The first picture of my new secret project:
Today I fired off a broadside blast against some annoying script kiddies that have been defacing a vBulletin site I have the unfortunate misery to manage. I finally tracked their crack down to a PHP file that was uploaded under a previously vulnerable version. I had no idea it was there, but these evil files kept showing up despite my keeping the software updated.
These people are not hackers, but tiny-minded people trying to up search engine results and send out spam. If you want to know what a real hacker is, read 2600 Magazine.
Anyway, I deleted their exploit, then realized I was missing an opportunity, and replaced the page with this:
Now if they ever come from an un-banned IP address (yeah, I shut them out, and the rest of their ISP's network, too!), that's all they're going to get…
I was lucky enough to see Jonathan Coulton and They Might Be Giants play in Spokane WA last Sunday. On their way to Seattle, they offered to have JoCo answer questions, and mine got answered:
I for one would take that chance.
(Thanks to Eric Trueheart for posting this picture where I could see it!)
If you have ever had to download anything from Cisco you may appreciate this:
Now that my MUD (which I've recently settled on the name ForeverMUD) is getting more stable, I thought I'd run some profiling tools on it. Valgrind is a very cool utility made to do this very thing.
When I first started developing, I wrote in a loop timer that keeps track of the longest processing time as well as the average loop time. After the introduction of a large (16,200 room) world map, the loop times jumped from 10-30 µsec to over 190,000 µsec—no bueno.
So last night I ran Valgrind and used kcachegrind to view the results, which showed me this:
Put simply, most of my time is spent manipulating mutexes. I'm going to have to rethink my design, because that's way too much time…
I have several subscriptions to Microsoft services, such as MSDN, TechNet, etc. I realized that they expect people to use their browser to access their site, but do they have to make it so other browsers can't access?
Case in point:
They reminded me of this old User Friendly iMac parody, too.
People and pictures of poor grammar and/or misuse of apostrophes really amuse me. For example:
The part I enjoy most is both the appropriate and inappropriate use of the apostrophe. I see this truck around town from time to time. I finally had a camera handy and snapped a picture of it. I also submitted it to GrammarBlog.
Meta-Cat is not amused at your Internet humor…
I thought I had a copy of this lying around, but couldn't find it anywhere, so I had to go find it again. This kind of humor cracks me up:
We had visitors this morning:
I created some new textures and added them to my MaJiang program. I also added a few more tiles to the view.
Today I had a cow-orker create a chamfered rectangle in 3DS Max (it's extremely simple, the chamfered box is a primitive object with its own button) and save it as a .obj file.
I wrote some code to import the format and display that instead of the simple cube that I hand-coded to get started. Anyway, the new object looks awesome—way better than the perfectly square edges of the old model. Enough chatting, see for yourself:
Old model: 12 vertices, 10 faces
New model: 104 vertices, 204 faces
I had a lot of quiet spare time at home today, so I thought I'd work on my OpenGL Majiang program. Here's where I'm at:
Today I added multisampling to get rid of the worst of the aliasing, I computed all the surface normals and added diffuse and ambient lighting, and set up the specular and shininess attributes of the different materials I use.
I've also been working on some new textures, so when I get around to rendering the whole game I'll have a good bunch of images to mix things up. It took me a couple of hours to track down some old Chinese fonts, toss out the bad ones, and create new images for the tiles. I'll save the rest of the work for next week.