The website of my current company Exove is now open at both exove.com and exove.fi.

The whole site runs on top of WordPress that has been patched somewhat to support two languages within a single installation. Compared to Nomadig.com, Exove’s site has extensive amount of WP pages for static content. The Exove blog is not on the top level, but it has been moved one level down with an extension.

WordPress has been improved a lot during the two years I’ve been using it. Back in the old days, I had to hack the WP itself to get more advanced tricks to work, but now I just need to install a plug-in and configure it properly. The theme support has removed a real pain and it allows the site to stay visually the same even if the WP is upgraded.

Exove has an extensive amount of theme modifications, as the system supports two languages using one WordPress instance. The language is selected based on the domain name, and a few tricks have been used to make sure that English and Finnish pages do not get mixed up. All of them are on the template level, so the system should be upgradeable easily.

The company specialises in designing and implementing Web 2.0 services for digital marketing. Our specialties include corporate blogging and community based services that drive the stakeholders and the company to work together and create added value with an exceptional rate. We provide also consulting and training.

If you are interested in our services, please get in touch with me.

I’ve been using mostly Macs during the last two months, as my workstation nowadays is a Mac (with a 23″ display, it does make a difference).

After installing all necessary tools, such as Witch and others, the computer is quite okay to work with. I don’t want to compare it to my Windows environment yet, as I’ve been steadily improving the Windows for over five years now.

I’ve noticed that my usage patterns for browsers is different. In PC, I tend to use new windows for every task. In Mac, however, I’m using tabs. I also use more browsers in Mac; Camino, Mozilla and Safari (in that order, by the way). In Windows, I’m satisfied with Mozilla and sometimes I need to use IE to test something.

As long time readers remember, I was not converted to a Mac user when I bought my first Mac almost a year and a half ago. One of the newest annoyances has been to notice that Mac programs do not get the first mouse click through, if the window is inactive. In Windows, I click a link on an inactive browser and the browser follows the link. Furthermore, hovering over the link tells me where its leading. In Mac, I need to click the browser to activate it first and then click again. Double the effort!

The active window in Mac is also nearly impossible to spot fast. There just is no consistency about showing which window has the focus — or then you have to look at the small circles at the top left corner… I’ve tried to find a haxie or a them that would give more visual cues about the active window, but all that I’ve tried just remove cues, making it harder to work with windows. A challenge to theme maker: make a theme that actually helps people to work faster instead being just more stylish.

Yesterday, while checking my ShortStats I found out that there is no much traffic in Nomadig.com. The reason was imminent when I opened the site. The front page sported a PHP error and journal was broken, too.

After logging in to the system, I quickly checked the files and noticed that the PHP files were mangled. Whitespaces were missing and the bigger files were cut above eight kilobytes.

The first thing to do was to close the site for maintenance, so I created a small static HTML file for the front page and the journal to inform visitors.

The second step was to request a full restore for the site. Fortunately I haven’t been working on the site for a while, so I wouldn’t loose any precious changes. This had a flipside, too, as my offline backup was done last August…

Glancing through the files, I find out some PHP injections that looked very odd. They collected user information from $_SERVER and then posted that information to user7.phpinclude.ru. The URL of the site was “hidden” using base64_decode.

I read a few discussion threads about this and learned that the site injects links to paysites inside your content. While they were trying to accomplish this, they broke my site completely. Thanks, guys.

Closer inspection to the files revealed a huge number of backdoors with names such as includes.php, time.php, users.php and so forth. Every directory that was writable with PHP was infected. I painstakingly cleaned them. First used grep to find the files and then remove those. I also copied old development files from my hard disk over infected files and little by little I could clean up the mess.

There were changes also in HTML and JS files. Fortunately those have been there for ages, so I just copied everything over them.

My hosting provider restored their backup a few minutes ago and everything seems to be ok now. The file and directory permissions are fixed now, but due to this probably some of my PHP admin stuff is broken. Needs to be investigated later.

I’d better also set up a cronjob to make a backup of the site as soon as I get a Linux server of my own. I cannot store the backups in Nomadig.com, as the space will run out in less than a week.

Sanna and a couple her colleagues started their own company, Espatent, a couple of weeks ago. The patent attorney business in Finland got a serious contender, as the skills and general knowledge of these guys is far better than in general.

And I’m not saying this because Sanna happens to be my wife. I have several patents and patent applications, drafted by various agencies and people in Helsinki, including also Sanna and her partners. The quality and the craftmanship of their application drafts is just so much better. Further, they learn fast. It is always a pleasure to work with a patent agent that understands you from the beginning and can bring some additional value to the application.

So, if any of my dear readers are contemplating patenting now or in the future, don’t hesitate to talk with Espatent, too. It pays off.

Nomadig.com was unreachable at least in certain parts of the Internet due to a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS).

To be honest, my site was not target of the attack, but mere a victim. Someone was making a massive DDOS attack against Joker.com, my domain name provider. I also happen to keep Nomadig.com nameservers at Joker, and those servers were unreachable or unresponsive.

It kinda feels dumb that you know about the situation, but there is nothing you can do. At least not immediately, and most probably all your means are feeble, unless you have enough money and time to spent on the issue.

Of course, I could distribute Nomadig.com DNS servers to different service providers, but on the other hand I know that DNS is really flaky when the first server is down.

If you were missing me yesterday, don’t you worry. I’m back — in fact, I didn’t leave anywhere, Internet just lost track of my address for a while.

A few days ago Photoshop decided not to play nicely anymore. Every time I switched to other application and back, Photoshop hung for a fifteen seconds or so. All windows, including the palettes, were blank and the system was churning something on the disk.

First, I thought the problem to be insufficient memory and killed Photoshop among some other applications. No change. I continued to work and tried to adjust to the delay, as surely a reboot would fix the problem.

The next session showed the same problems. I started to get worried, and checked that the Photoshop preferences are not garbled. No changes there.

Finally, I googled on the subject and still found nothing. Fortunately I kept my eyes open and found out a nifty software called Filemon that logs all disk access. I installed the system and fired Photoshop up once again.

The root cause behind the behaviour was a disk access error in colour profiles. Running chkdsk showed a bad block in C:. After chkdsk had fixed the disk, I was really worried whether Photoshop would start anymore. Chkdsk is not the best tool to correct anything, it just marks the blocks bad and then you have to fix the file level issues by yourself.

I couldn’t believe my luck when Photoshop started without a hitch. There may be some missing colour profiles, but as I’m not using them, I don’t care.

Finland is slowly, ever so slowly, waking up to Web 2.0. I was interviewed on the subject, “as one of the leading XML experts in the country”, in IT Viikko (a weekly IT magazine inside Taloussanomat, a daily financial newspaper).

The whole spread article discussed Web 2.0 as a phenomena, a technology toolkit and a possibility for making an international breakthrough.

Nothing revolutionary for people familiar with the concepts, but the article discusses briefly the following topics:

• Growing interest in investing on the area
• Public APIs
• Social network aspects
• Using and creating software as services

The article has been titled “Finns are late in social net”, a statement that I can agree to certain extent. But fortunately there is something cooking under the hoods, watch this and other spaces in the near future.

I’ve been playing lately with Smarty template engine to further enforce the clean cut model-view-controller paradigm on web sites.

Now, I’m forced not to create any HTML code on the model and controller parts of the system, and rely fully on the views. Surprisingly enough, this gives me more freedom for implementing the application logic in the best form conceivable, as I don’t have to care about the layout order imposed by HTML.

The flipside is that the system is slower, but not noticiably so. Speeding up implementation, testing and deployment helps me to focus more and more on performance, both on design and implementation.

One big plus is that I feel like being 20+ again, as that was the previous time I was fooling around with template solutions.