Survival of the fittest

About 6-7 weeks ago we were given a very challenging assignment at school. We were told to update an old Darwin-online site. New design, now informational structure, new features… A new life for the website!
Revamping that website was one of the most surprising things I’ve ever had to do. I never thought a subject like Charles Darwin and his research would be that hard to lay out. Together with Fabian, we managed to give the Darwin site a new face. At least for this assignment. According to our tutors, the University of Cambridge might select one of the designs made by the students and ask to put it into production.

Along with that we had to create a conceptual touchscreen application that might be used inside the museum, allowing visitors to look up more info about Darwin and his immense research. In order to make sure we can pass our ideas along, we were ordered to create a demo video that features the use and experience of the application. I finished that demo video last night and I really wanted to share this with you!

What happens in Amsterdam…

… doesn’t stay in Amsterdam. In fact it returns all the way to Kortrijk in a big bus with a lot of exhausted people. FITC was great. We had a great time in Amsterdam, although the weather was pretty damn cold.
It’s the second time I attend FITC Amsterdam and again I’m a very delighted I did. I met lots of new people, had a few very interesting conversations and I saw lots of cool shit (which is in fact why I am there).

Day 1

I thought it would be a good day to keep my habits going in Amsterdam, so I turned up 15 minutes late for the beginning of the first day. Happily I didn’t miss much new stuff. In fact, I didn’t miss a single thing.

Ever since I started going to conferences, they always began with the Adobe Keynote. Today would be no different. Adobe would come on stage and talk about their latest numbers and how fast the latest version of the Flash Player is spreading among the internet’s users. 2 years ago, I would listen with full attention and be amazed by all those details. However on monday: I couldn’t be bothered. It’s great how fast the player is spreading but it’s really not worth half of the duration of the Keynote…
The rest of the keynote would be about the Flash Player on mobile devices. I think it’s a great step forward and I’m looking forward to future development on that aspect of the platform but the guys on stage just couldn’t interest me. So I left the keynote early. Read the rest of this entry »

I lied

I lied! I actually did! I lied when I told you everbody was going down. Because ever since I said so, the server has been up without going down at all. The server has been up for 3 days now, which is about 3 times longer as the longest uptime before that.

I think it’s safe to assume that the issues have been resolved at this point. The question that many people might want to see answered: What was the cause of all this? A hacked script.

BBclone to be exact. BBclone is a great script to keep count of your statistics. It’s free, it’s PHP based (so it doesn’t matter whether your visitors have Javascript enabled or not), it can be included using .htaccess rules, it’s simple to use, etc. Basically it’s a good script to show you basic statistics of your website. However it’s vulnerable: People can access a modified script URL to include a personal (and probably hostile) scripts (RFI exploit).

That happened to a client of mine who ended up with a nasty script residing in the BBclone folder. That script added cron jobs that ran some other nasty stuff… Very uncool as you can tell from my unstable server.

I removed those cron jobs, got rid of the hostile files, deleted BBclone and did some other (minor) stuff… The server has been up ever since.

I want to thank everyone who helped out and suggested what to look for. It would’ve taken me ages to figure out those things myself. Seen as everything is running smoothly, I can get on with what I really wanted to do: New stuff!

Everybody is going down!

Well not everybody in general but probably every site hosted on my new VPS.
Near the end of January I upgraded my previous shared hosting account to a VPS server. Although I’m pleased to tell you that VPS hosting at Vexxhost is very affordable and pretty straight forward, I have to say that I’m running into a pretty annoying problem right now.

In short:
I’m having trouble keeping my server up as it randomly starts spawning tons of PHP processes for no reason whatsoever. There’s a screenshot of this a bit down. The result is in fact simple: The server dies and needs a reboot. The issue is still ongoing and I’m still trying to fix it. So if you end up seeing my site (or any site hosted on this VPS for that matter) go 404, feel free to ping me, so I can reboot the box

In long:
I have been looking into the issue together with friends and even my hosting provider, but nobody was able to figure out was going on. I keep monitoring the server as long as possible but at some point the server just goes berserk and starts spawning PHP processes which consume all of my memory. The next thing is the OOM-killer killing every other process in the server to free up memory, which results in an unresponsive server… The last thing my Terminal window can show me is the insanity going on before the SSH daemon is sacrificed in order to free up some more memory (to no avail I might add).

If you have any clue how I can find out what is causing this: Feel free to mail (i-at-noCreativity.com) me, Twitter @reply / DM me, call me on my cellphone (if you’ve got my number), or even break in into my home and leave me a note with the solution on the table, because this has been going on for almost a week now and I’m desperate for a solution!

I have been Googling along all week. There are a few people out there having the same issues, but nobody seems to be able to actually solve it.
Having said that: Sorry for the inconvenience (if any) and I hope to fix this soon (because I want to share more cool shit with you guys & gals!)

Actionscript is cool for developers. Not for me.

I love the creative process, I love experimenting, I love discovering new things and doing all kinds of stuff with it. I like to create toys that tell me something about myself. Having said that: I am a passionate Interactive Experience Designer. It’s a title I like because it tells you everything about me in 3 words.

That last point is really the reason of why I’m writing this. Having said the above, it should be clear Actionscript has enabled me to create cool stuff. Actionscript has enabled me to create whatever I could think off. But now at this point, I’m eager to go beyond my current limits, and I want to go there fast! Read the rest of this entry »