Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

You can download the 12 songs that make up the BioShock orchestral score in a nicely packaged, free zip!

There’s nothing on the Facebook blog or Techcrunch yet, but Facebook just made its Applications a bit more viral by adding an application palette with all your added application icons to each user’s profile. The palette sits just underneath the profile picture:

It’s cute and probably useful. I was hoping for a bit more, like a nice mouseover that would give some kind of application description, but I suppose it’s a good start to cleaning up the clutter that the Facebook platform has introduced with arbitrary applications.

I plunked down the $49 to buy BioShock on Steam, and except for some transient errors and logging in and out to refresh the state of my purchase, everything went as expected. If you’re thinking of buying this game, check out the requirements first:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo processor; System RAM: 2GB; Video Card: DX 9 - Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB RAM (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT or better), DX 10 - NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or better

My E6600 dual core with an ATI 1900 XT is barely good enough for decent frame rates at moderate quality settings, but it’s good enough to play with:

The plot is the best since Halo–you’re in the 1940s and have fallen into the ocean near a remote island. Surviving the crash, you make your way to the island and descend into Rapture, a society hidden beneath the earth. In Rapture, the inhabitants decided to experiment with DNA modification, giving them the power of gods. Unfortunately, it also twisted them into a hateful, violent society now decaying. The art deco is quite amazing:

As you go through the game, you try to acquire different plasmids to modify your DNA and gain new powers:

Another thing I like is the items in the game glow, so you know what to pick up and do. It’s very user friendly

And here is the first look at one of the “Big Daddies”:

The release and 97% aggregate review shot the stock up about 10% today. Go Take2! Post your reactions to BioShock here, guys.

A newly created blog http://facebooksecrets.blogspot.com has posted a single, devastating post, the PHP source code to Facebook’s home page. The front page currently looks like this, and lets users log in or register:

My first question is Where did the source code come from? Who leaked it? How? Techcrunch offers two theories, the first that a Facebook employee leaked the code, and the second that facebook’s source code repository was hacked. Neither of these make any sense; what really happened is that a Facebook third party developer on the F8 platform found an injection attack that he could use to retrieve an arbitrary file. Since Facebook is written in PHP, it was inevitable that any injection attack would lead to a source code compromise.

My theory has proved incorrect, as minutes after the article went to press, a Facebook employee left the following comment on Techcrunch:

I wanted to clarify a few things in your story. Some of Facebook’s source code was exposed to a small number of users due to a bug on a single server that was misconfigured and then fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further.

Thanks to you and the TC readers for helping us out on this one.

Brandee Barker
Facebook

Interestingly, The Wrong Advice points out a blog entry which used to contain the source to profile.php and a commenter who claims to have gotten photo.php. Others have posted search and groups code online. Facebook isn’t just hacked, it’s leaking source code all the time.

The alleged source code contains some humorous comments, which I will list here:

• // FIXME?: is it sub-optimal to call this both in requests_get_cache_data and here?
• // Holy shit, is this the cleanest f****ng frontend file you’ve ever seen?!
• // make sure big tunas haven’t moved around
• // Merman’s Admin profile always links to the Merman’s home
• // Friend’s Feed Selector - Requires dev.php constant

I’ve got the feeling that Facebook, just like MySpace, is a web 2.0 site strung together with glue; glancing at the alleged code doesn’t make me feel great about their infrastructure. They have huge win32-api-esque functions like multiget_fresh_notstale_hashed_network_with_orientation (i made this up), a procedural, rather than object oriented structure, and no clean abstractions or MVC scheme. At least they’re using smarty for templating, though….

Update: They’ve added the code for Facebook’s s.php search feature. When will it stop!?

The new Wordpress Jobs Board is cute; I’ll have to make a job-board mashup aggregator for fun soon now!