Fun With Spammers #1

October 31st, 2012

So, I get an email from a spammer:

Hello My Friend,
I am Mrs  Jennimar Foraza , From Libya, and Presently, I’m with laptop in a hospital here in Accra Ghana where I have been undergoing treatment for cancer of the Breast. I have since lost my ability to talk and my doctors have told me that I have only less than (2) two months to live.
It is my last wish to see that this money is invested wisely and at the end of every year funds are distributed among charity organization. I want a reliable and honest person that will use this money to reach to the motherless and also less privileges, to reach to the Katrina Hurricane, the sick that has no body to take care of them, the poor and widows and to set up a Cancer research.Please do all things possible to make my wish come through. Email: (jennimar_foraza@xxxxxxx.xxx)
Hoping to hearing from you soon.
Love you,Mrs Jennimar Foraza

And upon seeing the “Katrina Hurricane” bit…I had to reply:

Hi Jennimar,

I am saddened to hear about your cancer of the breast. I, for one, am a big fan of breasts both large and small. I would be happy to accept your money but saddened that I would be unable to reach out to Hurricane Katrina on your behalf. The reason is that (thankfully) Hurricane Katrina is dead. After her murderous rampage, she succumbed to her fatal collision with the continental United States. The tragedy could have been prevented!

Every year, hundreds of tropical storms and hurricanes around the world die in collisions with land masses. The collisions could be prevented through the deployment of nets and warning signs along the beaches to prevent these beautiful and majestic creatures from meeting an untimely end.

Would you be willing to fund my dream project? To put up bright orange nets around every continent and island so that the hurricanes and tropical storms can roam the skies, protected from dangerous continents. I estimate it would take $400 trillion US to make the HTSPF dream a reality. Your donation to our cause would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Justin Pearce
President
Hurricane and Tropical Storm Protection Fund

Hope you folks enjoy. This may be the start of a new hobby. :3

CodeKase Tear Down

April 17th, 2012

I recently received a contest offer from an area car dealership with an “Electronic Codekase”. Electronic. Quickly the contest paperwork was discarded and the “Codekase” investigated. Sceptical, I pulled the tab labelled “Pull Tab to Activate”. Lo and behold, the device lit up to display the code numbers allegedly matching the numbers on the discarded paperwork. After locating something to pry with, the device was cracked open to reveal the working bits of the device.

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Holidays

December 24th, 2011

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! May you have safe and peaceful holiday season.

Readability

October 9th, 2011

So I realize that I am a hypocrite. I love to preach the wonder of black text on a white background! Yet for the time my website has been with this new design, the text has been cyan on a transparent blue with a dark background. Yes, it looks kinda cool (I think so, anyway), but I realize that not everyone might be able to read it.

I was ironing my shirts (yes, domesticated programmer is domesticated) and it hit me: I’m a damn programmer with tons of experience in Javascript and CSS. I should solve this problem! It’s what I do!

So, a little CSS, a little Javascript and here you have it: E-Ink Mode

At the top of the website there is now a little button that turns the content portion of the site into (tada!) black text on a white opaque background with sans serif fonts for easy reading!

I’m too lazy to have it persist across pages, but it’s just a click to turn it on and a click to turn it off so it’s not something difficult. Plus, not enough people read this thing for it to be a problem. :P

Enjoy.

StackExchange

September 25th, 2011

So I’ve become rather active on several of the StackExchange websites. It’s quite fun to puzzle over some of the questions people pose. Of course, there are some questions that are just retarded….or are blatant tries to get people to do one’s homework assignment.

So, yeah. Bam. Stuck my ‘flair’ on the side of my website.

Rumors of my death…

June 9th, 2011

…have been greatly exaggerated.

As my last post stated, I am not dead (yet). I have been so busy with life in general that I have almost forgotten about my own website! I suppose I should be putting this thing to better use than letting it sit and collect spam comments and digital dust. I do have a lot of personal projects on my plate that have failed to launch or are in a state of non-progress. For the benefit of myself and the few people that run into this place, I’m going to list them here:

  • RPG GM Map system (In progress)
  • QOQ Model 02 + Backtrack Linux 5 built (In progress)
  • Port-o-rotary powered my TI MSP430 (On Hold)
  • Hacked Fonera AP (90%, futzing with auto mounting SD card)
  • Home Asterisk server (On Hold)

Those are the few things, tech-wise that I’m working on. My art stuff has kinda reached a wall, as work sucks the creativity out of me and random distractions steal my time away. Hopefully I’ll get some inspiration and let it take off. Until then, the tech-related projects provide a more tangible reward. I’ll try to keep tabs on what’s done and not done as we go (and probably post more often). I plan to do write-ups on the projects I have not totally forgotten what I did.

To great success and completed projects!

Not Dead…

January 23rd, 2011

…well not yet. XD

Yes, I came back from Defcon. It was awesome, as always.

Oh so very busy. o.o;;

Headed for Defcon

July 28th, 2010

Off to Defcon…BRB.

Superfish Menu Fix for Joomla 1.5

July 2nd, 2010

So after moving some menu items around on a website, a client calls up noting issues with the ordering of items in the menu. This site is not using the usual mainmenu module from Joomla, but another module called “Superfish Dropdown Menus“. Apparently this is a pretty common issue and only affects people that have moved or removed anything in their menu. So, after much head scratching and trying things out, I finally came up with a fix for the menu ordering issue:

First, add the following functions to the “superfish_modMainMenuHelper” class in the “helper.php” file:

function sortParent($x, $y){
  if($x->parent==$y->parent){
    return 0;
  }else if($x->parent < $y->parent){
    return -1;
  }else{
    return 1;
  }
}

function sortByOrdering($x, $y){
  if($x->ordering==$y->ordering){
     if($x->parent==$y->parent){
        return 0;
     }else if($x->parent < $y->parent){
       return -1;
     }else{
       return 1;
     }
   }else if($x->ordering < $y->ordering){
      if($x->parent==$y->parent){
         return 0;
      }else if($x->parent < $y->parent){
         return -1;
      }else{
        return 1;
      }
   }else{
      return 1;
   }
}

Next, just above the line “$user =& JFactory::getUser();” in the buildXML function, insert the following lines of code:

usort($rows, array("superfish_modMainMenuHelper", "sortParent"));
usort($rows, array("superfish_modMainMenuHelper", "sortByOrdering"));

This will sort the items by what their parent is and then sorts by the ordering, taking into account the ordering of the parent items. After that, the buildXML function will take care of putting the menu together.

A really strange issue and really frustrating fix.

I also make no warranty on the above fixes. I’ll answer questions, but don’t expect me to repair your site for you (backups are your friend).

Camping…

June 19th, 2010

So last weekend I went camping with my little brother and some friends (who had never been camping before). It has been some time since I’ve been camping and, while it was really hot out, it was also alot of fun. We managed a campsite down on the shore of Lake Texana, which was great because there was a constant breeze that helped stave off the heat. I got to take a few pictures with my new camera. Some of wild life and some…a little more frivolous. ;D