Just putting in a last minute pitch for a good thing:

There’s a FREE Web conference going on this weekend in Raleigh, NC that covers Flex, ColdFusion, AIR, JavaScript, CSS, Ajax, and other web goodness.  The schedule looks good, there’s a networking party Saturday evening, and the hotel rate is decent.  So go.

And bring your business cards…  the next time I’m asked if I know any web gurus looking for work I need some names and numbers. 

I had a very strange thing happen to me today.  One of my old friends called me to see how I was doing and he asked if I knew any db workers looking for a job.  I had to kind of stop for a moment and pinch myself.  Many of you probably know where I’m coming from when I say that I know a LOT of good IT folks who have lost their jobs over the last year and are still unemployed.  I heard earlier today that many states are seeing unemployment over 11%, so hearing that a good paying job wasn’t bringing in loads of applications seemed odd.  It turns out that the job just hasn’t been advertised much, and my friend needs someone good to work with so I’ll do my part and try to get a few more applicants headed to HR so he has a better shot of getting someone with some decent skills.

The job is in Philadelphia, PA.  Pay is $60 - $65k

Here’s the job posting
Here’s their main job openings page

A couple of weeks ago I heard from a client (friend) that has a site hosted on my reseller web server and he said something odd - he said he could access his web site from work but not from home. There's a ton of things that could cause that so I stuck it in the back of my head and went on. Well the other night I went through and updated the mambo installation on that server and was testing it out when suddenly I could no longer get a response from it. I also found I couldn't get a response from any site on that server, couldn't traceroute to it, etc.. I'd been put on their firewall blacklist. Ouch! And for what?

I got in touch with the support folks and they confirmed that their firewall did indeed think I was an evil hacker and sent me the logs to show what caused it:

Fri Jul 4 22:10:37 2008 lfd: mod_security triggered by 192.168.216.232 - 1 failure(s) in the last 75 secs
Fri Jul 4 22:10:37 2008 lfd: mod_security triggered by 192.168.216.232 - 2 failure(s) in the last 75 secs
Fri Jul 4 22:10:56 2008 lfd: mod_security triggered by 192.168.216.232 - 3 failure(s) in the last 100 secs
Fri Jul 4 22:13:05 2008 lfd: mod_security triggered by 192.168.216.232 - 4 failure(s) in the last 230 secs
Fri Jul 4 22:13:46 2008 lfd: mod_security triggered by 192.168.216.232 - 5 failure(s) in the last 275 secs
Fri Jul 4 22:13:47 2008 lfd: 5 (mod_security) login failures from 192.168.216.232 - *Blocked in csf*
Fri Jul 4 22:13:48 2008 lfd: alert email sent for 192.168.216.232

But.. I was just browsing the site! I wasn't trying to log into the site. I was just doing what a regular web surfer would do.

So after some digging around in the web server log files I found this:
- - [06/Jul/2008:20:18:48 -0700] "GET /%3C?php%20echo%20http://www.thedomain.org;?%3E/templates/247clean/images/favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 406 341 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11"

Ow... I should have caught that long ago when I was looking in the log files, but somehow didn't. My guess is that this was mangled up like this for a long while (I hadn't touched the offending file in at least a year) and the host changed their mod_security rules and started triggering the fun.

So the offending file was in the 247clean template (which is a great template.. they just slipped up on this bit of code..) here:
(in index.php)

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;><?php echo _ISO; ?>" />
<?php if ( $my->id ) { initEditor(); } ?>
<?php include($GLOBALS['mosConfig_absolute_path']."/templates/247clean/splitmenu.php"); ?>
<?php echo "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"$GLOBALS[mosConfig_live_site]/templates/$GLOBALS[cur_template]/css/template_css.css\" type=\"text/css\"/>" ; ?><?php echo "<link rel=\"shortcut icon\" href=\"$GLOBALS[mosConfig_live_site]/<?php echo $mosConfig_live_site;?>/templates/247clean/images/favicon.ico\" />" ; ?>

the favicon code could be hardcoded if you only have one site to something like:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">
...or if you have many sites and you want to reuse the template for all of them then:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php echo $mosConfig_live_site;?>/images/favicon.ico" />

also note the extra greater than character in the content-type tag..

Fixing that issue was easy enough, but... here's the worrisome thing.. anybody (or any web spiders) who visited the sites that I use this template on and clicked through more than 5 or 6 pages in a couple of minutes is now blacklisted by the host - and from what they say it's a long term blacklist.

I just returned from a nice vacation South of Cancun and had a little excitement on the return flight last night. About an hour into the direct flight from Cancun into Charlotte a man got into a fight with another passenger and was subdued after a short struggle. The plane was diverted to Miami where he was taken off of the plane along with a female passenger.

I saw it happen right in front of me, and on top of me actually, as the fighting at one point was happening in the empty seat next to me and I had to push the two off of me.

I've been on many, many flights for business since 9/11 and on each one I was careful to check out all the people around me and try to be alert.. this time was a bit different since I had my family with me coming back from a vacation.. I popped in my ear buds and started watching a movie on my iPod nano. The ear buds silenced everything around me so I didn't hear the two arguing. I was sitting in the first row behind the bulkhead (separating first class from coach) so I didn't have a good view of what was going on in the front of the plane. I just saw one guy in the last row of first class (on the opposite side of the plane from me) and the "attacker" suddenly start wrestling and within a few seconds they were on top of me and a few seconds later a third guy from first class pulled the "attacker" onto the floor. It wasn't clear to me (as they were wrestling beside me) who I should help.. I didn't see what precipitated the altercation. I just kept them off of me and my daughter and tried not to get in the middle of what looked like two old white guys pissed off at each other and they were in the floor before I had a chance to figure out what the heck was going on.

Other passengers told me that the man was seated further back in coach and had been drinking heavily and went into first class and argued with the woman who was also taken off the plane in Miami. So what appears to be a domestic dispute caused a bunch of people to miss connecting flights, etc. My kids saw and heard the whole thing and it was traumatic.. seeing a guy laying in the aisle at our feet getting handcuffed and yelling profanity is normally not what you expect to see when you get on a USAir flight.

Alcohol seems to be a real problem for folks flying to Charlotte this week.. as there was an incident on an American Airlines flight.

---- updated to add.. ---
it's finally been picked up by the media here and here and here