I haven’t posted anything in a while so I figured I would throw something up to let the many devoted followers of my blog know what’s been going on lately.
Not too much on the web design front. I have been spending a lot of time recently working on various IDX integrations for a realtor’s website. I have been frustrated by the sparse open source resources available. Most of the good products are paid and the decent open source projects have little support available.
Maybe I have just been taking the wrong tact in my research and planning. I’m just going to keep plugging away until I find the best solution. Meanwhile, I have been able to meet all of the core needs of my client using the ListIt Gateway service from Solid Earth. It works great but I would like to have the flexibility that an IDX solution like RETS provides.
Other than that I have just been doing everyday run and maintain work.
I had a fun experience with a pretty mean rootkit the other day. I thought I was going to be dealing with an average case of malware, but after a few hours of work, the PC kept behaving badly. It wasn’t until I tried to install an upgrade of Java that I noticed the problem. A very well hidden rootkit was running in the background and the Java installer prompted me to close down the instance of IE that was connecting to a Chinese domain name. So I regrouped and thought about ways to clean off the rootkit. Then it occurred to me… the PC was an older P4 with only 256 megs of ram. So I threw in the towel and gave the person a new PC. Some battles just aren’t worth fighting.
