Welcome to Dale's Homemade Robots
New Content
4/9/08 Replacing the pinion gear on a DeWalt drill motor
3/28/08 Flip-O-Matic
A new flipper weapon for 30# combat bots
2/25/08 Spinning Compass
A way to provide a heading reference for a spinning robot using the earths magnetic field.
Password tips
During the research I did on securing web sites after some morally challenged internet abuser defaced one of mine I learned that using strong passwords is very important. I won't get into the details of how passwords are found but here are a few tips to make your password difficult to discover.
- Do not use a dictionary word or a proper name or place name.
- Do not include any personal info such as birthday, address, make of car, pet name etc
- Use upper and lower case letters
- Include several numbers
- Include punctuation if allowed
- Make it as long as possible ( 10 characters or more)
Examples:
Bad: bozo ford 12345 admin password london george Atlanta
Better: biteme59times honkinghorn27
Even better: 73%bozoClownz. $Death-2-$pammers .IL2mkrobots.
Hacker Attack!
Feb 25th 2008
If you are running a web site based on CMS Made Simple version 1.2.2 like I was you need to upgrade to verson 1.2.3 ASAP. There is an SQL injection exploit in the wild that allows criminals easy access to your password and user file. My wifes site was attacked and all content deleted. It was replaced with a link to a banner ad server. This site was also attacked but not defaced. I suspect the attacker was not able to recover the plaintext password from the hash code.
I've updated the CMSMS system, changed all the passwords and put some antihacker filtering in the .htaccess file. I also firewalled the class B IP address blocks in Viet Nam where the attacks originated. Hopefully this will hold back the forces of evil for a while.
Web Site Rebuilt
Posted Dec 23rd, 2007
by Dale Heatherington
Welcome to my new and improved web site. I rebuilt it using CMS Made Simple. Originally I hand coded this site in raw html code. It took a lot of work and the look and feel of the site was not consistent. I considered using Dreamweaver but based on the advice of a friend I decided to try a Content Management System first. Initially I tried the popular WordPress blogging system. Unfortunately WordPress is mainly designed for blogging and was not well suited for a general purpose web site. It was also very buggy running on my server and browser. Next I tried Joomla. It looked good at first but the more I used it the less I liked it. It soon developed a problem where it put bullets before and after all my menu items and I never did find a solution. It also didn't produce user friendly URLs. After searching the web for CMS systems for the third time I discovered CMS Made Simple. It has all the features I need without being bloated with a lot of junk I don't want. It's easily customizable by changing a template and/or stylesheet file. So far it hasn't screwed up... even during the conversion of this entire web site. I think I have a winner.
Most of the original content has been moved and any remaining will be moved soon. I've even added a new section called "A Brief Technical History of Dale". Enjoy.
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