Tagged as: General

It's available at http://www.kirsle.net/rss.cgi.

In Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, there's an anti-piracy measure that I triggered late one night while using a MysticTicket and AuroraTicket to start my quest of capturing Lugia, Ho-oh and Deoxys. The ticket checker at Vermilion City told me to buy this game or die.

I created a You're The Man Now, Dog page using this animated GIF image (because at the time--near the end of high school--YTMND was cool). From there apparently the GIF found a home in the Bulbagarden forums.

Months (years?) after making the GIF I decided to google this and see if anyone else has seen it. Apparently it's been verified by various ROM dumpers to be legitimately in the game's code, so my ROM wasn't just a hacked copy. And that's when I discovered the familiar-looking animated GIF; verifying its MD5 hash proved it was indeed the result of my 5 minutes spent taking screenshots and animating them that these people were all linking to.

Interestingly, it seems that the GIF is the only screenshot (animated or otherwise) that exists on the topic. IIRC all I did was enter some cheats to get me a MysticTicket and AuroraTicket (either by cheating and making my monsters carry them when captured and subsequently take them away, or else by buying them at a Pokemart) and then attempting to catch a boat with them in hand.

I've been wanting a domain like this for a while (especially after I saw my former boss, Samy's (my hero) domain name, samy.pl), and then I found a domain checking service online that would look up a domain under every possible TLD and I found a few that were still available, .is being the most attractive of them all (come on, http://noah.is/awesome?).

It took a good number of hours wrestling with ISNIC about the DNS settings, though. They have retardedly strict requirements for DNS servers; the servers themselves have to be configured in the most strict way possible (matching forward and reverse DNS records for each of the name server hostnames for example), and furthermore they want all their DNS servers to be "registered" with ISNIC, and they want the person who manages the name servers to be the one who registers them.

Thus, using the ol' ns1.kirsle.net, ns2.kirsle.net was out of the picture, as my server has only one IP and I don't control the reverse DNS on that IP regardless. Luckily my web hosting company provides DNS forwarding services, and their servers are configured in the strict way ISNIC requires. I just had to register them with ISNIC ($karma--, I registered them with my own ISNIC name instead of bothering my web hosting company to do it; should be fine though, if they have any issues I'll forward the e-mails they send to the web host to deal with then).

ISNIC charges me 39 euros a year for the domain and they are the sole dictators of .is so I can't transfer to another registrar... but, again, http://noah.is/wicked.cool? Seriously.

The new icon in 96², 48², 32², and 16² sizes:

(These are PNG images with alpha channels, if you're using a lame browser like IE 6 that can't show them correctly, then... I pity you. Catch up with the rest of us in 2010 and use a real browser.)

It's an emblem I made up at least 7 years ago, it's a composite of the letters "CjK", as in my Internet alias, "Casey James Kirsle."

Speaking of favicons, I created the icon using a command-line tool in Linux called icotool. In Fedora it was provided by the icoutils package from the fedora yum repository.

# create (-c) favicon.ico (-o) from source PNGs cjk-16.png and cjk-32.png
$ icotool -c -o favicon.ico cjk-16.png cjk-32.png

I remember that the ability to share USB devices with virtual machines used to be working "out-of-the-box" with VirtualBox and older versions of Fedora, but Fedora 11 complicates things a bit.

By default USB devices in virtual machines don't work; the menu lists all your USB devices as being greyed-out while the machine is running. It comes down to a permissions issue with the user you're logged on as. To fix:

1) Make sure your user belongs to the vboxusers group. Older versions of VirtualBox made this an absolute necessity (virtual machines wouldn't boot otherwise), but VirtualBox 3.0 seems to only create this group but not actually require your user to belong to it for the most part. Update: with current VirtualBox, this is all that's required; USB should be working after you do this and log out and back in. If not, continue reading.

2) Create a mount point directory for usbfs (I did mkdir /usbfs as root).

3) Edit /etc/fstab to add a line that mounts usbfs, giving the vboxusers group write permissions to the mount point. In my case vboxusers had a group ID of 501; check in /etc/group to see what your group's GID is:

# VirtualBox USB support
none  /usbfs  usbfs  rw,devgid=501,devmode=664 0 0

Now, you can either reboot or run mount -a as root (to reload the data from /etc/fstab). If you had to add your user to the vboxusers group because it didn't already belong to the group, you'll need to log out and back in again.

And now your virtual machines can access the USB devices.

I set cuvou.com to redirect all links for regular pages to their counterparts on the new site, and to preserve HTTP referrer information while it's at it (so I can continue to see which Google queries link to my site, for instance). My sites have always been programmed to ignore referring URLs that belong to the same domain (so clicking a link within the site doesn't log the referrer because it would be rather pointless to do so).

But now that the domain has changed, referring URLs from cuvou.com show up in kirsle.net's logs, and it revealed something interesting about the spam bots:

They love my guestbook page. They probably find it via search results for the word "guestbook." Spambots look for guestbooks specifically because they usually tend to contain e-mail addresses, which the bots can add to their list of victims.

My guestbook has no e-mail addresses but instead resembles a blog comment thread... but they don't know that.

Anyway, the interesting thing is, on these requests, the spam bots send the referring URL as being exactly the same as the URL they requested. So their requests look like this:

GET /guestbook.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.cuvou.com
Referer: http://www.cuvou.com/guestbook.html

The effective result is that cuvou.com's guestbook page is the #1 referring URL (also the #2 and #3 top), because of how popular that page is with the spambots.

Maybe I should set up a spam honeypot on that page and trick them into downloading an infinite number of bogus e-mail addresses that go nowhere to flood their databases with fake e-mails and waste the spammers' time...

There are still some things left to do with it and I need to rewrite a couple of pages, but for the most part it should be fine for now. All the old links on cuvou.com now redirect to kirsle.net; let me know if there are any broken links or anything like that.

I'll post a more thorough blog post about this when I polish up the site a little bit and have time to write about it.

Update: added a traffic-logging plugin, which replaces Cuvou::Traffic on the old site and is better integrated now.

The new one seems to be headed in the right direction, though. I named it Siikir, because I plan on adapting it for a multi-user website by the same name after I've first built it so it suits me on my single-user websites.

The main thing that sets it apart from any failure of a CMS I've built in the past is that this one is completely abstract and plugin-oriented... so, the main Perl module that gets loaded doesn't really do anything itself, it only manages the loading and controlling of other plugins... literally everything else (page controllers, user management, sessions, etc.) are all delegated to extra plugin modules.

The general idea is this: if I want to make an ajax front-end that tests whether a username is taken or not, why should the code for that be required to load all the code for pages, photo albums, profiles, blogs, etc.? All it really needs to do is load the one plugin that manages users, and ask it if the user is taken. Simple. So that's what this new CMS structure allows for.

Since I'm liking it so far, I just might release the code after I'm doing working on it. Maybe.

Anyway, it's getting close to completion. Page management, users, profiles, and photo albums are all completed (unlike the photo albums on cuvou.com, each user can make their own collection of photo albums). All that's left is programming a blog back into it, and then I'll be migrating everything on this site over to the new code.

I'll also be changing the domain name; this site is gonna be moving over to kirsle.net with the switch. All the old links to specific files on this site will be redirected to the same files on the new domain, for a while, until Google forgets about the old URLs... then I may use cuvou.com for something else.

So I've created a web-based converter tool to turn TrueType TTF fonts into OpenType EOT fonts, to go along with my other tools that turn images into favicons and turn images into XBM masks.

You can use the new tool here. As with all the other tools, your converted files are cleared off the server after 24 hours, so don't think about hotlinking your embeddable fonts!

Links for simple search terms, such as "picture", or "blog", or "Linux"...

From URLs that indicated the link came from the very first page of search results that Windows Live provided for those simple, generic, single-word search queries.

Thusly I concluded that Windows Live Search is complete crap, and is probably powered by a primitive SQL query that has no regard at all for relevance, no "page rank" technology, and otherwise nothing at all that determines what results are the "best" ones to show to the user. Google would never let such things fly. Getting a link to my site because you searched for the word "picture", and one or two pages on my site might've used the word in passing? That's a big FAIL.

So, now that Bing is out, and it's all over the news and Digg about how great it is and how it's (finally) a competitor for Google, I was hoping that if I got any links in from Bing searches, that they'd be from more useful search queries.

I was wrong!

I was just looking at my incoming referrers, and somebody who did an Images search for "Acer Aspire" linked to my site (this page, specifically)... from the first page of results. I had to check this out. Sure enough, the 10th image that comes up for that query is the picture of an Acer Aspire 5050 laptop that I included on that page.

The 10th result. Is my site about the Acer Aspire at all? About laptops period, even? Why, when there's SO many other sites out there that are more relevant, would my site come up in the top 10 results? It's broken. As usual.

Microsoft should just give up on the search scene altogether. MSN Search, Windows Live Search, Bing... no matter what they call it, it's the same exact failure of a search engine. Hopefully they'll learn their lesson after this and not try again with yet another search engine in the next couple years and just give up completely.

For the most relevant results for your search queries, Google is still the best.