage. The works to be considered are Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion and the drama Educating Rita by Willy Russell.
Eliza in Pygmalion is offered to be taught good pronunciation for free. Her teacher, Mr. Higgins, bets that he will be able to pass her off as a duchess. Similarly to Eliza, Rita in Educating Rita takes on a private course in the University in order to become more educated about literature. During that time, she tells Frank, her teacher, about her life. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo lives hi entire life in the perpetual fear of becoming a failure. Even though he accidentally kills a tribesman and is exiled for seven years, he keeps going. When Christian missionaries come to the village, many – including Nwoye, Okonkwo’s son – are converted. The story ends in a failed attempt to uproar against the missionaries, leading to Okonkwo committing suicide.
In these works, we can see at least three different types of courage. Rita and Eliza are the most obvious example: they both try out something innovative and unexpected by their surroundings, but without risking too much. Rita does suffer from her choice later because of her husband, although that was not anything that she had been expecting. This is a very subtle kind of courage, which we can see almost every day in people making individual choices. This can also be seen in Nwoye, even though he puts a bit mote at stake: when he joins the Christians, his already angry father becomes infuriated. All of these actions changed the actors’ lives completely; Eliza married an upper-class man, Rita made new, more educated friends and Nwoye’s life began completely afresh, without his demanding father.
Another, much similar kind of courage is the one that Higgins displays when he bets about Eliza. Higgins is fully aware that it would be a large loss of income if he failed.. Thus, he is taking a chance along with a substantial risk. The missionaries from Things Fall Apart do just the same: they must have been aware of the risks when they embarked on their quest to enlighten the heathen. The risks are also shown in the book when one missionary is killed. This courage lies in risking something for another thing.
The third kind of courage is shown by Okonkwo when he stands out from the crowd and makes his and the whole clan’s voice heard after he returns from the exile. First, he convinces the other clan leaders to raze the church. Later, he attacks and kills one of the white messengers in an attempt to ignite the fighting-spirit in his clan. In the first event, Okonkwo shows courage because he does not conform and simply do what the rest of the clan does. In the second, he risks everything for the sake of the clan.
However, are these examples of courage? Of course they are – but whose kind of courage? According to me, none is real courage, since in every situation the ego plays a part. Rita, Eliza and Nwoye do it for their own sake, hoping for a life that is more enjoyable, be it with better understanding or without a demanding father. Higgins and the missionaries are not that courageous either, since they do it with a goal of their own in mind: Higgins wants to show off his skills, while the missionaries want to become persons of power. Not even Okonkwo handles selflessly: his goals and ambitions are all based on the survival of his clan, and being denied gradual adaption, he cannot handle it.
In my opinion, true courage is present only where ego is absent.
How can you sleep well
When you waste your life with sleep?
Change — Go Biphasic
Three days ago, I started a big project that I have been thinking about for some months now: biphasic sleep. I first read about polyphasic sleep — dividing sleep up in six segments a day — which seemed extremely controversial. However, there’s a thing called biphasic sleep, in which you divide your sleep into two segments a day. The biphasic sleeping schedule is designed to maximize (well, increase) your effective sleep.
If sleep was like Dungeons & Dragons, then polyphasic sleepers would be the munchkins who ruin the game, and biphasic sleepers would be the people like me, who just like not to suck.
So far I’m feeling great, and I am sleeping around 7 hours a day. My goal is 6 hours, and I am certain that I will reach it in a few weeks’ time. I blog about my venture in the land of effective sleep.
I just got this error trying to install Wordpress Multi-User on this host:
No WPMU site defined on this host. If you are the owner of this site, please check Debugging WPMU for further assistance.
Confusing error, especially since I previously installed it successfully. Fortunately, the excellent WordPress forum for MU helped me: just remove the wp-config.php file. Seems like I forgot to configure WordPress the first time I tried WPMU, which was the correct way. You should not upload a wp-config.php for WPMU, since it is generated automatically.
Blog tag is a contagious virus which has soon infected the whole blogosphere. When you are tagged, you have to write five not well-known facts about yourself and then tag five other bloggers. Assuming that there are 55 million bloggers out there (data from Technorati), everyone will have been tagged after twelve generations. Hurry up!
I got tagged by Daniel at Daily Blog Tips, and here are my five Tim-factoids:
- I’m only 16 years old.
- I’ve been working on a browser-based MMORPG called Zarin for several years, and it’s still a closed beta with two users.
- I’m addicted to apples.
- I lost hundreds of dollars buying booster-packs for the Pokémon Trading Card Game, and play it occasionally so I won’t feel sad about the money.
- I’ve once been way too close of becoming a gothic, wrist-cutting emo-kid.
I tag Gustav, Aki, tobbez, Ordago and Vaandoo.
Reading log at night
Ref: I come from the shadows
Spoofed referers scare
I was looking through the log from this blog, and found a referer from “I come from the shadows”. Haha. Funny. It ruins the purpose of the referer-field, though. Please stop.
Använder FireStats