Lately I’ve been exchanging riddles / mind puzzles with some coworkers of mine. I’m not really sure how it started, but one ended up on my white board at work and before I knew it everyone wanted to know the answer or had their own riddle to challenge me with. I’ve collected up some of my favorites. If you’re unfamiliar with one and you solve it, feel free to post your proposed solution as a comment.

As far as site updates go, I have some coming, but I’ve had a distracting past couple of weeks. Since January I’ve been suffering from tinnitus (ringing in the ears), but it didn’t really get bothersome until the middle of last month. I ended up going on a huge research quest for a cure, but it appears there are only things you can take to prevent tinnitus (NAC, antioxidants) and nothing that’ll really cure it. Right now it’s at a volume I can deal with, so I’m fine, but I want to caution everyone and let you know its important to take care of your hearing. Also, avoid things that are too good to be true. There seems to be a lot of snake oil out there when it comes to tinnitus.

Anyway, enough of my personal problems, on with the riddles…

1) In front of you there are ten boxes of books and a digital scale large enough and strong enough to hold all of the boxes when they’re filled with books. Inside of each box is ten books. In nine of the boxes, the books weigh 1.0 pounds each. In one of the boxes the books weigh 0.9 pounds each. Using the digital scale only once, how do you determine the box that contains the books that weigh 0.9 pounds? You may take the books out of the boxes and you can assume the weight of each box is 1 pound.

2) You’re one an island and you want to get off of it. There are two caves off the island. One leads to certain doom while the other leads off the island. In front of the caves there are two guards. One always tells the truth and the other always lies. You do not know which one is which. You may ask one question which they both will answer. What question can you ask that will guarantee you pick the right cave to get off of the island? [Editors Note: After much discussion, we discovered there were actually multiple answers to this question, so if you know the answer, try to come up with another one]

3) Four men are standing in a row. They are ordered tallest to shortest. The tallest man is facing west while the other three men are facing east. Each man is wearing a hat that is either black or white. Each man knows that there are 2 black hats and 2 white hats, however, they do not know the color of the hat that they are wearing. The tallest man cannot see anyone’s hat, the next tallest man can see the hat color of the two men in front of him, the next tallest man can see the hat color of the man in front of him, and the shortest man can see no one’s hat color. Imagine that the hat ordering from tallest to shortest is: black, white, black, white. Where the tallest person is wearing a black hat and the shortest person is wearing a white hat.

None of these men can move around, however, they can talk to each other – though they do not have to be truthful when answering each other’s questions. As soon as a man figures out his hat color he screams it out (and he cannot scream unless he really knows his hat color). Which man can figure out his hat color and why? [Editors Note: This one is easier if you draw it]

4) You have 25 runners. When raced, they always perform the same, and no two runners perform identically. You can only race 5 at a time, and once a race is over, the only information you get is the order that they finished in. How do you determine the fastest, second fastest, and third fastest runner using only seven races?

5) This was the puzzle that started it all. No one I’ve told it to has been able to figure it out. And it always takes a while for the answer to make sense.

I’m a little prone to conspiousy theories, so I might be jumping the gun here, and I may end up looking totally silly, but I think Yahoo deleted my Color Fader from of their index after I reported some spam in their search results.

A little background: For some reason most of the pages on this site don’t rank well in Yahoo. For the month of May, only 1.87% of my visitors came from Yahoo. That’s compared to 46.37% that came from Google. The Color Fader was the only page that really pulled in visitors from Yahoo. It used to rank #1 for the search phrases “Color Fader” and “Online Color Fader”. Those phrases only brought in around 20 visitors a day, but that’s better than nothing.

Anyway, seeing as these are the only phrases that bring me anything from Yahoo, I check them out every once in a while to see where I am. Around 3 weeks ago I noticed a new site was #1 for them (not unusual – the results tend to get shaken up every so often). However, this new site had the exact same title as my site, so I was a little curious. I opened it up and discovered the page was just auto-generated gibberish with lots of ads.

I was annoyed, but figured I’d just report the site to Yahoo’s Customer Care. In my note I said something like “I was searching for my site when I discovered one that had the exact same title. This site turned out to be auto-generated spam with lots of ads.” I’m not sure why I mentioned I was searching for my own site, I guess I was just typing off the top of my head.

After I submitted my report, I got an email confirmation saying it’d be processed within 48 hours. I checked back twice within that time period. The first time both sites were there, although mine had recaptured the #1 spot. The second time I checked back, both sites were gone.

At first I thought they’d just done some reindexing and I’d fallen a bit. However, after some pretty thorough searching, I found that my app, along with that spam page, was gone from their index. I quickly filled out a resubmit form explaining what I thought had happened – that the reviewer had accidentally deleted my site. I read my message over a couple of times to make sure it was short and polite and then sent it off. A day or so later I got back this reply:

Hello Patrick,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search.

If you are not seeing your pages in the Yahoo! Search results, they may
not have been indexed or they may not be in the top results for the
searches that you are conducting. Here are some Yahoo! Help resources
for submitting your page to Yahoo! Search:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/indexing/indexing-06.html

and for improving your site’s ranking:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/ranking/ranking-02.html

in the Yahoo! Search results. There are no current indications that your
pages have been blocked from the Yahoo! index. Please note that all
pages are at all times subject to Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines
located at:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Search.

Regards,

Carmen

So according to that email I wasn’t blocked, which was good. However, something still didn’t seem right to me. It seemed like too much of a coincidence that my app and the spam page would disappear from the index at the same time. So I decided to check out Yahoo’s Site Explorer to see what it had on my Color Fader. This is what I found (note: searching with the “www” brings up additional links):

So for some odd reason only the style sheet for the Color Fader is in the index, and not the Color Fader page itself. Even though the links it has recorded for the Color Fader URL point to the app itself and not its style sheet. That seems really bizarre to me. My gut feeling tells me that the page was removed and didn’t drop from the index due to algorithmic reasons. I’m guessing it was either removed by accident, the person processing the spam report just glanced at the URLs and decided to remove them both, or the guy processing the request just didn’t like the fact that I was searching for my own site and decided to knock me off too. The last idea is a little cynical, but my mind tends to wonder all over the place when stuff like this happens. I suppose it could also be a quality issue, but I’d be surprised if that was the case since I don’t think I did anything particularly egregious in my design.

I probably shouldn’t care too much, the Color Fader is kind of girly app, but it annoys me when I try to do something good and then ended up getting punished. As thing are right now, I wouldn’t recommend reporting spam pages to Yahoo, since they might remove your content along with the spam.

It’s been over two weeks since I sent them my last email. I may try to resubmit the site again later today, however, if I say blocked, I stay blocked. It’s annoying, especially since I was beginning to like Yahoo, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

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.