October 31, 2008. - Games, games, and more games.. Halloween at last, and here I am stuck in the middle of playing video games rather than going out to fix myself up with a costume like I did last year. Last year's costume was awesome, and this year I had a few good ideas but I just never found the time to get to the store in order to pick up the items I need. So what have I been doing? Playing video games.. yep.. For my N64 I'm playing Kirby 64, The Crystal Shards Between those 3, Dead Space is probably the best of them all, but I can definitely see myself spending the most time playing GH:wt. -------------------------------------------------------- September 22nd, 2008. - Palin "hackings". Ok the title of this entry should explain what I'm about to rant about, but if you didn't know already.. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (yeah, the one running for vice president) had her Yahoo email account "hacked" several days ago. What I want to rant about is the usage of the term "hacked", "hacker", "hack", etc.. This person who did it turned out to be a 20 year old kid who frequents an online hate site. He did not hack her email... instead, he broke in by resetting her password using personal information that she stupidly put in that was readily available online. Now people are saying that Yahoo mail (and similar sites) are insecure. This is not the case. Yahoo asks you for a SECURITY QUESTION / ANSWER. You're supposed to use a combination that only YOU know. If you're stupid enough to put something that people can find through a simple Google search, then who is to blame? Hacked her account? He didn't.. he opened the door that was unlocked for him. In fact, the door had a sign on it reading "come right in." The only thing that really brings be joy is that the same group of people who broke into her account were the losers who were trying to break into my site several months ago. The FBI is taking them down here and there and this is absolutely great. I mean the internet is all about freedom and free speech, but quite often free speech has its limitations (in cases where it causes harm to others usually), and the site that did this attack is definitely set out to cause harm. Is your child safe looking at their little kiddy sites online? Not at all with 4chan running around posting obscene images and derogatory comments left and right. They even attacked an epilepsy information site by putting flashing images on it inducing headaches and seizures in some people. Who is this funny to? If someone thinks it's incredibly funny, then they really need their heads checked because they're obviously sick minded. People are allowed freedoms.. true.. but doesn't that mean that I should also be free to view websites (and build websites) without having to watch every little thing I say and do? Where children aren't safe looking at anything, where people who are sick aren't safe... it really saddens me that the world is in this state of affairs. The group that did the break-in of Palin, who run around causing internet harassment, who cause problems for myself and many many others online are known as Anonymous. I find this ironic considering how easy the FBI was able to track down the person who broke into Palin's account. Let that be a lesson to those in Anonymous... you're never truly "Anonymous". All the media this has been getting has finally brought the mainstream attention to this group of trouble-makers. Maybe their horrible site will finally meet its doom as a result of this. That would be a dream come true. -------------------------------------------------------- September 3rd, 2008. - Google Chrome Review. Ok, after reading reviews on Google's new Chrome browser for about an hour tonight, I decided to give my own review. From what I have been reading, it seems that people all seem to think that Chrome is lacking "something", but aren't sure what. I have a few ideas in mind, and so I will give a small Pro and Con of what I think of this Beta release. Pros: Cons: All-in-all, Google Chrome is a fairly decent browser. I was able to BETA test Internet Explorer 8 the other day which had HUGE issues displaying even the most basic table content and ActiveX Controls... In Chrome there doesn't seem to be any issues yet. I've heard horror stories about crashes, but haven't experienced any myself. The lack of HTTP Pipelining is upsetting and is the only real downside that I see to this browser. I'm going to keep using it for now to continue building my opinion. Can't wait to see the full release! -------------------------------------------------------- August 21, 2008 - Top 20 Games of All Time Today I present you with a list of my top 20 games of all time. This is a personal list based on personal tastes ranked upon the level of fun I had as an individual or with friends, the level of replay value for me, and based on how many hours I spent playing these games and loving these games and.. well.. you get the point. On with the list! 20. Grand Theft Auto 3 (Original) 19. Prince of Persia: Warror Within 18. StarTropics 2 17. Super Mario Bros. (NES) 16. Call of Duty 2 15. ElderScrolls III: Morrowind 14. Mortal Kombat 2 13. Guitar Hero 2 12. Battletoads in Battlemaniacs 11. Super Mario World (SNES) 10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Arcade Game 9. Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past 8. Super Mario 64 7. Diablo 2 6. Final Fantasy 7 5. StarCraft 4. Half-Life 3. Doom (95) 2. Pokemon Red / Blue 1. Wolfenstein 3D:
So there you have it. There are LOTS of games that could have made the list, and I even wanted to do an "honorable mentions" list, but thought that would get rather long. -------------------------------------------------------- August 12, 2008. - Busy, busy, busy. I'm surprised I even have time update this right now. After queuing up some holiday time, I decided that it would be in the best interest of everyone at the office if I took Monday's off for a month, rather than an entire week off. Now this made sense to me and everyone I told the plan to, but unfortunately I didn't tell enough people about it. As a result, when I come into the office Tuesday, my phone is ringing off the hook, my emails are flooding in, and I don't get 10 minutes to sit down at my desk. This makes for a very quick work day. As far as personal projects go, my site project is coming along smoothly. I have commissioned a few artists to do some work for us, and things look promising. I think there are some new prospects on the horizon as well. I haven't decided whether or not I want to take on these prospects as it might be a lot of extra work for me to do, but if I find that it's well within my capability, why not do some work in the evening to fill the gap? Keeps me hopping. -------------------------------------------------------- July 29th, 2008. - Various troubles. I have a pretty bad habit right now. No, it has everything to do with the way I make websites, so don't go getting all up-in-arms about it. The problem is that I tend to build an entire website and leave the administrative features for last. Now while this makes sense in my mind... you can't make an admin tool without something to administrate... at the same time, it gets very difficult to edit site content as you go. This blog for example: I have to physically pull the file off the server, edit it, then physically push it back onto the server for every change. That's not very user-friendly! Funny that I worked on a news posting system way back in the day. Another problem is that this server that I'm on right now is new. Why is that a problem? It's a problem because the old server crashed twice in two days and was so unstable that after pestering the tech support got me a new server. Crossing my fingers that this one is more stable. -------------------------------------------------------- July 6th, 2008. - Rtrn plz? - Hardly anyone who sees this will understand. So I was writing (or rather re-writing) some code the other day, and the thing I was writing was a simple return statement. Then another. Then yet another. I remembered back to my days at the U of M when my Comp Science prof. would tell everyone in the class: "Never ever have more than one return statement in your function!" And this bothered me quite a bit. To this day, I see many articles saying both good and bad about it, but one thing that I just can't stop thinking about is that it is A FEATURE SUPPORTED BY THE LANGUAGE! Take a look at the following two scripts which are supposed to do the same thing: function(){ And then look at the other way.. as supported by my prof. I don't understand why a professor at a university, whose job it is to provide us with the best programming knowledge, would say that you have to have "only one return statement". That's ridiculous. If your code can support multiple exits, why not let it do that? If you can exit the function early, all that's doing is saving processing time. Why WOULDN'T we want that? Thus ends my geeky rant for the evening. -------------------------------------------------------- June 3rd, 2008. - Aw crap.. Yesterday (and today) I had to deal with a computer like no other. It was different in that there were so many viruses and so much spyware that the computer was basically not usable at all. It's so hard to clean, I'm not sure how it will ever be the same again. Needless to say, I'm running the Windows Recovery right now. It was bad in that: Basically this thing would go behind me, and for every fix I made, it would break something else. The list goes on. -------------------------------------------------------- May 28th, 2008. - A call to support. I had the pleasure of talking with HP Canada's customer support today regarding a problem on a fairly new laptop. I was actually surprised to get service almost instantly, regardless of who I was and what service plan I had, and was delighted to have someone on the other line who could speak my language. Did we resolve the issue? No.. but he was able to confirm my thoughts and was very kind in helping me do that. I've been on the phone with technical support reps hundreds of times, and I don't think I've ever had a quality of service like that before. I know it sounds like a huge endorsement for that company, but I had to write about it because of my shock and amazement over the service I got. It was great. In the future, I would definitely consider getting my hands on HP products just knowing that if I ever needed support on one, I could get it without a hassle. I can sympathize with technical support reps and I know that it can be stressful and that accounts for a lot of the hassle you do normally get with support calls, but I always make an effort to sound supportive on the phone to those I'm helping, and I expect the same from the people I call. Today I got that same level of service. -------------------------------------------------------- May 13th, 2008. - Some interesting pictures? I was walking around the server room with nothing much to do the other day so I snapped off a few pictures with my PocketPC.. you'll now get to see the hardware I work on at the office.
-------------------------------------------------------- May 5th, 2008. - When will they learn? I was working on the Malthea.com project today and as I was writing up the registration page for new users, I ran into a problem I always face. This is a problem faced by web developers all over the world each and every day...... Instead of the various browsers out there worrying about adding in new search features, new methods for making favorite links, etc.. why not put their time into making sure their browsers actually view the internet the way it was supposed to be viewed? -------------------------------------------------------- April 29rd, 2008. - It's all about trust. I was thinking about XSS today. For those of you (most of you?) who don't already know, XSS stands for Cross-Site Scripting. Why isn't it called CSS in that case? Well.. CSS stands for something entirely different and I suppose they didn't want to confuse people more than they already have. What is XSS? XSS is a means of tricking a page (by use of malicious code) into displaying content that is not at all what the viewer was supposed to see. This is how most hackers come in and deface websites. The thing is... security measures have to be taken in order to prevent this kind of thing. The sad fact of the matter is that most people programming websites in this day and age don't protect themselves against it nearly enough. I was checking out the server access log on a website I host, and I was amazed to see that someone had attempted XSS on the page dozens of times (by an automated script most likely), and I was very very lucky that I had taken the necessary precautions beforehand. I read an article in the Globe and Mail that an approximate 500,000 websites were exploited in this fashion recently on account of a Microsoft problem. Microsoft said that it wasn't their fault (obviously), and that it was up to the site's creator to introduce security measures to protect it. I agree and disagree. In a perfect world, the server software would help protect you against those things right out of the box without any additional work. Of course this isn't plausible, but it would be nice... in a perfect world. Of course in an absolutely perfect world you wouldn't need to put any kind of security measures against it, because nobody would be attacking you with it. Unfortunately, building security for a website is all about trust. The bottom line is that you can't trust anybody. -------------------------------------------------------- April 23rd, 2008. - AJAX web development techniques. I was reading an article the other day from 2005 on a technology website specializing in various tech-related articles.. I don't remember the exact site actually.. but the article I was reading was about "the downfalls of AJAX". Now while I know for a fact that AJAX might not be the best solution in most situations, to anyone who knows anything about web development, AJAX can be a very very powerful tool to use. The article went on to say that it was bandwidth intensive (if poorly written), that it had security flaws (if poorly written), that it was difficult to understand (to who?), and that it would never be as powerful as Adobe Flash applications. My answer to this: Don't write it poorly. That seems obvious enough and can be said about ANY technique in web development. Write something poorly and expect poor results. Who would have imagined? It's actually hard to believe that only about 6 months ago I REFUSED to learn AJAX. I knew that eventually I might have to, but I hated Javascript coding and I didn't want to teach myself any new tricks when it came to programming websites. PHP was about as far as I would go as far as making a page dynamic is concerned. I learned the basics of AJAX in about a day, and was amazed at how simple it was to use. I was blown away at how easy it was to create dynamically loading applications without having to learn anything I didn't already know. The author of the article in 2005 never thought AJAX would catch on... well here it is 2008 and AJAX is just about all you hear about wherever you go online. To the author of that article, I say "stuff it."
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