Just told NoScript to forbid fsdn.com. Incredibly annoying problem solved.

Goddamnit I hate this poor excuse for a holiday.

"the 10,000 or so chinese characters"

There are quite a few more Chinese characters than that. The Kangxi dictionary, published in the early 18th century, lists 47 thousand (albeit many of them are not used commonly any more).

The vast majority of Chinese characters do not have meanings which can be as easily derived from the character's parts. However, knowing the meaning and pronunciation of the parts of a character does often make remembering it easier.

Yep, I'd suggest starting by learning all the radicals up to like 5 strokes. It'll give you a good foundation to start learning the rest of the characters, as you'll know the meaning and pronunciation of the radicals and will start to see the connections between the pieces that comprise other characters.

"When you're using ideographs, such as in Chinese, you'll probably have a pretty good idea what a new character means, but not how to pronounce it"

Well, not quite, at least in Chinese. Most characters give you a small hint about the meaning plus a small hint about the pronunciation.

For example, check out this character: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/rsc/img/chargif/GB256s/stat/c2e8.gif pronounced "ma" (in Mandarin) with a high unchanging pitch (1st tone), it means "mother". It's made of two halves. The left half hints at its meaning; http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/rsc/img/chargif/GB256s/stat/c5ae.gif means "woman" (and is pronounced "nu"). The right half hints at its pronounciation; http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/rsc/img/chargif/GB256s/stat/c2ed.gif is pronounced "ma" with a falling and then rising pitch (and means "horse"). So someone unfamiliar with this character could guess that it's pronounced something like "ma" and has a meaning that's somewhat related to women -- but wouldn't specifically know if it were actually pronounced "la" or "mu", and wouldn't specifically know if it meant "young girl" or "pregnancy" or whatever.

This isn't true for all characters, but IIRC it is for the majority.

I've found Skritter to be a wonderful service for refreshing my Chinese character knowledge. It has a very slick UI that has you draw the character, so you don't forget the stroke order.

Thirded

Agreed, Dvorak seriously cuts down on the number of people who ask to use my computer...kinda nice. And it's comfy.

If your site is on a shared server, it may be the case that another user of the server got hacked (or is malicious in the first place) and was able to access your files. In this case, it's a very good idea to notify your host that your files have been messed with.

Something you may consider: make a backup of a known-good .htaccess, and set up a cronjob to `diff --brief` the two frequently and email you if they're not the same. I've done this with a list of all the PHP files in my account on a shared server:

7 */4 * * * cd $HOME; find . -name *.php >tmp.phpfiles.txt; if [[ -n "$(diff --brief tmp.phpfiles.txt phpfiles.txt)" ]]; then diff tmp.phpfiles.txt phpfiles.txt | mail -s "new PHP files" YOUR@EMAIL.ADDRESS; fi; rm tmp.phpfiles.txt

"Majia" can mean "sockpuppet" in Mandarin.

dang3zheng4 zong3shi4 dui4 de.