I’ve spent the past couple of hours researching VPS (virtual private server) hosting. It’s apparently the next step up after shared hosting. This site isn’t at that level yet, however, I suspect I’ll probably need to upgrade if I keep creating web apps. Anyway, I’m not sure I really made any progress. There are a lot of VPS hosts that look nice, but they’re either too pricey ($100+ a month) or I get horror stories when I Google things like “[hosting company] sucks”. It’d be nice if my current host offered VPS hosting, though according to their forums, they don’t plan to do that anytime soon.

Anyway, over the past week I’ve made a couple of minor updates. I’ll enumerate them below.

• The Snake game was updated to use a snazzy YUI loading dialog (see image below). The loading time is strictly taken up by div creation. I create 2000 divs so the snake can grow without any pauses when you “eat” the red dots. There’s probably a better way to do this, but I haven’t thought of it. Also, a lot of little updates were made to the Snake game, however, you probably wont notice the difference since it’s little stuff that only I’d care about. I know I said this before, but I’m now officially leaving this game alone (with the exception of bug fixes and possible significant performance improvements).
• The dual-thumbed slider bars on the Text Color Fader and Gradient Image Generator were updated so that the thumbs will move when you click on a color.

What’s Next?

I’m thining of making a couple more simple web apps for the site. Right now that’s just what I’m into. I spent a few hours this past week reading some tutorials on jQuery, and it looks really cool. After that I may do some C# or VB stuff. The programming section of this site recently became more popular than the software section, so I’m thinking I should probably try to expand that more – though I’m not sure what angle to take (the old VB stuff is what’s pulling in the visitors). I may make some quizzes, those were fun back in the day and they’re easy to whip up, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

I think the forums are officially dead. They had some good exposure. I just don’t think they were targeted right for this site’s audience. Plus there seems to be database issues. Oh well though, there were a couple of interesting topics. I’ll leave them up for the next week or two, but after that I’ll probably take them down.

I’ve split my color fading app into two new online apps with interfaces that utilize Yahoo’s YUI. You can see them here:

http://patorjk.com/software/colorfader/
http://patorjk.com/software/gradientimage/

The new designs are meant to be more concise, cleaner, and easier to use. I tried to think up a nice way to let the user manipulate lots of colors without it looking cluttered. The old design had the problem where the input colors were stacked vertically. The more colors one decided to use, the longer the page got. To fix this, I decided upon using a two thumbed slider bar and a horizontal row of colors that would shift depending on what your selection was (see image below). One thumb indicated the number of colors the user wanted to use and the other one indicated which color the user was currently editing.

I thought it was a really clever way of handling the problem, however, after watching a couple of people try to use the app, I realized it wasn’t that intuitive. People kept clicking on the colors they wanted to edit. And when that wouldn’t work, they assumed there was something wrong with the thing (no one bothered to read the instructions). Oh well. I made a modification to it to allow “color clicking” selection to work.

Hopefully this is the last time I do a complete redesign this program(s). I’ve been perpetually annoyed with myself over the past 3 design jobs I’ve done with it. I was actually working on something else for a while, but for some reason I got side tracked, oh well. I think I have programmer ADD sometimes.

Anyway, both redesigns were finished tonight, so there may be a few bugs. Let me know if you have any problems (or suggestions). The widgets I used from the YUI were the two slider bars and the color picker dialog.

If I opened one back up, would anybody be interested in posting? I’d want to keep the number of sections low, like I had when I used ezboard. Right now I’m thinking of having the following sections: Programming Discussion, Web Programming Discussion, Thoughts and Opinions, and Errors and Suggestions.

It’s been almost a year since the relaunch of this site, and though I’m now getting between 500 and 600 visitors a day, the blog only sees a small fraction of that (maybe around 15%), so I’m unsure if I have a large enough base to actually launch a forum like the old one I had. I may try and partner up with other sites and do a shared forum type thing, though I’d have to think about it. Let me know if you’d be interested in one. If I get no / little feed back I’ll just wait on it.

Also, I am working on some updates. I aim to have some new content up by the end of the week.

Hope everyone out there is having a good holiday! Northrop gives me a week and a half break during this time period so I’m pretty ecstatic. Along with visiting with family I’ve been working on some new apps so hopefully some of that will see the light of day at some point.

Anyway, patorjk.com and Pascal (the family dog) wish everyone a good winter break!

As a side note, I’m not the one who dresses up Pascal. He seems to really like it though, I assume it’s because of all the extra attention he gets.

I’ve come across a rather interesting MySpace phishing technique. Hijacked profiles will send you a link or post a link on your wall telling you to go look at some user’s profile (it’ll usually be done by a friend of your’s). For example, they may say Joe is dead and display the following link to his profile:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfmfuseaction=user.viewprofile= 1890000

However, when you click the link, you’ll really be taken to a website like the following:

http://profile.myspace.com.fuseaction.id.user.viewprofile. 1890000.cn/

Notice the “.cn” extension. That site ain’t MySpace. If you follow the above link you’ll see that it takes you to a site that looks just like the MySpace homepage, and it’ll be asking you to log in – even though you should already be logged in. MySpace is kind of crappy in that you have to log in to see certain things, and sometimes you get logged out for various reasons, so most users will gladly re-enter their information.

After you’ve given this phishing site your log in info, it’ll save it and then use it to re-log you in to the real MySpace web site. So you’ll end up back at MySpace, but that interesting thing you were told about isn’t anywhere to be found. I’d assume most users would just shrug this off and move on – totally unaware that they’ve just given their log in information to a phisher/spammer/identity theif/whatever.

This really isn’t anything new, phishing has been around a long time. However, it actually works really well in this scenario, since MySpace used to take you to it’s home page after asking you to log in (even if you just wanted to look at someone’s pictures), and you were sent the link by one of your friends (not by some random dude you know is probably a phisher), so the environment leads to it being a pretty transparent attack. Anyway, it’s important to keep a look out for these kinds of things. A couple of my friends have had their accounts hijacked recently and they weren’t sure how it happened (I haven’t mentioned the above scenario since I just witnessed it recently). You don’t want to get your account or any accounts that may use the same password deleted because some jackass stole your log in info and then spammed a bunch of people.

I’ve had a lot on my mind recently, and as a side effect, this site has been neglected somewhat. I’m going to keep checking in regularly though, even if I don’t have a whole lot to say.

Call for Tutorials

Chic’s VB Array tutorial continues to do well on google, so I figured I’d ask if anyone else wanted to write a tutorial on a certain subject (something with a similar format). I may write one myself, but I’m not sure what topic I should pick.

How people find patorjk.com

I found the following table from Google Webmaster Tools amusing (format = % of queries, search term, page rank):

Top clicked queries
The top search queries from which users clicked through to your site.
%: % of top queries
# % Query Position
1. 63% text art 3
2. 15% ascii art generator 7
3. 3% sarah michelle gellar 152
4. 3% visual basic arrays 6
5. 2% art text 2
6. 2% visual basic array 8
7. 2% kurt cobain 220
8. 1% color fader 4
9. 1% artistic text 3
10. 1% sarah michelle geller 97
11. 1% ascii art 58
12. 1% slim shady 120
13. 1% patorjk 1
14. 1% beep sound in vb 6.0 4
15. 1% ascii generator 16
16. 1% britney spears 777
17. 0% ascii art arial font 4
18. 0% ascii art text 5
19. 0% ascii art text generator 5
20. 0% “ascii art generator” 7

Apparently mentioning a celebrity will get you visitors. I mean, I’m listed as the 777th page for the term “Britney Spears”, yet someone still found me via that search phrase. I’m assuming these people are finding this page though, since I don’t normally mention Britney Spears in this blog.

Back when I was in grad school I had a friend who told me that a friend of his wife’s was having spyware issues. She was getting all sorts of random pop up ads and her computer was basically becoming unusable. So to fix the problem, instead of bothering one of her knowledgeable computer friends (and she apparently had quite a few), she called Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

For an absurd amount of money (I forget how much exactly), they drove to her house and spent a few hours installing the freeware versions of Spybot and Adaware. And to top things off, that didn’t even completely fix the problem. I believe she ended up getting a friend to help her straighten everything else out, but I can’t remember because I was too in shock after hearing the first part of the story. Though maybe I’m such a computer geek that things that seem obvious to me aren’t really that obvious to others (when I have a problem, the first thing I do is google for a solution).

I don’t think I’d ever trust a computer repairman. I know people who fix computers, and some of them I wouldn’t feel comfortable handing my computer over to. Granted, there are quality computer repairmen, but there are a lot of duds (and yes, I do know some – none that read this blog though). Luckily, whenever I have a computer issue I can’t handle, I just talk to my dad (former President of the Las Cruces computer club). Most people aren’t that lucky, so for them they’re stuck with either trying to convince one of their friends to help them or to take it into the shop.

I’d personally recommend getting a friend to help you – offer them free pizza. And it might interesting to try and get two or more to come look at it. Computer people are usually pretty egotistical so if there’s more than one working on the problem, they’ll be more motivated to be the one who solves it. The only exception to this would be if you have some kind of warranty issue. Then you should make the company/store fix it for free.

This may seem somewhat cynical, but I’ve always had a distrust of repairmen – especially in the computer industry. So what brought on this mini-tirade today? A disturbing video I just saw on youtube:

And to be a little more clear, when I brought up not trusting computer people (above), I was thinking more towards them not fully understanding computers enough to solve the problem. Not being dishonest like the people in that video, that’s just disgusting.

I actually can’t believe this is real: an online database containing the salaries of most federal employees (exempt are those who deal with matters of national security):

http://php.app.com/feds06/search.php

This sort of makes sense since we the tax payers are paying these people, however, it also seems a little wrong. Aren’t these people entitled to some amount of privacy? I’d be annoyed if someone could look up my salary, though then again, maybe if everyone knew what everyone else made it wouldn’t be so bad. You wouldn’t have people trying to cut backroom deals to get a higher salary.

Unfortunately I don’t know many Federal Employees. I tried most of the people on my facebook list and came up with only one hit (and it was the guy who told me about the site). This would be a much juicer find if Maryland State employees were listed, sort of like how New Jersey State employees are listed.

Anyway, I found this to be shockingly interesting site. If you know any federal employees you might want to point them to the site, just to see what they think :).