Normalkid:Arnold Kim

Yesterday was my last day at my full time job as a physician. I plan to work on MacRumors.com and other web projects full time.

The most likely reaction I expect from regular MacRumors readers is “You weren’t working on MacRumors full time already?”

As crazy as it seems, for these past 8 years, MacRumors has been a hobby or part-time job. I think most people would have made this move long before me, but the momentum of my “other” career made it difficult for me to break free.

I started MacRumors.com in February of 2000. I was in my 4th and last year of medical school. I had been dabbling in the web for fun and decided to focus a natural interest of mine (Apple) into a website. My work on the site has since had its ups and downs. Over the next 8 years, I completed medical school, an Internal Medicine residency, a fellowship in Nephrology and even worked two years in private practice as a physician (Nephrologist).

During that time, I’ve been fortunate enough that my hobby has become successful enough that I am able to transition it into my career. While the trend may have been clear for past couple of years, I was slow to recognize it.

One of the most frustrating things over the years, however, has been my inability to dedicate the proper time to improve MacRumors as I might have wanted. In addition, as a web-tech-guy I constantly have ideas and plans for other web projects that I’ve never had the time to pursue. By settling on this as my career, I will be able to execute some long standing plans.

Wish me luck!

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Twitter: http://twitter.com/arnoldkim
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My Active Sites

Normalkid - my personal blog
MacRumors.com - Mac news and rumors
TouchArcade.com - iPhone games

Contact Me

arn@normalkid.com

Once upon a time, I was actually a non-web programmer.

I had an interest in game development and the demoscene. This was mostly done at the hobby level. I did write one screen saver module for After Dark 4.0 (’Points of View’ was mine).

I wrote a few graphical demos in C and 68000 assembly back in my college days on a Mac IIsi. I spent a lot of my free time on these demos during one summer. The big problem now is that they were written under Mac OS 9 Mac OS 7-9 on 680×0 processor machines, and I believe they specifically targeted 256 color displays.

I was hoping that someone out there would have a Mac that could actually run these old apps, and be able to record them as digital videos. I would love to have video copies of these since I’m unlikely to be able to run them in the future. Here are the download links:

Chrystar Demo
Flag Day
Chaosmint

If anyone could actually do this, I’d greatly appreciate it. You can contact me via the Forums contact form. Thanks.

I don’t mean to single out Wordpress… but for all the joy of these free open source applications we have — there’s an distinct element of “pain in the ass” that accompanies it.

For some background, MacRumors.com was started with an open source version of Slashcode called PHPSlash. It lacked a few features, but it was easy enough to install and free. MacRumors ran on PHPSlash for probably a year or so… until one day, we got hacked. So, I took the site down, changed all my passwords, and looked into the problem. I hadn’t kept my version of PHPSlash up to date, and there was some known exploit that someone had used to get into the site.

The problem was that there were known exploits in every version… and it was like holding up a sign to anyone out there to “Please Hack Me”. Sure, I could have kept up with every single update… but I have other things I want to do with my day than upgrade server software regularly and hope things don’t break.

So, my decision that night was to rewrite MacRumors’ front end on my own. Do I write perfect PHP code devoid of exploits? Of course not… but I don’t care what people say, there is some degree of security through obscurity. So, the initial rewrite took that weekend, and I’ve built on it ever since. Now, this isn’t necessarily the best time-saving technique, but it worked for me at the time.

Not long after, I started looking for forum software to use as a comment system for the site, since I didn’t want to reinvent that wheel. I started with PhpBB. I had heard good things about it, and I even installed it. Of course, I ran across a strange installation error. I asked around on the PhpBB forums, and searched for help… in the end I got versions of “what do you expect, it’s free” answers.

As a result, I decided, I wanted to pay someone to take some responsibility for their software. In the end, I settled on vBulletin — a decision I’ve been happy with. For whatever reason, their security updates are far less frequent, and yet have seemed quite secure over the years.

So, that brings us to today. On November 18th, someone hacked this blog and inserted hidden spam links into the template and a couple of stories. Based on my research, I think it was a non-shell exploit. I swept my directories to make sure there was no residual scripts left behind. I did have a couple of plug ins and was using an old theme (lowstream) which had not been updated to the latest Wordpress.

So I wiped my install and have gone 100% default (and latest) for now. I don’t have the time to customize another theme, and I certainly don’t have time to track down any more hacks.

My name is Arnold Kim and this is my professional and personal blog.

On the internet, I’m most well known for starting MacRumors.com — a popular Apple News and Rumor site with an active community of over 100,000 registered users.

Over the years, I’ve resisted the urge to start a blog — and the urge didn’t come that often. I’ve been a pretty private person and didn’t really see the appeal of allowing others read my rants. With the growing popularity of MacRumors, however, I’ve felt the need to expand my exposure and network a little more within the web community.

So what can you expect from my blog?

Topics of interest are expected to include commentary on the Mac web and behind the scenes at MacRumors.

Why Normalkid?

Normalkid is an anagram for Arnold Kim and is the name of my company.

Contact information?

Are you a blogger, entrepreneur, mac enthusiast or just want to get in touch?

email:arn@normalkid.com, AIM:chaosmint, LinkedIn profile