Adduc’s Addictions

Food / Drink

Power Concerns

Sound / Video

Tables

Space

Games

Restrooms

Being a computer user, and in particular majoring in a computer field has naturally made me a prime target for everyone with electronic trouble. I say electronic, because people’ll ask if I could fix their iPod, desktop, laptop, television, almost anything with a screen at all. But I’ve never really had something happen to myself computer related that I couldn’t fix or find a solution / someone to fix until now. Yesterday I got home from a grueling day of work to sit down at my desktop for a game of Team Fortress 2.

An awesome game from Valve using a game distribution system which can be… frustrating at times. Steam is probably the best distribution system on the net right now, and the VAC system, while not the best, is not as annoying as punkbuster to users, and still catches people from time to time. Besides that, it utilizes the standard username password to sign in to the service. As I tried to log in yesterday, I was told my user/password was incorrect. No problem, right? Password was probably mistyped. Just type it again. Nope. No go. So I’m a little confused. After a little investigation, it turns out someone got my account information.

An account hijack. Hmm… Instantly I filed a report with Valve, the standard thing that people do, and from some friends I’ve been told it takes about a week to sort things out. But I’m not concerned nessecarily with that. It’s more so how something like this happens. It’s dealing with the leak, yes, but also finding out where the leak came from. How’d I fall prey to this kind of happening?

Virus scan is the first thing people think of. Up until this point I didn’t have antivirus software on any of my computers. An intelligent reader might say that’s my problem. Well… I went out and got AVG’s free antivirus software. I’ve heard it’s good, and I’m not willing to pay for a potential one time use of software, no matter how good it might be. What did the results reveal? I was clean, sans a few tracking cookies that were harmless in the current situation. Make that one reliefed person. But also frustrating. If not a virus, how did my information get out? The plot thickens.

This is where I’m at right now. I’m going to wait to post anymore until I receive any sort of feedback from Valve. I did like their system for reporting this type of incident. Accounts were created separate from the regular steam account, and opening tickets allowed such information as serial keys to be included to give proof as to owning the account in question. Until anything is resolved, sadly I have to cease from any ideas of playing TF2, HL2, or any other games I owned. Here’s hoping for the best.

A friend desires an RSS feed of his channel topics for use on his website, and although I haven’t told him, it is something I’ve agreed to do. Here is my initial script. All it does is connect to the network, get the channel’s topic and disconnects. Nothing too difficult, but certainly annoying when called excessively. Next build is going to cache the current topic, and start to allow channel names / server names / port numbers in the URL by passing GET requests. Until then, feel free to take a look at the code.

ircphp

Messages of the Day have been around for many many years, originating from terminals when server admins needed a way to communicate with users about certain events and downtimes. Seen in BBS’s and IRC Servers, they’ve made their way into games as well. Team Fortress 2 is one such game, and when the clan I’m in (STA) decided it was time for a change in their MOTD’s look, I was up to the challenge. Here is the result.

is an addicting musical. As Avenue X was stuck in my head for weeks after first hearing the soundtrack, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog has captured my mind in a similar manner. The soundtrack is not yet out, but for those interested in musical comedies written by the guy who did Firefly, it’s up on Hulu.

So I finally got up off my ass and put together a web server.

1.1GHz AMD Athlon
512MB RAM
40GB Hard drive

Ubuntu 8.04.1

I’m setting up virtual hosts right now for extended fun. Hoping to put it up on the net by the weekend.

<Unidentified61073> Ooh. What RSS goodness were you going to reveal Coheed?”
<Coheed> snackr
<Unidentified61073> oh.
* You are now known as Adduc
<Coheed> I dig it
<Coheed> a lot
<Adduc> It’s good for those with few feeds.
<Coheed> heh
* Coheed has 300+
<Adduc> lol
<Adduc> In that case I’ll give’r a try.
<Coheed> newsfire is another great one
<Adduc> Still haven’t found anything as comfortable as Google Reader yet.
* Coheed ducks
<Coheed> well thats partly because you can access Google Reader from anywhere
<Adduc> Well yeah, but with most of the desktop clients there are features I want that just ain’t there.
<Coheed> such as?
<Adduc> Podcast support is something some clients miss.
<Adduc> Others would be the ability to merge feeds into folders and have unread counts on a per folder basis.
<Adduc> You’d be surprised how many clients miss that feature.
<Coheed> yeah
<Adduc> Besides that I can’t really think of any of any other features.

Taken from #rathcast on WlydRyde IRC Network.

Just a small running list of things Plurk needs to work on or fix:

No API : Without an API it makes it harder for developers to write applications that utilize Plurk at all. They might be able to retrieve your friends and other things like that without an API, but posting from a 3rd party app right now is pretty much out of the question.
No SMS: Being able to access Twitter from the phone brought in many people who’d otherwise not use the service. I myself didn’t really start using Twitter until I could do this. Obviously there would be things to figure out with Plurk and SMS, one thing being they’d have to split some posts into multiple messages, considering the 255 character limit Plurk has and the 160 character limit SMS uses.

IM Downtime: Another avenue to recieve Plurks by and respond to, ever since Plurk’s usage skyrocketed the first of June with the registration of Leo Laporte the IM interface has consistantly stayed offline, giving 404 errors just trying to access the page.

Stability Issues: Well, haven started writing this post over a month ago, none of these have gotten better. But the worst thing so far has been some of the downtime that Plurk has had, similar to Twitter. Going down for a short period of maintenance turned into 6 hours. I’d call it unacceptable, however the popularity of Twitter proves me wrong.

Ugg… I’m using Windows Live Mail solely for the ability to walk by the computer and glance at the login screen and know how much mail is waiting for me. Unfortunately, in downloading that mail, gmail only allows 200 messages or so at a time. Which would be fine, but for the fact that it starting syncing my mail from February. Seeing as I’ve received about 3000 messages since then, it hasn’t yet become current. It’s annoying. Maybe I should move to IMAP. That seems a little easier in syncing, and if I do actually read anything in Windows Live Mail it’ll sync back to the server so I don’t have to mark read the next time I go to gmail’s web interface. Hmm…

One of those posts that contribute to the overall popularity again, I can’t help but praise Plurk as a site that took the concept of Twitter and somehow made it more social. Why? Well, there’s a few things.

Karma: Viewed as controversial more than anything else, on joining Plurk one finds they don’t have access to everything. Things like their profile title and display name are locked off, telling the user to gain karma first before they can perform these actions. This is actually a smart move, as being dropped into a control panel of many settings at first can repel a user away. By restricting them at first until they get used to / start partaking in Plurk, they can settle in and start to look forward to what they could access with enough participation.

Threads: Like Pownce, Plurk gives each post a thread, allowing replies like a real blog. This makes it easy for people to hold multiple conversations without getting lost in the stream. Twitter has no good way to sustain multiple conversations unless people want to direct message, which goes against what Twitter was created for in the first place.

Syndication: Unlike Pownce, each thread has an RSS feed associated with it. Want to follow a few threads and make sure you don’t miss anything posted in them? This is the place to go. These feeds are regenerated everytime a comment is added, meaning even away from Plurk you never miss a beat.

The Word: Plurk is an awesome word. Twitter doesn’t flow off the tongue as well as the work Plurk does. Plus, it (Plurk) can be used in so many different ways. Plurking plurker!

But above all…

The Banana: known to start fights and solve wars, this little avatar has grown to become one of the unique things to love about Plurk. Not available until enough Karma is gained, it’s one of the things that gets people to become active. They want the ability to post the banana, and until then, they just won’t stop Plurking.