DVD Guide Blog

My installation of WordPress was hacked last night. I have deleted the previous installation and installed the latest version, 1.5.1.2, but I do not know if it will be any more secure since the vulnerability 1.5.1.2 fixes from 1.5.1.1 may or may not be related (obviously, I have not been using the “default template” mentioned in the May 27th “Security Update” post in the WordPress Development Blog, but that does not mean that the same vulnerability may not also affect other templates, such as those in the Blix theme).

I am not yet certain about the point of entry, but I have had some suspicions. A new user account was created even though I have always kept the user-creation functionality of WordPress disabled. Thus, I first suspected the user-creation system because I received a user-creation notification e-mail marked 8:40pm and because hacker-uploaded files and hacker-modified files had modification times after that, but now I have my doubts because wp_users.user_registered was set to “1999-01-01 03:40:06″ for the new user account (the wp_users.user_registered value for my own account is “0000-00-00 00:00:00″, which is also rather odd, but probably normal for accounts created during WordPress installation) and because one of the hacker programs connects to MySQL itself.

Strangely, the user account created by the hacker does not show up for me when I click on “Users” in the main WordPress menu; when I do, I see only the “Your Profile” tab with my own profile and my “Level” set to 4. The corresponding field in the database, wp_users.user_level was set to 10 for the hacker. I do not know what my level was set to before, but I suspect it was higher since clicking on “Upload” then “options” results in the following unlikely message for an administrator:

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

Could the breach have been through the upload system? I will continue to look into it, but if you have any further information, please feel to share what you know in the comments.

I have installed a new WordPress theme called “Blix” (version 0.9.1) by Sebastian Schmieg. So far, it seems very nice—clean.

After my first attempt to install WordPress 1.5.1.1—right over WordPress 1.5—failed with an e-mail from DreamHost’s “one-click” installation robot complaining about how the directory was not empty, I grudgingly deleted the contents of the directory (I had already saved a copy of my content to my local system) then repeated the series of clicks (”few-click” installation is more like it) necessary to try again. Now WordPress 1.5.1.1 is installed, but the .htaccess file is gone, so none of the links into the “wordpress” directory work. Oops.

I tried to edit the .htaccess file, hoping WordPress would generate a new one, but it did not; it merely complained about there not being one. I also tried editing a link category name (without actually changing it), but that did not seem to do anything either. Ugh.

I would ask if anyone knows how to regenerate the .htaccess file, but the comment links are among those that are not presently working. I wish I had saved a backup copy of my .htaccess file along with that copy of my content.

Update (Just Minutes Later): I got WordPress to rebuild the .htaccess file, fixing the links into the “wordpress” directory, by loading Options > Permalinks then clicking on the “Update Permalink Structure »” button (it was not necessary to actually make any changes, only to click on the button).

Update (4:40am): With all of the bug-fixing that the WordPress team did for version 1.5.1.1, they missed one that has already been mentioned on their Web site: changing a post slug does not change the value of wp_posts.guid (the URL) for that post. I discovered this while looking into a broken link that showed up in my index table. Curiously, the sidebar link to the same article had the correct URL.

I recently bought an internal DVD writer—a Toshiba SD-R5372 (with 12x DVD-R write speed, before it was upgraded to 16x about a week after I bought ours)—for our computer so we could back up our personal files onto discs that actually have enough capacity to hold them all. The drive came with Nero OEM Suite. I then bought a PVR card—a Hauppage WinTV-PVR 150—and that came with Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3 SE, among other things. Thus far, both Nero and DVD MovieFactory seem terrible; neither seems good enough to pay money for its retail counterpart.

The Nero suite’s “SmartStart” launcher seems cluttered while NeroVision Express 2—the suite’s DVD authoring package—has one of the worst interfaces I have ever seen in a computer application. Unlabeled icons abound. Common features such as “Open…” are not so easy to find because there is no menu bar while there does not seem to be any “Save As…” functionality at all. Error messages tend to be unhelpful (one that appeared after video transcoding failed gave me no indication as to why and one that appeared after a burn failure provided no useful information and suggested that I look through an error log file to diagnose the problem, but that was not helpful either). Thumbnail views do not always match larger views.

Chapter marking is easy enough, but there does not seem to be any way to convert edited segments into chapters and automatic chapter creation seems worthless (I did not want a chapter every few seconds, thank you). After surviving all of that torture, I found that Nero does provide a lot of menu layouts that are customizable through windowish areas that I apparently accidentally caused to disappear sometimes while I was using them. The menu layouts and imagery are somewhat customizable, but not nearly as much as I would like and the end result always seems to involve ugly blinking selection overlays instead of outlines.

As much as I dislike NeroVision Express 2, it seems mostly preferable to Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3 SE. I have to wonder about a developer’s attention to detail when the splash screen for its DVD authoring application shows a woman holding a disc that is clearly marked “CD-R” and my concern proved warranted when MovieFactory generated chapter previews that used clips from the original timeline rather than the edited timeline. That flaw is a deal-killer without even considering the software’s other shortcomings.

Thus far, I am disappointed by the DVD authoring software I have (and frankly, by the video recording software, but I will not go into such things as WinTV2000’s recording problems and clunky, buggy menus now since that application does not pertain directly to DVD authoring). NeroVision Express 2 and Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3 SE both make me wonder if there are any better options.

Who has some suggestions for me? What have you used, on what platform (e.g. Windows XP or Mac OS X), what do you like, what do you dislike, and why?

I have been resisting the urge to write mini-reviews, instead entertaining the idea of one day writing reviews of every DVD movie in my collection and possibly in the collections of friends and family, but Fox has cumulatively annoyed me out of my procrastination with the DVD release of “AVP: Alien vs. Predator”.

You might think that forcing advertising on viewers by disabling the disc menu button during automatically-played pre-menu advertising on a DVD that sells for the standard new DVD price (read: paid for with money, not a pledge to watch advertising every single fucking time you spin it even if you already have the movies that are being advertised) would result in plenty of money for Fox and thus, a high-quality production in anticipation of the revenue from the immediate sale of copies of AVP and from future sales of the advertised movies and you might be right . . . about the revenue . . . but not about high-quality production because the AVP DVD looks like it was thrown together under the direction of sleazy marketing people who don’t know the first thing about producing a high-quality DVD.

AVP is plagued by a distracting amount of artifacts in dark scenes while its special features include still images of comic book covers that are obviously out of order—obvious not just to movie or comic book fans, but to anyone possessing the ability to read—while the “INSIDE LOOK” touted on the main menu merely played two more trailers for Fox movies with the closest thing to an inside look at anything being scenes that happened to take place inside of buildings. The ‘”MAKING-OF” FEATURETTE’ listed on both the case and its slip-cover does not appear to be on the DVD.

The movie itself was okay, but the AVP DVD’s low production values and annoying advertising make me glad that somebody else paid for it.

UPDATE (2005-03-04): Upon reinserting the DVD, I discovered that our DVD player’s “TRACK +” button enables us to skip the pre-menu advertising rather than fast-forwarding through it; perhaps the sleazy fucker at Fox who decreed that the disc menu button should be disabled was unaware of the existence of track buttons or at least unable to disable them. Either way, a different main menu than before then appeared—with the options on a predator arm device rather than as slanted text in the sacrificial chamber—but the options all appeared to be the same as on the other main menu, the “INSIDE LOOK” option still just played two movie trailers, and the special features menu appeared to be the same as before.

(Note: The backward quotation mark in the third paragraph of this mini-review—the one that curls left when it should curl right—is the fault of the system WordPress uses to replace straight quotation marks with curly quotation marks. I will probably look into it a bit more—or at least report it to the developers—after I have had a chance to see how many of the things I disliked about WordPress 1.2.1 still exist in version 1.5.)

WordPress 1.5 has been released and it reportedly offers many improvements over WordPress 1.2.1, which I was previous running at DVD Guide, so I have—as you may have guessed by my use of the word previously—upgraded to it.

With the new version of WordPress comes a new default page style, which looks much better than the old default page style aside from using right-pointing double-angle brackets as bullets. It seems cleaner overall. I will likely tweak it a bit, of course—after I have had some time to explore it.

I have started working on a new page style for WordPress-generated pages to improve their content presentation. It is currently posted as an alternate style sheet, but I do plan to make it the default when I have had some more time to work on it (this is, after all, final examinations week at school).

For now, can apply the new page style, “DVD Guide Custom Style: Untitled (A Work-in-Progress)”, by using your Web browser’s built-in alternate style sheet support as follows:

• In Firefox: You can select alternate style sheets from your “View” –> “Page Style” menu.
• In Opera: You can select alternate style sheets from your “View” –> “Style” menu.
• In Another Modern Browser: Check your “View” or equivalent menu and, if necessary, your browser’s documentation.
• In Internet Explorer: Alternate style sheet support is not built into Internet Explorer for Windows (I do not know about the Mac OS versions, some of which do offer some functionality that the Windows versions lack), but I may implement a style sheet switcher for you later. For now, I recommend using a different browser.

Although the new page style is still a work-in-progress, I would love to know what you think about it, so please do not hesitate to post a comment about it.

Update: You can now select from the WordPress original page style, that plus my custom page style (so far, it extends the original style rather than replacing it), or my custom page style alone (for use primarily during further development until it is ready to replace the original entirely). I have changed the default page style to the combination of the original and custom page styles (listed among the available styles as “WordPress++”).

I just installed WordPress before going to bed earlier this morning then I awoke several hours later to be greeted by nearly fifty comment notification e-mails—all for spam comments about gambling sites—and more of them arrived while I was sorting through them for anything real, so I temporarily reposted the old page and started looking for an image-based system to prevent WordPress comment spam without stifling legitimate comments.

I found a plug-in that may do the trick, but I am not crazy about how it seems to rely upon PHP sessions* to store its temporary information, so I will have to keep looking and considering my options for now. In the meantime, since comment spam keeps showing up (even with times from several hours before their associated posts and no notification messages), I have added “casino”, “gambling”, and “poker” as keywords to trigger comment moderation, so my e-mail inbox may still be filled with notifications, but at least it should be more difficult for new ones to show up on the site.

Update: I just deleted 68 spam comments (one individually, three pages of twenty, then a page of seven more), but I received only 57 corresponding e-mail notifications, so it looks like WordPress let eleven comments through (possibly all associated with nonexistent posts) without notifying me.

* PHP sessions work by either embedding session information into URLs, which is both ugly and short-sighted (a threat to security, system resources, and even search engine operations), or by using cookies, which I am not crazy about requiring for unregistered commenters.

I have reinstalled WordPress under a “wordpress” subdirectory because of how it pollutes the installation directory (I didn’t want all that stuff in the root directory). I also changed the “Weblog title” on the “General Options” page to “DVD Guide » WordPress” because WordPress-generated page titles are misleading about the organization of the Web site if I use just the name of the site.

The first time a DVD movie denied me the use of our remote control’s menu button—”Love Actually”, as I recall—I thought perhaps something might be wrong with the remote control. Another movie did it recently, but I do not presently recall which one it was (I will update this post if, after getting some sleep or perhaps having my memory jogged while walking past our DVD shelves, I remember which it was). I do remember how annoying it was, though.

It is bad enough that I have to sit through the same legal warnings and disclaimers (or slight variations of them) almost every time I watch a DVD; forcing previews on me is going too far. I would prefer that previews be tucked tidily away in their own area of the DVD where I can watch them at will and only if I will (for example, aside from occasional historical interest, there is little reason to see a preview for a movie I already have), but I can tolerate them playing automatically if I can skip past them at will with a single button press rather than having to fast-forward through them, wasting time while waiting for the fast-forwarding to finish. This is a most annoying, rude, and wasteful trend and I do hope it will come to an end soon—preferably with some corporate apologies, assurances against further occurrences, and perhaps even some very public firings as evidence of the sincerity of the issuers.

Update (2004-12-19): We finally watched I, Robot last night—after fast-forwarding through the previews Fox forced on us. *Grumble, grumble . . . *

Update (2005-03-04): We watched a movie with last night’s dinner: AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Fox’s latest effort to force previews upon us by automatically playing them before the main menu and disabling the menu button.

Although I have my own Web-publishing software in PageDrive, it is still under development and not yet ready to deploy at other people’s Web sites, so I have decided to try WordPress at DVD Guide to see if it might be good for friends and family who want to set up Web journals soon rather than waiting for PageDrive.

So far, everything seems to be working and WordPress seems to offer a lot of functionality and impressive attention to detail in some regards (automatic replacement of quotation marks with curly versions, for example). I do have some initial concerns, so I will document them here for easy reference (not presently in any strict order, but I may sort them later):

• Security Risk: The installer was publicly linked from the root of the installation directory, so if anyone had gotten to it before me, the user name and password would have been provided to that person rather than to me.
• Security Risk: Users are allowed to create their own accounts by default.
• The installer and the “General Options” page delete trailing slashes from the “WordPress address (URI)” and “Blog address (URI)” fields. It then seems to add one back when generating the link at the top of a content page if “Blog address (URI)” is the root directory, but not if it is a subdirectory.
• The”View site” links on the administration page go to index.php whether it exists or not. (WordPress seems to assume that the “Blog address (URI)” will have the index.php file it installed at the “WordPress address (URI)”.)
• Most of the links between WordPress-generated pages use file extensions—even the “View site” links to the site’s root.
• I am not in love with the query strings WordPress uses in so-called article “permalink” and search URLs, although they do seem to be editable to some yet undetermined degree.
• This form does not offer em dashes and en dashes.
• The default page layout seems rather cramped in some places.
• The default page layout seems rather bland.
• Every time I use one of the “Quicktags” with the post form on the “Write” page, the text area in which I am typing scrolls to the top. (I am presently using Firefox 1.0 on Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2.)
• The TrackBack section of the form on the “Write” page says “TrackBack an URL” and it mixes “URL” and “URI” on the same line.
• There does not seem to be a way to replace deleted indentations in the post form.
• WordPress does not hyphenate “e-mail”.
• If the “Nickname” field is blanked (it is filled by default) on the “Profile” page, WordPress returns an error message after the user clicks the “Update Profile” button.
• If the “Email” field is left blank on the “Profile” page, WordPress returns an error message after the user clicks the “Update Profile” button.
• WordPress does not generate valid XHTML if “™” is entered in the “Weblog title” field on the “General Options” or in the post field on the “Write” page; it seems to just pass it straight through as XHTML, which browsers will display as “™”. This causes Firefox and Sage, an RSS plug-in for Firefox, to both halt and return error messages when parsing WordPress-generated feeds.
• If “™” is surrounded by quotation marks and followed by a period as in the item directly preceding this one, WordPress replaces the preceding quotation mark with a curly quotation mark, but leaves the following quotation mark straight.
• The post form sometimes refuses new text selections, keeping other text selected. For example, when I try to select part of the final item in an unordered list, the closing tag for the list (not the list item) stubbornly remains selected.
• Comment notifications come from a nonexistent e-mail address with a garbled name (”DVD Guideâ„¢”).
• New link categories auto-increment past numbers of deleted categories. (This may be due to how MySQL handles AUTO_INCREMENT fields.)
• WordPress automatically changes well-known XHTML tag names to lower-case, but it leaves their property names, such as “HREF” and “TITLE” however they were typed, which can cause XHTML validation to fail.
• Category names are numbered in a single sequence in order of creation regardless of their depths.
• WordPress uses the same title for the pages and feeds it generates and it generates its garbled e-mail notification sender name from that same title. Different titles might be nice (”Latest News”, “Category X”, etc.)—along with category-specific feeds.
• WordPress generates a link to the front page even on the front page (sans query string). Category and single-post pages also link to themselves.
• Upon posting a message at 2:21pm, there was immediately a spam comment with today’s date and the time “7:56 am”. This particular spam comment did not appear in my comment notifications.
• WordPress generates a .htaccess file that is incompatible with its archive (year-month) links when using hyphens as delimiters between year, month, and date values in permalinks.
• WordPress generates a .htaccess file that is incompatible with its archive (year-month, e.g. http://www.example.com/wordpress/2004-12) links when using hyphens as delimiters between year, month, and date values in permalinks.

I still have the following concerns regarding WordPress 1.5 (other items will be moved here when they have been confirmed for this version):

• I am not crazy about how WordPress dominates whatever directory it is installed in, creating category URLs without any apparent regard for whether those categories represent specific topics (e.g. defective DVDs or usability problems) or general content types (e.g. news, reviews, or interviews). Categories can be arranged as subcategories, but the resulting automatically-generated URLs may not be as desired and the default page style shows subcategories at the same level as their parent categories. I would prefer something that would better suit sites running multiple applications (indeed, enabling smooth, seamless deployment of multiple applications has been part of my own Web software plans since before I decided to bring some of my projects together into my PageDrive project), preferably with a common user-account and user-session system (users would create and use just one account for blogs, discussion forums, games, shopping, and whatever else a single site offers instead of being annoyed by multiple user name and password sets for each site that offers more than one type of service).
• The new default page style uses right-pointing double-angle brackets as bullets on the front page while it uses standard filled circles as bullets on other pages.
• The new default page style justifies text, creating wide, ugly gaps between words on some lines.
• I do not care for the “Archives” metaphor; it carries an odd temporal connotation for new content.
• So-called archive versions of articles do not appear in their entirety. (This may be adjustable, but this is the default behavior.)
• Per-month archive URLs are created by default.
• Per-category URLs display archive versions of articles.
• Post slugs and corresponding URL rewriting code are generated whether they are wanted or not.
• Automatically-generated post slugs omit ampersands and there does not seem to be any option to have solo ampersands converted to “and” instead.
• The default template says that every site “is proudly powered by WordPress” even if the owner of the site has no reason for pride in using WordPress. Slightly less annoyingly, that line isn’t followed by a period.
• Some WordPress generated links still lack trailing slashes when they should be there, but trailing slashes are included for rewritten URLs that do not require them (e.g. the feed links at the bottom of every page), which just seems silly.
• WordPress does not seem to allow category names to follow the blog directory directly in permalinks even when the custom prefix is set to “/” or the installation directory (e.g “/wordpress/”) . It still inserts the word “category” into category links (and it still deletes a trailing slash from the form field).

Two weeks ago, I wrote to webmaster@starwars.com to ask who people can contact about defective THX 1138 DVDs (the packaging includes the street address for Warner Home Video, but not so much as a Web site URL let alone an e-mail address or a telephone number while the official THX 1138 Web site, the Lucasfilm Web site, and the Warner Bros. Web site do not seem to include any information about defective DVD replacement, although I did just find a customer service form on the Warner Bros. site). My e-mail has gone unanswered. We exchanged our second defective copy of THX 1138 for a third identically defective copy earlier tonight. Could there be a mastering problem that causes incompatibilities with some DVD players?

Scott, a manager or supervisor of some sort at Target in Cupertino (he was identified by a woman at the customer service counter as her supervisor), informed us that we have been making a mistake in purchasing some of our DVDs from Target; of course, he did not use those particular words, but he did tell us that unless there has been an official recall, Target policy does not permit him to refund a customer’s money for an opened DVD even when multiple copies have revealed an apparent defect that may affect an entire production run.

Scott dismissed my suggestion that there may have been a mastering problem, stating simply (and quite fallaciously) that if there had been a mastering problem, he would have had a lot of returns. When I pointed out that a mastering problem may not necessarily result in playback problems on all DVD players, he responded that Target policy also prohibits customers from returning opened games for a refund due to compatibility problems—a point I easily and immediately refuted by pointing out that any DVD carrying the DVD Video logo is supposed to be compatible with any DVD Video player that carries that same logo, unlike computer games, which have specific component requirements (and even so, may exhibit problems with some configurations of supposedly compatible components, but that is another issue). Usually, we would happily accept an exchange for a defective movie because we want the movie (that is why we bought it in the first place), but since we suspected we would encounter the same defect with a third copy of THX 1138, we accepted an exchange rather than a refund only because we had no other choice.

We are displeased. Most displeased.

(Note: This article is also posted in my journal at my personal Web site.)

We exchanged our defective copy of THX 1138 for another copy—another defective copy. The movie stops playing at the same two points (and perhaps others we have not yet reached) when played on our television DVD player, but not when played on our computer via PowerDVD. Shall we try a third copy?

(Note: This article is also posted in my journal at my personal Web site.)

The DVD release of THX 1138 has caused me to ponder what could qualify as the worst DVD of all time; our brand-new copy has frozen at two different points within little over a half-hour into the movie, after which it quits out to copyright warnings (the usual annoying FBI and Interpol crap that movie fans have to suffer through on a regular basis) then the special features menu. We successfully fast-forwarded through the first offending location after resuming the movie after the first incident, but the second location—near the beginning of the tenth chapter—crapped out three times in a row before we decided to declare the DVD defective and put it away permanently (and yes, we checked the surface of the disc for debris, but found none of significance).

There are many DVDs that look overcompressed (for example, there seem to be a lot of sudden grain population increases in dark background scenes in Stargate SG-1) or force you to watch the afore-mentioned copyright warnings before the movie EVERY SINGLE TIME you put the disc in your DVD player and there was even one DVD that forced us to watch the previews before allowing us to get to the movie (the menu button was disabled, but we were at least able to fast-forward through the intrusive advertising), but luckily, that one was only rented (we do not usually rent anything, but we had a gift card). And don’t even get me started about those Dic cartoon DVDs that came in Cheerios boxes; I was sick of the Heathcliff theme song before we even got to the first cartoon!

Without even considering the quality of content, there are a lot of ways to make a poor DVD, but lax quality control may be the surest way because it can ruin even good content. I don’t mean that it can just distract the viewer for a short while now and then or otherwise detract from the enjoyment of content (as the graininess does in Stargate SG-1); it can bring the content to a halt or damage it to such an extent that stopping the DVD is preferable to watching the abomination that remains.

In addition to THX 1138, two DVDs stand out in my mind for their absurdly low quality: the tenth DVD in the “Farscape: The Complete Season One” boxed set (the second episode and the video in the extras section were both severely garbled on our copy before it was replaced) and the 1998 television production of Moby Dick (the audio for an an entire scene—17, if memory serves—was out of synch with the video). Which is the worst of all time, though? Is there anything else I might be forgetting? I will have to ponder this a bit more.

Here’s hoping our defective copy of THX 1138 is a rarity and that we will be able to have it replaced with a properly working copy with less hassle than we had to endure for Kristen’s defective Farscape DVD.

(Note: This article is also posted in my journal at my personal Web site.)

I have still received no reply from ADV Films since our brief exchanges last month, so it seems unlikely that the company is reconsidering its customer-unfriendly replacement policy, but at least our replacement DVD seems to work properly.

(Note: This article was originally generated manually with a date, but no time of day, so although midnight [00:00:00] has since been entered as a placeholder for content-management systems, that is not likely the actual time of posting.)

ADV Films has not replied to my call for them to change their replacement policy, but our replacement Farscape DVD did arrive yesterday, well in advance of the eight-weeks we were told we might have to wait for processing. The DVD was mailed in a thin cardboard envelope without any kind of padding or even so much as “do not bend” written on the outside to protect it, so I am hoping it made the journey through the mail unscratched and otherwise undamaged. I will post another update after we have tested the replacement DVD.

(Note: This article was originally generated manually with a date, but no time of day, so although midnight [00:00:00] has since been entered as a placeholder for content-management systems, that is not likely the actual time of posting.)

When first played on the night of Wednesday, January 27th, our copy of the newly released Stargate SG-1, Season 5, Volume 3 DVD was not even reaching its main menu. It automatically played some severely garbled video from the beginning of its first episode then it froze. I ejected the DVD for inspection, but I could see nothing wrong with it, so I attempted to play it again only to encounter the same results. However, when I attempted to play it the next day to seek more information about the failure, the DVD made it to its main menu without issue. Despite further testing, I was not able to reproduce any of the undesirable behavior, so I now suspect that the DVD itself was not at fault; something may have come between the DVD and the laser inside of the DVD player.

(Note: This article was originally generated manually with a date, but no time of day, so although midnight [00:00:00] has since been entered as a placeholder for content-management systems, that is not likely the actual time of posting.)

ADV Films has acknowledged a defect in an unspecified number of copies (possibly all copies) of the tenth DVD in the “Farscape: The Complete Season One” boxed set—on our copy of that DVD, the second episode and the video in the extras section are both severely garbled—but the company is refusing to replace defective Farscape DVDs in a prompt manner, instead citing a company policy that dictates a wait of up to eight weeks for “processing” of all returns and replacements. I hereby call for ADV Films to publicly announce the defect, to offer immediate replacements for all defective copies, and to amend its customer-unfriendly policy. I would call that having integrity and doing the right thing; what ADV Films is doing now I call despicable.

(Note: This article was originally generated manually with a date, but no time of day, so although midnight [00:00:00] has since been entered as a placeholder for content-management systems, that is not likely the actual time of posting.)