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 :).

A couple of years ago one of my friends introduced me to a rather interesting research project that his friend Matt had preformed. Matt had decided to take pictures of his then girl friend and post them up on a popular online dating site. He then wrote a profile for her – creating in effect what he felt was the perfect girl: Chrissy Parker. Chrissy was basically described as being nice, fun, down to earth, smart and obtainable. Matt wanted to see the kind of responses he’d get from guys on the site. Pictures are important, but how important is the content itself, and would that effect the responses that he received? And what kinds of letters do guys typically write to girls on these kind of sites?

About two weeks ago I had a chance to talk to Matt and asked him about the site. He laughed about it upon remembering it’s conception. He also mentioned that once he started reading the letters he felt kind of bad. I don’t think he was expecting the guys who wrote her to be so nice. He said they sounded like the type of guys he’d want Chrissy to date. His girl friend apparently also found this project interesting and read through the letters herself, though it’s unknown what she thought of them. According to Matt she wasn’t anything like the profile he posted up, and instead of being 22, she’s really 16 or 17 in the pictures that were displayed.

Anyway, if you’re interested in seeing a copy of the profile and letters that were received, you can find them in a nice little write up at the following link:

The Stupendous Chrissy Parker Project

Reading over it again it seems a little unethical, but it’s a neat idea.

I found the following blog post about being a female gamer somewhat entertaining:

http://lostinazeroth.blogspot.com/2007/07/being-female-gamer-for-profitor-why-do.html

Here’s the bit that fascinated me the most:

Although it is reportedly not as common nowadays as it was in the earlier days of WoW, every once in awhile, I will receive whispered questions of “Are you really a girl?” or “What do you look like IRL?”. I usually just shrug them off, but sometimes the invitations can be tempting. If you are supposedly a true female AND a sexy race (Night Elf or Blood Elf in particular) the attention you may receive can be insane. Being offered 5G (which when you are lower levels can be a small fortune) to “talk dirty” to a male character or a purported male player, isn’t all that uncommon.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with WoW, it stands for World of Warcraft and it’s an online role playing game. The game itself costs around $50, and then you have to pay around $15 a month for a subscription so you can play online. I’ve never played myself, but I had a roommate who was hooked on it for a few months.

Anyway, the whole idea of spending fake money to have some supposed girl talk dirty to you reminds me of the whole “cybersex” phenomena that was big in the mid to late 90’s. I remember being 16 and having a couple of friends over and all they wanted to do was to get on the net and “cyber”. I remember it being this huge thing, I remember being asked several times by people, after they found out I had net access, “dude, have you ever cybered?” Nowadays I don’t get that question so much. In fact, I don’t think I’ve been asked that question since I was 16. I’d hypothesize that the majority of guys doing that kind of thing in WoW are just horny teenagers, though I’m sure there are older guys doing that too, which is a little creepy, and a little sad too, I suppose.