Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Well, I've been quite busy the past week or two, hence the silence. I know ya'll missed me .

First off, I've picked up a job doing the website for a grad student in the Fine Arts School here, specifically a portfolio website, as he's a photographer. This'll be interesting, and I trust I can put out something of high enough caliber for what he needs. I randomly met this guy at my church, and it turns out that he grew up Virginia also, about two towns over!

Next I've just been asked by a professor of mine, and a P.H.D. student to join them on a business venture. I can't go into specifics right now, but they're looking to patent an idea, so after the patent's filed, I could talk about it. It turns out that I'm going to be programming most of it, yippe. The post-doc's job is to make sure I stay on track, and the professor came up with the idea, and will secure our patents. We'd split the proceeds with my school, as that way we can get the school to file the patent for us. The goal is, in a year this'll be a self-sustaining revenue generator, and the school will use it as an example to encourage ore entrepreneurship. Very ironic, the post-doc is ALSO from Virginia, and his mother now lives one town over from me.

Once I can say more (heck, once I understand the project better), I'll let ya'll know.

Well, 'tis a great game, I think. If you haven't played it, you really oughta.

This *was* going to be a bigger post, but, well, things went awry. Turns out, what I was playing with is rather buggy and ugly. However, if you happen to get this client to work, I'm running a few server's on snarky.no-ip.org. I plan on, hopefully, getting it so 10 servers will run (ports 5550-5560), and I've already got a meta-server, so you can see if anyone's playing (snarky.no-ip.org:5557). I think it'd be great to be able to play you guys over the Internet, and also makes for an easy, yet somewhat entertaining single player game. Well, I'll be looking into other clients, as well as a way to set up your own server with a php page from here, so stay tuned.

Well, there's a good article on botnets, and how they work here. I had an argument in Chicago this summer with a friend who couldn't see the point in them. I hope this article will effectively articulate the danger, and fun, of such nets.

Simply put, a botnet is a network of computers that run software to allow another person to control them. Some call them zombies, for good reason. The software that's run can be anything. It can view your screen, make you download programs, turn on your webcam. Anything that the creator wants.
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Well... I'm addicted to them, I'll admit it. I recently came across an interesting format to represent them. You can read more about that on the other site.

Well, this post will live up to my nickname... If you don't know why, well, go check a dictionary. And yea, should be some good laughs.

Valentine's Day is all about spending time with the one you love...
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Sorry 'bout that last post on LiveJournal. The new design moved the "Excerpt" box, and I filled in the wrong thing. Oh well. I also moved my script to a more secure location, so... hopefully these things won't happen again. Just for fun, I'm uploading a picture of my workstation in the Burrow, a CS lab behind key-card access on campus. My favorite place to work (on campus).

Oh, it's also to test the file upload feature, and see what it does.
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Well, some big changes just happened. I've (been) upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1 for starters. This is cool. There's some new stuff (notice the search bar on the front page), and the backend got a BIG redesign.

Also, I've decided to go get me a theme, as the guy that gives me hosting just started a WordPress blog and made (is making?) a cool theme. I'm starting with a base citybridge, and will be editing it over the next few days (hopefully, only days). I'm gonna be changing the text colors, a tad, the big image, and maybe the curly looking things. So, use the comments to let me know if you like, or hate, or what part you like or hate, of the new theme(s). (Broad enough for ya?)

Been super busy as of late, once I get approval, I'll let ya'll know about the research I'm doing here.

Well, some of you have heard me rant about Social Networks, Facebook being an example, already, but here's a new one.

I had the great opportunity to have both a really informal breakfast (only 5 students, and the speaker) with a CMU professor who is looking at Social networks and privacy issues. Before I go further I should stress there's no such thing as privacy online. At least, not for the average user.

Facebook, after I started using it, really bugged me. There is no way to turn off displaying your email at all. Yes, it's displayed as an image, but it's not CAPCHA text, so can be "decrypted" on the fly in Perl. Using a Perl module called WWW::Mechanize, you can mine whatever you want from any profile. You can even do batches of profiles. Here's my findings so far.
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