All posts by patorjk

Archived patorjk.com

http://web.archive.org/web/20060519165919/http://patorjk.com/

All I have to say is that Mark Z. is the f’ing man!! I would have never thought to look there for my old site. I had no idea they archived images! I know this may sound bad, but when I found out my old host deleted my account (shortly after my hard drive crashed) the only thing I was really sad about was that I didn’t back up the scans some German lady sent me of the feature my Mosaicer program got in a German magazine. Everything else I felt could be rebuilt – and probably should be rebuilt. But the scans actually meant something to me. It just completely blew my mind when I started getting emails from Germans asking about my software, and then finally someone emails me the scans. Anyway, you can see the scans here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050302031952/patorjk.com/newslog03.htm

I’ve also saved a few other things off the site, but mostly just for reference or for modification. Like I said before, I’m going to try and create a slightly different site.

Oddly enough the only 3 programs they archived were IMapper Studios, my API Spy, and Mosaicer 2.0. I wonder if this means that those were my 3 most popular programs? They also archived my Snake game, you can play it here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050224064503/patorjk.com/newslog03_2.htm

I actually lost the source to all my Flash stuff on my first hard drive crash (I’ve had 3 crashes in the past 3 years, all hardware related – 2 on my PC and one was on my laptop). Lessons have been learned though. I now back stuff up routinely. Probably a good habit for everyone. Snake is a great game though. I’ve been toying with the idea of making another one, except this time in Java.

Other interestingly high lights:

/dropgraveyard.htm
/IntergalacticOdyssey_04.htm
/snake.htm
/pat_bush1.gif – Infamous Pat/Bush pic. Note: This is not a political pic. I just thought it looked freaky.
/mosaics.htm

Lastly, I had someone request my color spy so I’ll try and whip one up by the end of the week (or check my backup disks, I have a feeling that I backed that program up). If you have any suggestions for the site, let me know. I can’t promise anything, since I work 40 hours and do stuff outside of this site, but I’ll keep it in mind.

Spot Lighted Site 04/08/2007

My friend and former roommate Ben H. was telling me about this flash game he was playing where you had “5 minutes to kill yourself”. It sounded kind of bizarre, but turned out to be pretty fun. You can play it along with a whole bunch of other cool flash games here: 

http://www.onemorelevel.com/

Watch out though, because that site is great at eating up your free time.

Also, in other news, I’m about 30% done with a new program I’m going to be putting up on the site. It’s being written in Javascript and PHP, so it’ll be an online app. It’ll mostly be for entertainment and wont be anything breakthrough. It should be pretty cool though. Tomorrow (well, really later today) I’m seeing Lily Allen in concert, so I wont have anymore time to work on it this weekend. My guess is that I’ll have it out in 2 weeks.

Code Add-In Downloader Fixed

Someone messaged me and told me the downloading of the add-ins wasn’t working. I tried it out myself and found that though the program correctly downloaded the add-in list, for some reason it wasn’t able to download the files. Since I lost the source to my spy and it’s code add-in companions in a hard drive crash two years ago (on man did that suck), there wasn’t really anything I could do – except recode the downloader.

The downloader is a very simple application so I decided to do just that. Below is a link where you can download the Add-In downloader and its source code. I’ve also included these files in the API Spy zip on the Software page.

http://www.patorjk.com/downloads/codeaddins_april5_2007.zip – The add-in downloader and its source.

Old Emails

I’m being audited for the research study I did for my thesis. Each year they randomly choose a bunch of people who did them. I basically just have to collect up all my consent forms, research materials, etc etc. And be ready to present them to some guy so he can look over them and make sure I followed the rules for doing a research study correctly. It’s a pain in the butt, if only because it’s just another thing I have to do on top of everything else.

While I was looking for my consent forms, I found bunch of old emails I had printed out. Back in the day, I use to print out emails which were sent to me, just so I’d have a hard copy. I did this for programming message boards a lot too, so I could study the code later. I also found a print out of what my original site looked like back in the day. Reading over its news section brought back some memories. AOL had some message board security holes, and I had actually created my own official AOL message board (you could get to it through their keyword feature). It later got deleted, but it’s kind of funny to think I used to have an official AOL message board.

Anyway, in case you’re bored, I’ve posted a few of the more interesting emails below.

Email #1: I got this after posting up a review of the movie “Man on the Moon”. I have no idea if this guy is who he says he is. It was a weird email though.

“Yo..Let me figure somethings out..You hate mr.Hollywood (andy kaufman)? Or what? He was a god, started new things, no one can take that away from him neither! The thought about your review for Man On The Moon make me nuts. To hard to see if you hate him or not. He worked for my father he was a nice man. This is how you can see i am for real my father owned jerrys famous deli, ANDY KAUFMAN NEVER CASHED A CHECK! Never ever! We never ever knew when he was going to come into work. If you watch comedy central and see jerry my father in the 80’s he don’t look like that no more! plus he sold it. Back to my point andy is a god, jim is a fool, and you make me drule with all your god damn rules with mailing! Am i butt kissing? no way. By the way i like your api spy 4.0. You can post this i don’t care! This is not supposed to be mean this is just me gettin pist!” – Lance, 1/16/2000

Email #2: This was actually a series of emails. Some guy wanted the source to my API Spy. I said no, and he flipped out and threatened to hack my site. I unfortunately didn’t save my responses to him, but I printed out his emails so I’d have a record for later (in case I was ever in another exchange with him). This kind of thing actually wasn’t uncommon and is one of the things that soured me towards the whole “aol prog scene”. Everyone was so hungry for “ao-fame”. Ugh. Just re-reading this crap makes me wonder why I helped so many of those people (I wrote a code generating example, but I would not release the code to my app because I knew there’d be a ton of people who’d just re-released it with their name on it – the aol prog scene was just that bad).

“no prob i already figured out ur code, although the inferface will look very different the core coding is simple….i really think its sad when any one person is so self absorbed that they will not share in the interest of education. Its all good though you are the kind of person that surpresses to stay on top, instead of share to advance all.” – Troy (lilhitmahn), 12/8/1999

“no problem and now I will tell peepz that i wrote the code instead of giving u the credit” – Troy (lilhitmahn), 12/9/1999

“thats aite cuz iv told all mah partners to bomb ur lame ass page. dun b surprised when ur shiet displays a hacked by 05007 code and ur page is fucked” – Troy (lilhitmahn), 12/11/1999

Spot Lighted Site

So back in the olden days, I’d have a “Spot Lighted Site”. It’d usually be once a month, and usually it’d be the site of someone who had correctly answered a riddle or puzzle I had posted up. For now, I’ll do away with the riddle and puzzle and just post up sites or articles I think are cool. I’ll try and do this once a week on Sunday (before making this post, I rounded up 10 possible candidates for future Spot Lighted Sites). This way, if for some reason I’m slow on content, at least I’ll be featuring other sites that are cool.

The first Spot Lighted Site of the new era is a site by Google:

http://www.google.com/tisp/

As you can see, they’re featuring a new product. I encourage you to click the “Getting Started” button and to read what they have to say. Thanks to my buddy Kevin for the link.

Oh, and before I forget – special thanks to Awesome Andrew and Mark Z. for sending me my API Spy add-ons. I’ve re-uploaded them.

Blog?

I’ve been playing around a bit with WordPress, which allows you to create blogs like the one you see in front of you. It’s actually a really cool piece of software.

The new site will revolve around this blog. Unlike the past, where things were released in bulk, I’ll probably be updating this incrementally. As can easily be seen, this blog is far from complete. I’ll try and update it more this weekend. Anyway, it’s 3:30am over here and I need to get some sleep.

Someone emailed me about getting a copy of mosaicer. I’ve uploaded a copy here:

http://www.patorjk.com/downloads/mosaicer2.zip

Also, a visitor by the name of “Awesome Andrew” recently sent me a zip of many of my old programming examples and tutorials (thanks!). I may post some of these up. However, like I said before, I wont be reverting to the old site, so only some of that stuff will be posted.

I’m back…

Wait, what’s this? New content? Hahaha… patorjk.com is back my friends and it feels good to see it up again.

I’ve finally realized what I want this site to be: Open source software! For the past 4 years I’ve struggled with the direction that I want this site to go in, and all this time in was right in front of me. Screw programming examples!* Screw online games! Screw trying to make money off software! There may be some online game stuff / tools, but the key will be open source stuff. Tools that people can use.

In the past few years I’ve also changed in the way I feel about code I write. When I was younger, it was something special, and I always liked to have some credit. Not anymore. Who cares! If I post something up, I’ll probably say you can incorporate it into your own software without me caring. If you don’t get it here, there’s probably another 100 places on the web you could get it anyway.

On another note, my hard drive has crashed 2 times in the past 2 years, and I didn’t have a back up of the site (though I think I have a back up of my API Spy somewhere, which I’ll try and post up since I’m aware it’s my most popular program). However, other than that, this site will be totally from scratch.

Not sure what direction I’ll take the freeware in, only time will tell. Outside of this site, I’m working with some of my old grad school buddies on some other sites (that will have a goal of making money). If these get off the ground, I may post links to them so you can check them out. However, they might go no where, or end up lame, so I may not post info on them.

If you need to contact me, do it with gmail. You can probably guess my email address from that info :).

UPDATE: Ok, while looking through my backup disks I found a copy of my spy:

http://www.patorjk.com/downloads/patorjkapispy51.zip

* Who am I kidding? There will programming examples…