Its been some time since my last update.   Just about two weeks, I reckon.  There is a reason for this distinct lack of updates, however.  There have been a number of technical issues I’ve been dealing with that have eaten up all my spare time., the most significant of which is the fact that Ask the Fatty! got hacked.  Some 12 year old Albanian hacker somehow managed to reset the password on the default admin user and got into the WordPress dashboard.  He deleted everything and then put up his own index.html offering greetz to all his Albanian brothers and declaring victory for hackers everywhere.  Really?  You hacked a site that hasn’t been updated in almost 2 years by compromising a user on that site that was supposed to have been deleted (still not sure how or why the admin user that I deleted was somehow still present for this clown to compromise); a site that’s all about how some fatass likes to eat and that’s a win for hackers everywhere?  Yeah, you’re a real Internet Tough Guy.  I can’t roll my eyes hard enough at this guy.  The best part is that since he doesn’t actually know how WordPress works, the stuff he tried to delete was easily recoverable and I’ve since edited the MySQL tables of all my WordPress installs to make sure the admin user is gone, so he won’t be getting in that way again.  As a side note, on my old My Twisted Mind install, the admin user was still in the MySQL table even though I’d deleted it out of the WordPress dashboard.  Nice job, WordPress developers!  Way to write secure software!  In any event, I’ve got the site mostly restored, but I still have a lot of back end stuff to do because I don’t know how far into the server he got and what else may have been compromised.  Better safe than sorry and all that.  And can I say, that while I love Dreamhost, and have been a delighted customer for years, they were remarkably unhelpful during this.  They wouldn’t restore a backup because despite the fact that their backups are kept on an off-site server, somehow they may have been compromised. They also didn’t really do much aside from run an automated scan of my account to find possible vulnerabilities and point me to their support wiki if I wanted to know how to set up a clean WordPress install.  While this info was useful, in the past they’ve been considerably more helpful in terms of technical support.  Despite this, I’m getting it done, and hopefully it won’t be too much longer.

The other main issue I’ve been having is that Google Music is pissing me right the fuck off.  Since uploading my music library to the service, I’ve realized that I’ve got a lot more untagged or improperly tagged mp3s than I thought. I’ve been taking some time to fix them, and then tried to re-upload the corrected files.  Turns out, Google Music doesn’t care if you’ve changed or added meta data to an mp3 its already uploaded.  It won’t upload it again.  Won’t do it.  No.  Go away. Not even if you delete the copy already in Google Music and then ask it to re-upload.  Not happening.   There’s a work around, however.  If you go into the %appdata% folder and delete Music Manager’s database, you can get it to re-upload files.  Great!  Lets get uploading!  I make a bunch of changes, point Music Manager to those files, and it works great.  The trouble started when I pointed Music Manager back to my normal music directory.  In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have done that, but I didn’t know it would cock everything up.  What happens is that since the local database is reset, Google Music thinks all of those files I had (around 15k) are new.  Its too dumb to poll the server and see if they’re already uploaded.  It tries to upload the files again and you actually end up with duplicates.  When I realized this, I pointed Muisc Manger to an empty directory to stop more duplicates from being created.  Unfortunately, this has its own consequence.  When the music manager scans the folder you tell it to upload from, it creates dummy placeholder files in your Google Music account.  These files are in no way accessible by you and are only removed once the mp3s are uploaded.  Problem is, if you point Music Manager elsewhere before its done uploading, everything freaks the fuck out and the temp files are never deleted and count against your total file limit.  According to my dashboard, I now have 15741 playable tracks and 20073 total tracks.  Since my total track count is over 20k, I can’t upload anything else until the file count drops.  Telling Music Manager to go back to the original folder and then later deleting the duplicates it uploads doesn’t work because it won’t forget the temp files from the first time around.  The only solution I’ve found is to delete my entire library and re-upload everything.  I currently have over 16000 files.  It took me over a week to upload my stuff the first time, and that was when I was living in a place where my internet connection wasn’t made out of two cans and a string.  Now, if this is the only way to fix it, fine, I’ll do it.  Problem is, deleting your library means that it will delete all of your purchased music too.  Remember that flaky internet connection I just mentioned?  Apparently, that gives both the Google Music website and Music Manager shit fits.  The Music Manger won’t download anything because the second the connection goes dead for a moment, it just stops downloading.  And when trying to grab the music directly from the website, if the download is interrupted, it won’t allow you to resume, and the website has a 2 download limit on purchased tracks.  I’m trying a variety of methods to get my purchased music out of their clutches so that I can delete the library and re-upload everything and get my file count back to where it should be.  Google acknowledges the problem, and has done so since last year, however they’ve yet to actually do anything about it.  Again, I love the company, but goddamn guys why you gotta break my balls?