Monthly Archive for June, 2011

Some security suggestions for WordPress (and other) sites

Published on June 28, 2011 in Work. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Someone on the Manchester WordPress User Group mailing list recently asked about checking their WordPress site for malware, and as I’ve spent some time decontaminating a WordPress site which was fairly riddled with malware recently, I thought I’d write up some quick pointers which might help you (or me in the future). I’ve broken them down into detection and prevention, and noted which are paid and which are free.

Continue reading ‘Some security suggestions for WordPress (and other) sites’

Trust your gut, also use SMART Utility

Published on June 19, 2011 in Work. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

For a while now my laptop has been running *extremely* slowly. Recently it got worse and about every other startup would just freeze until I forcibly powered down and tried again.

I ran Apple’s Disk Utility and told it to check the error messages from the drive’s internal SMART systems: “this drive is verified”. I groused and left it for a while, but performance continued to suck and the whole thing was making me nervous. I told Disk Utility to check again: still no SMART errors from the drives, but this time it found some mis-set permissions. Louder alarm bells went off in the chaos of my mind, so I refreshed a SuperDuper! clone of the drive and over the weekend I ran Disk Warrior to attempt to save the drive, using whatever arcane magicks it employs to do these things. Success! The drive was rebuilt! I had Dodged A Bullet™, all was good in the world, and I went back to mildly grumbling about performance.

Then the laptop failed to boot again. Continue reading ‘Trust your gut, also use SMART Utility’