Just a few days after Valentine’s, even the Easter Bunny is disgusted at how early the decorations and store products go up. (What happened to St. Patrick’s Day, anyway?)
Category: Entertainment
Backup Lesson from the Emerald City Comicon Hack
Emerald City Comicon’s website was hacked and deleted this week…along with all their backups.
Ouch.
Ticketing is all handled offsite by EventBrite, so tickets and financial info are safe. They’ve redirected their URL to the Facebook page while they rebuild their website.
Lesson learned: Isolate your backups.
I don’t just mean physically. Yes, you need to keep some offsite in case the reason you lost your server is that the building caught fire. But isolate the online access as well. If you back up your site by pushing the backups from your server to a remote location (either self-hosted or cloud storage like Dropbox or Amazon S3), those credentials are stored on your server somehow. What could an attacker do with them?
Consider: If someone breaks into your web server, what else can they do in addition to vandalizing your site? Can they access other databases? Can they hop onto your internal network? Retrieve or alter private files? Can they get at your backups? If so, can they get at all your backups including private documents?
The answers are going to depend on your network and backup setup. But they’re questions you need to start asking.
Star Wars Director – A Close Second
I was kind of hoping Disney would pick Joss Whedon to direct the next Star Wars movie just to watch fans’ heads explode. But going with the guy who rebooted Star Trek? That’s what I call a close second.
J.J. Abrams Will Reportedly Direct the Next Star Wars Movie
Originally posted on Google+
Les Mis: Looking Back at the Book
I found this funny review of Les Miserables (the book) [ack! link deleted!] on GoodReads via Kobo. It’s been 20 years since I read it myself, but it rings true.
…you will not read the abridged version. Don’t you dare. Don’t even think the word “abridged.” Yeah, I know, Victor Hugo frequently turns away from the main narrative to focus on side characters, historical events, religion, philosophy, and other subjects. That’s why this isn’t called “Jean Valjean’s Excellent Adventure.”
The review even mentions the Paris sewers. Because, really, it would have to.
The crazy thing is that, after seeing the movie, digging out my own review of the new stage version, and stumbling on this review of the book…I’m starting to consider re-reading the novel. Because obviously I have gobs of spare time and no new books to read. And at 1200 pages, it’s only 1 1/3 times as long as A Memory of Light! By page count, anyway. It’s not as if the Les Mis edition I have has tiny type, making those page counts not comparable. And it’s not as if Victor Hugo’s prose is that much denser than Robert Jordan, right?
*sigh*
If I do this, it’s going to take me months.
On the other hand, Katie suggested I could live-tweet the re-read. It would be slow, but hey, it could be interesting.
Hmm…
Update: I’m moving forward with the re-read and online commentary!
Recent Links: Geography, Internet and Comics
A few interesting links that I’ve been meaning to post for a while now.
Geography and History
- Live map of wind patterns across the continental US. Someone linked to this during Hurricane Sandy. It’s still fascinating to look at.
- How fast could you travel across the U.S. in the 1800s? Great maps showing how far you could get from New York in a given time period in 1800, 1830, 1857 and 1937 as faster and faster transportation became available.
Using and Building the Internet
- Warren Ellis has given up on Facebook and Google+ because it’s just so hard to reliably reach or listen to people. Think of how many posts in your news feed you miss each day just by not being online at the right time, never mind the pre-filtering Facebook does to the firehose.
- Page Weight Matters – an engineer at Google led an effort to cut Youtube’s bandwidth requirements by a factor of ten. Strangely enough, when they started a live test, average page load time went up. It turned out that people on low-speed connections had found out about it and started using it even though it took two minutes to load where they were…because even that was still better than the 20 minutes they’d been stuck with before. (Via Raymond Camden)
- If you run an email newsletter, keep in mind that many of your readers will try to read it on a phone. Keep that in mind when designing your format. Giant images with no text aren’t going to be too helpful.
- How to keep electronics going when you lose power for days: Generators, batteries, car chargers, solar or kinetic chargers, etc.
Comics
- Some of the earliest UNIX daemon art was drawn by none other than Phil Foglio of Girl Genius fame.
- Saturday Morning in Front of La Salle De Justice is a painting by Rey Taira in DC Comics’ gallery show, inspired by Seurat’s famous painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (the painting at the center of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George), but recast with the Justice League and other DC Comics heroes. It’s making the rounds again now, but I first saw it on Firestorm Fan a few months back.
What the M’Hael?
Little-known fact: in the First Age, Mazrim Taim sought power by running a craft store, rather than becoming head of the Asha’man.
Where did you think they got their supplies for making sword and dragon pins?
On a more serious note, I’m currently reading A Memory of Light, the long-awaited final volume of The Wheel of Time. I’m about 80 pages into “The Last Battle.” This chapter isn’t just longer than a Robert Jordan prologue, it’s longer than some novels I’ve read.
Update: This photo turned out to be quite popular on Tumblr, racking up more than 300 notes including a slogan from ashamanhannigan: “We’ll turn you from other craft stores.”
Chas Bank
I bet they get really annoyed when you call and ask to “Talk to Chuck.”