the eXternal mind

Yesterday was my unlucky day. Two things happened:
Edit (07/24/05): I went out and bought more strings today, and they didn’t break this time! Mike = happy.

1. The high E string on my guitar broke on Monday when I was playing and so on my way back from work yesterday, I got Euge to make a stop by George’s Music so I could get new strings. I was pretty happy that I didn’t have to make a separate run, and when I got home, I went to string up my guitar with enthusiasm. That is, until the high E string slipped when I was tuning it and broke. Please note, that was the exact same string that broke on Monday. And that was the exact same string that kept me from playing all week. One minute later, me: Rawr! Angry! I r teh mad! Although Penguin pointed out to me: “You don’t sound angry…” and she was right—despite being pissed off, I was even more amused by my luck. This kind of stuff happens to me all the time. I’m dying from irony poisoning. It’s so ridiculous that it’s hilarious. So for the time being, I just have the B string substituting as the E string. Doing such a thing is bad for the guitar though, so I’m probably going to remove it later today.
2. There was a critical security hole found in Xcomic script mainly because I missed the fact that some of my variables were unprotected if register_globals were turned on and partially because of the servers that have register_globals turned on. register_globals poses such a big security threat that no server should ever have it on! Coincidentially, many of the servers that were exploited were running old PHP versions (<4.1) which is insecure. Well, anyway, this is pretty embarassing since I read a lot about register_globals exploits, but I never realized that the way I set up the paths on my script led to this hole. The good news is that I spent the night with other developers fixing the exploit and releasing Xcomic version 0.8.3! Please upgrade if you are still using an old version!