As I mentioned, I never found a way to actually remove the script itself, since I couldn’t find the script. But, I did surgically remove the script from the template, as it were. Pretty basic, actually, once I narrowed things down a bit. I just went into the part of her template setup that was generating the page headers, and found wp_head in that code. Rather than having it print the entire thing, I exploded wp_head, splitting it at the “<div” and “</div>” tags. There’s no legitimate reason any plugin would stick div tags in a header, so it’s unlikely there’d ever be more than that one set in there. Now, the template prints everything before the “<div” and after the “</div>”, but nothing in-between, thus removing that injected code from the front-end display of her site.

I also gave her some advice on how to make her WordPress install a bit secure. Unfortunately, whatever that code is is still in her install somewhere. I’m crossing my fingers that all it’s capable of doing is grabbing spammy links, so hopefully there won’t be any more troubles with her site in the future.

As, despite what I’m doing, I am no Windows sysadmin, I was at a loss for what the heck was going on, and ended up harassing Network Solutions about it. Turns out we needed an upgraded certificate, as some older systems would not recognize the discount (or “Xpress”, if grammatically incorrect branding is your thing) certificate. So we got a sweeter one, and installed it. Yet, the errors persisted.

The big problem for me was that I could not replicate the error. All seemed fine in Virginia’s Internet Land. Most of the issues were coming from Australians (which sent me down a brief and incorrect path of thinking it was a freaky cookie issue, something I dealt with before with timezones and a SSO about half a year back). Anyhow, “403″ is pretty generic. So, I went into the IIS manager dealio and set the 403 errors so that non-local browsers would get a detailed view. And, got someone who was actually getting the error to send me a screenshot. Turned out it was, in fact, a 403.13 error. Something about IIS trying to find a revoked certificae list and failing. And, apparently, if you’re looking at the site from behind a firewall with proxies, this’ll fling 403 errors all up on your junk and such.

Cause, I revoked that initial “Xpress” certificate when I added the new one. Anyhow, apparently the solution was to turn off the option in Windows 2008 that checks for a revoked certificate list (CertCheckMode). Course, there was no easy way to do it, I had to get all down and dirty in the Registry for that bastard. Boo! Anyhow, that fixed the situation, so all is good in the land of SSL certificates.

So I’m using Lightbox (the Lightbox2 module for Drupal 6, to be specific) and it’s not liking those cloned slides. Nope, not at all. Doesn’t work. Have no clue why, and couldn’t really find anyone else with that problem on the internets. What I did figure out, though, is when you call clone, if you call it with the parameter of true: clone(true). And that seems to work, as my cloned slides now open in lightboxes. So, yay!

Am headed to LA for Turkey week, that should be fun. I will be paying a big chunk of Stupid tax to the local Apple store during that time, where my Mac shall sit for that duration having it’s keyboard repaired. Though it means NaNoing on my teeny netbook, I’m looking forward to not having a laptop for awhile, as it will make it near impossible to do work for my job. Considering I haven’t had a sick day where I didn’t have to still work, and I was crouched in the corner at the HP theme park in FL last spring, supposedly on vacation, doing work, it’ll be nice to have absolutely no way to do work. I am struggling with some serious burnout issues, and am really hoping that this break (along with my upcoming week in Richmond) will help.

Speaking of that week in Richmond, I’m not going to insanely plan it like I have other trips. This is because I want to be lazy, and it’s not like I have a car to use (not really looking to rent a car for the week, and the trips mostly to see my parents, who I haven’t seen since last September, anyhow).

Not too much else going on. Now that I’m writing more, I find that I’m reading more. Which is a good thing. Am kinda cracked out on sleep, which sucks. I look at this laptop and my phone too close to bed, which messes me up. So I’m trying to shut them off earlier, and read before bed. But now I’m waking up an hour before I need to, and then dozing off again 10 minutes before my alarm. I just want a decent night of sleep, but that’s been proving challenging. It’s even more frustrating when my body doesn’t cooperate on the weekends as well, as I super depend on weekends to try catching up. Oh well.

I need more time. I want to learn Ruby, and then rails. Possibly Python as well. Every day I am reminded of how many things I don’t know, and it drives me maaaaaaad. I mean, I guess it’s good, if I knew everything what would be the point of getting up. I just feel like unless I’m actively learning new things and producing new things, I fall behind, which is super stressful.

I need to go skiing or snowboarding. I got pants to do so, and have yet to experience either. If needed, I’ll look for a Meetup group that’s doing the beginner’s version of one or the other, with hopefully a carpool involved. I’ve been rear-ended once up in those mountains, and my little car is mountain-shy still!

On a final note, I ate all of the chocolates and now have none. Dang!

Should the error “could not instantiate mail function” pop up when using Joomla and doing something that requires using php mail(), and you happen to be using a Windows server (2008, running IIS 7.5 in my particular case), there’s a good chance you (or I, as the case may be) restarted IIS at some point and your SMTP server never bothered to restart itself. If you’re like me, you had to set up SMTP in IIS 6 for some bizarre reason, so open up the IIS 6 Manager, check if your SMTP Virtual Server is running, and if not, start it!

To test if it’s running without filling out a form or whatever, either put together a sweet little php file that spits out “yay” if email sends or “nay” if not, or just try “Forgot Password” in Joomla and see if you get an email.

Yay!

Enjoy!

$user =& JFactory::getUser();
//name of K2 user table
$k2usertable = 'nua_k2_users';
$userId = $user->get('id');
// get user Group
$db =& JFactory::getDBO();
$query = "
  SELECT ".$db->nameQuote('group')."
    FROM ".$db->nameQuote($k2usertable)."
    WHERE ".$db->nameQuote('userID')." = ".$db->quote($userId).";
  ";
$db->setQuery($query);
$userGroup = $db->loadResult();

//the user group's id
echo $userGroup;

So. I’m living in a motel right now. Some who read this know, some don’t. Drew and I broke up over a month ago. I’m moving into an apartment in Capitol Hill in about a week and a half, incidentally on the same day that Carolyn will be flying out to visit for the weekend. Things have been…weird. Sad. Strange. Am still dealing with it, and likely will be for awhile. People have been very supportive though, and I really appreciate that.

I miss having a kitchen. I got to use Jonathan and Jill’s kitchen a week back and have a sushi party with them, which was fun. Got some really good salmon, here’s a shot of some of the salmon rolls:

Work’s going OK, though I’ve been staying up late a few more nights than I’d like dealing with the persnicketiness of HTML emails. HTML emails are definitely one of the lesser appealing things that I do. One thing that I’ve been doing lately that I hope to do more of is developing for mobile websites. There’s a great Drupal module called Mobile Tools that will switch your theme based on mobile device detection, and with that plus playing with the JQuery Mobile theme, I’ve been working on the mobile version of my work’s website. There are of mobile design is so new, I think there’s lots of opportunities to do cool stuff. I’ve also been dying to actually contribute a Drupal module to the Drupal community, and am hoping I can find something good to contribute involving mobile.

Am hoping to do some packing today, I’m trying to get rid of stuff I just don’t use – I hate having lots of stuff, and moving it is a big pain, so I’m trying to better justify the things I own. Super fun times.

But no, they have stacks and stacks of mostly unnecessary formatting, all sitting there just itching to make whatever you’re trying to build just a little bit uglier. And the problem is that those who do not know the evil of a WYSIWYG think it gives them power to create mighty, complex, and beautiful layouts. Then, when their beautiful layout turns to gobbledygook, they hand it off to someone else to fix. Incidentally, content editors who either know some html or are willing to learn are awesome. They’re more likely to know better then to dump table into table and format text over and over until there’s approximately 123127836 nested span tags, then try to “fix” the formatting mess by copying and pasting some stuff from MS Word. What really bugs me, though, are those who treat the idea of using HTML like an upper manager treats the idea of using a copy machine. Faked incompetency is crap.

If a text editor is really necessary, stick a simple one in there that inserts the HTML tags for you, like the “html” tab on this here WordPress text editor. What I’m really hoping is that this is just a temporary technological gap, and it’s just a matter of waiting until either someone makes a WYSIWYG that actually works properly (hah!) or writing basic HTML becomes as common as cursive used to be.

How convenient, I suppose, that my temp job has slowed to nothing? I’m due to come back in at *some* point to fix something, and then there’s still hope of future projects, but it’s pretty sporadic, which is unfortunate for those of us who like paychecks. I’m trying to take advantage of my time off, at least. Last week that mostly involved too many cookies and a serious time investment into the long-forgotten Civ III. There were progress nuggets buried in there somewhere, though, mostly consisting of continued work on the Pak’ma’ra painting, plus some planning for the (hopefully) visionary new Salami Day site. We’ll see.

A chunk of Drew’s relatives came to visit last weekend, and left in their wake a vast array of uneaten Indian food. My new favorite thing is Korma. At this point, I’ve only had Lamb Korma, but I’m sure all of the other varieties are just as delightful. My Other New Favorite Thing is Bhakti chai, which I desperately need to write a tastyniblets post about at some point. It is everything chai should be and more. I apparently need to seek out a Natural Grocers where they sell Bhakti chai ice cream, it sounds incredibly magical.

So I really hate WYSIWYG editors. I need to find one that works for Drupal, though, as for some bizarre reason people who don’t know html really like them. I’m all like “learn html!” and they’re all like “no way!”. Sigh. I’ve crushed through the rather-generic one titled WYSIWYG, it looked messy and did little for me. Then I switched to WIZZYWIG, which I had high hopes for. Unfortunately, the admin panel was limiting, with poorly written textfields where the max size was far shorter than one needs. I poked the js to get around this, which was fine up until the point I realised I needed the ability to upload PDFs. On to CKeditor! Testing that out now, I’m hoping it’s the editor that will make all of my fantasies come true.