Two home games, and two good wins! Ah, it’s good to be back. Of course being in second place at this stage is fairly meaningless, but it’s a lot nicer to be able to say that than having to say “well, being at the bottom of the table doesn’t mean anything at this stage”.

On the whole I like the look of the side now. Doherty in particular is a great addition, so it was a bit worrying seeing him limping off on Saturday.

I also like the fact that we’ve had 4 different goal scorers over the two games (and a disallowed goal from Furs). Having Rowlands, Gallen, Birch and Moore get goals early in the season has to be good for their confidence, and it would be great not to have to rely too much on Furlong, as realistically we’ll be very lucky if he manages to repeat last season’s tally.

I still worry about Santos’ distribution (eyes to the ground, and kick the ball as hard as you can), and his moments of madness, but he put in some pretty solid tackles on Saturday and looked not too bad for a change. On the other hand, he was responsible for the Ipswich goal on Tuesday! I’m looking forward to Evatt being fit…

Possibly the dodgiest performer on Saturday was Rose, who looked like his mind was elsewhere most of the time. He doesn’t really convince as a left-back, and again, I am looking forward to seeing Milanese, who presumably is lacking a bit of fitness at the moment. For some reason he’s not in the squad list yet, so I hope there’s not some dodgy business going on there.

Of the new boys, Nygaard really didn’t impress me against Ipswich, and I’m still making my mind up about Moore. He looks a little bit lazier than Furlong when it comes to chasing hopeless causes, and doesn’t have the pace that I was expecting, but perhaps he’s not quite fit yet, and he took his goal quite nicely thank you. It always annoys me when players give up on things too easily, which a few were doing on Saturday. One of the many great attributes of Furlong is that he’s as likely to be closing down the keeper in the 89th minute as he is in the 5th, and when he does so, he always looks like he means it. Moore only came on in half way through the game, but he still looked half-hearted at best in those sorts of situations. Maybe it’s just his style, but realistically we probably need chasers and hard workers, not prima donnas (unless he turns out to be really really good and scores 30 goals, in which case he can hang around the opposition half smoking a fag for all I care…).

There were still a few niggles left over from last season, like Birch still missing a little something, and Rowlands blowing hot & cold - one minute really up for it, the next minute not bothering to run into position or ask for the ball. But there were also some positives, like Gallen looking a bit sharper than he did last season, and Ainsworth being fit again. Even Bean looked a bit better for the minute or two that he was on the pitch…

Overall, my expectations for the season are still modest, but I must admit that I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.

Bizarrely, QPR director Gianna Paladini was allegedly held up at gun point on Saturday, apparently in an attempt by another board member to force him to resign from the board of the club. It sounds like a terrible ordeal, and I hope he’s ok.

This isn’t the first dodgy incident involving our recent board members. Predictably, given the nature of football fans in general, and QPR fans in particular, this has spawned a certain amount of irreverent speculation…

As some of you may know, I was supposed to be starting a great new job at Learn3k, in Dublin.

Right now, Learn3k seems to exist on paper, but that’s about it, and my job certainly hasn’t got as far as a draft of a contract, let alone anything that involves me getting paid!

It wouldn’t be productive or appropriate to speculate about the reasons for all of this, but the long and the short of it is that I’m tired of waiting, so I seem to be in the job market once again!

In an ideal world, I am looking for a short term Mac or Games programming contract, which will keep me nicely occupied until the Dublin job comes through. Realistically though, beggars can’t be choosers, so if a good, permanent opportunity comes up, then I’m interested.

If you know of such an opportunity, please let me know! There are only so many months that one can put up with waiting for a contract so that one can buy a bed or a sofa for the new flat…

Following my site being hacked, I’ve finally been spurred into updating to the latest version of Drupal. Please let me know if you spot any problems.

I suspect that the reason that I was hacked was that I was still running a version of 4.5 which had a security hole in it. This in turn was because I had been putting off the upgrade as it wasn’t reversible and looked like it might require performing some SQL updates. I think that the difficulty of installing and upgrading Drupal are one of its major weaknesses. It often involves backing up, manually downloading items, running scripts, issuing SQL commands, moving files around, all of which can be quite daunting. I’m very capable of doing such things, but the more steps there are, the more it looks like something might go wrong - so you start thinking that you will have to have enough time available to recover from any catastrophic cock-ups, and hence you put it off for another day…

It should be possible to automate most if not all of this process. Installation really ought to be a case of clicking one icon or running one shell script. Creation of databases could and should be automatic, or performed in a wizard on the actual site that it being installed.

New versions of Drupal ought to be detected automatically, and there ought to be an option on the admin page of a site to allow you to perform an update. This update should be performed safely - making a complete backup of all data first - without the administrator having to perform a backup themselves.

Installing updates and custom modules ought to be possible from within Drupal itself, in the same way that Eclipse - for example - has a built in update mechanism. The admin page ought to display a list of all of the items that are available on drupal.org, and there should be support for downloading and installing them from within Drupal. When a new module is enabled, it ought to perform any SQL creation/updating that it needs to do, without the user having to do anything themselves.

All of this wouldn’t be rocket science - the technology mostly exists already, it’s just a question of people taking the time to package things up nicely.

Whilst I was in Poland, it seems that some morons hacked my server, leaving the web site showing the banner “spykids ownz your server”.

It looks like they got in via a Drupal exploit, from a dial up account in Brasil.

God only knows what else they did - the machine looks intact but I’ll have to regard it as compromised as I’m never likely to be able to prove otherwise.

Luckily for me there isn’t anything of value on it, but it’s a massive pain in the arse. I’d love to hear from anyone else who has had this experience, or has any advice on what to do now!

In the meantime I will soldier on with this server, as I don’t really have any alternative. Ultimately I guess a complete re-install is called for.