You’ve just found my résumé and blog.  I’ve learned that there’s nothing greater I can do but to pass on the wealth of knowledge which God has provided me.  I hope to have the time in the near future to begin posting tutorials on how to do the everything from programming to photography to graphic design!

I love photography because it’s my way of “capturing God’s beauty”; programming is my way of taking a VERY small step into God’s shoes — and seeing what it’s like to create something that serves a purpose;  and graphic design allows me to express the beauty that God’s placed in my mind and make it available for others to see.

I’ve had a blessed life and God’s been right here with me every step of the way.  I’m married to the woman of my dreams and am the father of the most precious little boy — named Toma.  This is truly the most exciting time of my life and I can’t wait to see what God has in store for my family and I in the future.

I’m sure you’re eager to find out more so go on, click one of the links above to see my résumé and portfolio or see below for things I’ve blogging about.

I’ve been very fond of a plugin named new user approve written by Picklewagon. It allows you to open registration, and over-rides the default registration process of automatically allowing the user in and sending you ( the admin ) an e-mail — along with the newly registered user.

I’ve also been digging deep into WordPress multisite / multiuser, and have found that this plugin is not compatible — and no other plugin is, for this type of situation!  Going through the forums, I found that there’s a great need for this in WordPress MultiUser/MultiSite.  For that reason, I decided to go ahead and research what was causing the lack of execution of the approval process in registration.  Come to find out, WordPress’ register_post and registration_errors are not MultiSite / MultiUser friendly! Even WordPress 3.3.1 is still tied to the wpmu_validate_user_signup hook.

Luckily, the fix wasn’t too bad — I took the code for register_post and registration_errors and put them together in a new function call which I hooked to wpmu_validate_user_signup.

That did the trick!  This was a cool learning experience for me as I hadn’t dabbled into this type of functionality before and I have to say.. WordPress, I <3 you .

P.S.  The goodies — I have tgz’d the plugin directory for your using pleasure, here: http://beshoy.girgis.us/files/2012/02/new-user-approve.tgz

So here I sit, unable to log into my Google account due to some wonderful hackers.  I’m not sure why but my domains/accounts/etc have been targeted several times by hackers.  I appreciate the experience however as I’m learning my fair share about security.

This attack led the hackers to somehow gain access to my Google account and once in, they changed my password. I’ve spent all day fixing defaced websites, changing passwords and cleaning up my server to make it easier to catch suspicious files.  Like I said, I appreciate the experience.

Soon after I got my e-mails routed back to my original e-mail address that’s not GMail I got an e-mail from Facebook notifying me that my password has been changed.  I immediately clicked the link that was available if I had not initiated the change.  I was taken to a login page where it recognized that I put in the old password and gave me the option to lock my account or verify that I am the actual owner.  It took me to a page where it asked me if I was the user in ( a country far far away ), logging on using Firefox on a Windows 7 computer.  I told the system that that’s not me and I wanted to change my password.  After doing so, I felt much better knowing that the culprit is locked out of something.

It’s now been twelve hours since this all started.  I did receive one phone call from Google.  Upon answering however, the Google employee start coughing right before we got disconnected.  This was several hours ago and I have yet to receive another call.  I re-submitted the form to request my password be forcefully reset as well as attempting dozens of times to log in using my old credentials hoping that maybe.. eventually.. that Google would think “Whoao… Something’s wrong here.” — but nothing.

I guess the biggest disappointment is not that I’m locked out but that the hacker is still in there! I would honestly appreciate the account being locked down completely if there’s someone else trying to get in.  Keep the account locked up until an investigation is conducted… Don’t let the hacker in and allow him/her to do as they please with all my information!  I started thinking about the extent of the information and my word, it’s frightening!

I’ll follow up after this gets resolved — if it ever does!!!

Thanks to the wonderful world of spammers, in the process of deleting over 250 bot-created bad subdomains of girgis.us, I accidentally deleted my own.  When I contacted JustHost.com to ask them to restore the most recent backup, I got “Sorry but we can’t do that for you, since we do not have a copy or backups of your account(database).” So yeah, I’m at square one.  LUCKILY, Google is kind enough to keep a cached copy of my site.  I’ve saved all the pages that I could find and will try to rebuild it in the near future.

Stay tuned!