If you are trying to use the C programming language’s sizeof operator in a C pre-processor macro and find that you are unable to use it as expected and you see compiler errors (actually C pre-processor (CPP) errors), you are really seeing expected behavior. The sizeof operator works only during compile time and the sizes of structures are only known at compile time and it is not an operator supported by the C pre-processor.

Looking around the web, it seemed like there were many suggestions on reducing the size of a scanned document. There are software that will compress the size of your scanned PDF file, but nothing free. Ultimately I played around with the settings of my scanner (which is a Canon MP620 Pixma printer/scanner/copier combo) and found that the following settings reduced the size of the scanned image drastically.

The single change that had the biggest impact was to change the scan settings so that the document was scanned as a Black & White image instead of a Color image. Another setting that reduced the size further was to use 150dpi when scanning instead of 300dpi which was set as the default. Finally a big reduction results when you choose high compression when converting to a PDF file. Finally I went with just the Black & White scan setting only (since changing the other settings also reduced the quality of the resulting PDF file) and I was able to get a PDF of about 2M instead of the 12.5M that I was originally getting. So a decent amount of reduction in size.

After logging in, the admin screen (dashboard) of my WordPress installation was all jumbled (see screenshot below). It seemed like a CSS or JavaScript related problem. Developer tools on Google Chrome reported several issues with locating the ‘jQuery‘ variable and with the wp-admin/load-scripts.php file.

After several attempts at searching the WordPress site and googling around, I came across this forum post. Based on this forum post, I found that first configuring define(‘SCRIPT_DEBUG’, true); in wp-config.php and then refreshing my admin screen fixed the problem. Subsequently I removed this config line and refreshed my admin screen again and it stayed fixed.

It seems like in the default configuration, WordPress compresses or combines several JavaScript and/or CSS files into a single file and this compression/combination was somehow garbled. Turning on the SCRIPT_DEBUG flag turned off this compression and removing it again probably re-generated some files fixing my problem — I don’t know for sure what actually helped! But it worked.

This was with WordPress 3.3.1.

WordPress Admin Screen Garbled

UPDATE:

This happened a second time to me and doing the same thing as described above fixed the problem once again. But in the process, I noticed that the time-stamps on all files in my blog directory had been somehow updated to today’s date. Also *every* PHP file now had some additional code at the top within a php tag in the first line. The php code was eval‘ing a base64_encoded string via the base64_encode api. Apparently, evaluating this encoded string injected some JavaScript into every php based page on the site. It looked like some mal-ware had taken over my site. Having sucuri.net evaluate my site indicated there was some mal-ware (you provide your URL and they crawl your site and tell you whether your site has any mal-ware injected).

To fix my problem, I used the following shell scripts to detect files having the problem and to fix them.

Remember that I provide these scripts as an aid to anyone encountering the same problem and provide them as-is without any warranty. USE THEM AT YOUR OWN RISK. PLEASE MAKE BACKUPS OF YOUR FILES BEFORE RUNNING THESE SCRIPTS SINCE THEY WILL MODIFY FILES. The regular expression I used worked for me, but they may not necessarily work for you. BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP. Also the below may not be sufficient to rid your site of this mal-ware. I don’t know what else needs be done to completely rid your blog of the mal-ware.

To find all the files with this injected php code, I used the following script:

find . -name “*.php” | xargs awk ‘FNR == 1 && /<?php.*base64_.*?>/ {print FILENAME}{nextfile}’

To remove this line of injected php code, I used the following script:

find . -name “*.php” | xargs sed -i ’1s/<?php \/\*\*\/ .val(base64.decode(“.*==”));?>//’

(In the above scripts, please fix the quotes and the double-quotes — pre-formatted code doesn’t wrap, so had to use regular formatting which messes with quotes and such)

Now I wait and watch to see if the problem re-surfaces, if it does, then I know there is more I need to do.

UPDATE:

This happened yet another time and I cleaned up in the same manner. I also searched some more and found that someone had installed the infamous c99 shell to allow them backdoor access into my setup. They were using this backdoor access to periodically inject additional php code into my php scripts. I found the c99 shell by searching for the string “gzdef.ate.base.._encode” (I am using . instead of the actual character to prevent security tools from thinking this page has a security issue. Replace the dots with ‘l’, ’6′ and ’4′ in order). I removed the backdoor, but I am yet to find the vulnerability in the existing script that was exploited by someone to install the backdoor shell in the first place. Looking…

• You can’t have messages from two different tasks queuing up into the same queue in a destination task and expect sequencing between the messages.

Copy the folder

<android-sdk>\platform-tools\

to

<android-sdk>\platforms\android-8\tools\

You need to do this when in the Edit menu Preferences dialog for the Mobile Support item, if it fails with an error message saying:
The chosen folder is not a valid Android SDK. Please ensure you have installed it correctly, and enabled support for Android 2.2 (Froyo).

Focus on the road not the wall

Focusing on things that need to be done and not focusing on things that bring your project down can help you finish your project and not go crashing into a wall .

But this method does not scale and also it’s hard to give a project schedule and tell when you’ll be done with some module .

I need to figure out some way of divide-and-conquer programming where I don’t need to have the entire thing in my head, but have just pieces of it in my head at a time, code that piece and be comfortable that the particular piece has been coded correctly — and that the way it’s been coded it will interact correctly with all the other pieces making the old adage of the sum of the parts being larger than the whole come true.

Oh well. I guess I cannot be everything all the time. Back to wrapping my head around this current problem…why is it that people find web-development easy and I keeping finding it hard and wondering why no-one sees that it is complicated distributed programming? That things can go wrong anytime and everywhere.

How do you deal with coding of such nature? Let me know in the comments.