I’m very pleased to announce that I have a new laptop, the Toshiba A100 Celeron M 1.86GHz 1GB 80GB DVD±RW XPPro.

Here’s a pic:

It’s SO nice to be back to normal!

… that I have to inform you that my laptop died on Wednesday and has gone to the place where dead laptops go to in the sky.

It was a work laptop, and I should hopefully have a new replacement this week. Until then, I’m relying on other people’s laptops and those laptops that wait around for some lovely new owner to pick them up, brush the dust off and give them a reason to live again!

I probably won’t post to North of the Stupid Line too much over the next week or so. If you’re going to miss my witticisms, comment and tell me/us!

You may have noticed over the last week or so a rather annoying little denomination on nearly all my blogs or websites. As you attempted to load the index page, it would load very slowly, and show “m-gallery.org” in the status bar, as if the page was being redirected away from the blog or website to m-gallery.org. Eventually, the page would time out, you’d end up with a blank page, or your browser would crash.

This code was the culprit:

[html][/html]

Somehow, a hacker managed to access 3,500 FTP accounts on Dreamhost servers (including mine), and editing index.* pages to include the above code. When this started happening with the websites on my server, I googled “m-gallery.org”, which only found 3 results, none of which made sense. Now, there are 76 results, which illustrates how the problem spread quickly.

There’s a good summary of the whole shebang here that explains how the hack worked.

If you’ve been infected as a result of accessing one of my blogs or websites, then I do apologise. You will be pleased to know that I *think* I have now managed to obliterate this nasty little bastard from my server. If you spot it anywhere, give us a shout.

Oh, I suppose I should tell you how to get rid of it if you’ve been infected. Basically, if you’re running a WordPress installation you just need to replace the index.php in the root of the installation, wp-admin and in the theme folder that you’re using with either a fresh copy or a copy that you may have backed up on your system. If it’s a simple website with HTML pages, just replace index.html with a copy you may have backed up on your system.

Those of you who are that bothered about NotSL and my other websites to check it out every few hours, you may have noticed that my server suffered a few teething problems over the last one or two days, the reason being an outage as a result of Dreamhost replacing some cables at their office. For more details (if you’re really *that* interested!) go here.

As a result of this, some of the features on my server and Dreamhost generally aren’t quite working at 100% capacity, so if you experience problems with any of my websites, you know why!

To be honest, this was rather frustrating, as I was looking forward to working on deaflawyers.org yesterday! I also need to work on a few other websites, but the problem is time, or lack of it!

Fancy a change, so bear with me while I play around with some templates and modify them to my taste.