Rick's World

Hmm, it seems like I've become an 'image blogger' without ever intending to.

I regularly study my site statistics. My blogging software provides one set of stats, and my web host provides a different set of stats. I also use Google Analytics, which provides yet another different set of stats. Between these three sources, I get a pretty good picture of how my site is running. One of the things I look at regularly is who is the web site that refers most traffic to me. Not surprisingly, probably 80-90% of the visitors to my site are referred by Google. What surprised me though, was what part of Google was doing all these referrals.

It turns out that most of the traffic on my site was sent there by Google Image Search. I find this a bit ironic, because I have very few blog posts that actually contain pictures. I rarely post pictures, because most of the time, I'm just too lazy to go through all the trouble of making the images, watermarking them, optimizing them so they aren't too big of files, uploading them etc. Occasionally, I'll write a blog with some photos from a movie trailer. I've done this for Spiderman 3 and I've done this for The Transformers. It is these two measly little blogs that generate most of the traffic to my site. The problem is that most of this traffic that these images are generating are just the images. People are only downloading the images, and not actually reading my site.

I did some investigating, through my various site stats, and found out where these images are being sent to. Thankfully, whenever an image file is requested from your web site, the page requesting the image is sent as the referer. This means that I can see exactly what web sites are loading my images. I discovered that most of these images are being deep linked to other people's sites. Deep linking is a technique where you have a web site, but rather than putting a link to an image on your own web site, you put a link to an image on a completely different web site. This is all done in HTML, so it's completely transparent to the person reading your web site. They never know that they are viewing images coming from a different site. That means that whenever somebody loads this other person's web site, I am essentially providing them free bandwidth in order for them to use my images on their site!

On Myspace.com, for instance, there are over 50 different people who are deep linking to my images! These Myspace links don't concern me too much. So a bunch of stupid kids aren't smart enough to actually download my image. They just link directly to it. The bandwidth used is not enough to really matter for most of these. Plus, since they are usually linked as full size images, my watermark is still present, so hopefully my site gets a little free advertising on these kids' web pages.

There is someone on a Spanish website forum who is deep linking to my image as his forum 'avatar'. In other words, whenever he posts an article on the forum, it includes his avatar image. That means EVERY article he writes, and everyone who reads it forces my web site to server out that image for free. This is beginning to concern me. I've visted the forum and viewed some of his messages. While I certainly not fluent in Spanish, I can read it enough to understand that he is one of the Administrators of the forum. That means that he is likely VERY active on this forum. That means my image is going to show up a lot. The problem is that the avatar image is shown very small. This means he is using my image for free, but the watermark on the bottom is shrunk down so small that it's unreadable to everyone who sees my image. I am seriously considering pulling a 'goat se.cx' trick on him.

The 'goat se.cx' trick is a rather crude name for an Internet 'revenge' technique for getting back at image linkers like this guy. It's named after a hardcore animal pornography site. The story goes that the owner of a web site found out that someone on a different web site was deep linking to his images without his permission. Since the other web site was linking directly to his images, essentially the other web site was allowing the owner of the images to control a section of his web site! All the image owner had to do was substitute the original image for images, with the same filename of something else - like say some hardcore pornography images? As soon as the image owner does this, the other web site, instead of showing some innocent images, starts showing some hardcore porn - all without his changing anything! By shocking the other web site by pulling this trick, he convinced the other web site to stop using his image. I've even heard stories of people who do this and the person stealing the images gets upset and threatens the image owner to put back the original images or he will sue them! Heh, now that is funny. Of course, if I do decide to pull this trick, I won't replace the images with hardcore porn. I'm not that malicious (yet). I'll likely just replace them with an image of the same size saying "STOP STEALING MY IMAGES" or something like that.

Unfortunately, this trick is an 'all or nothing' hack. That means if I pull it, it'll affect everyone linking to that image, even the people that I don't really care about. Plus, I'd have to go back and edit those blogs to link to different files containing the original images, so that my site still works, but everyone else doesn't. What a pain. I'm not sure if want to bother with this quite yet.

It's a good thing I'm on Dreamhost, or this problem would have cost me money already. Just in the month of July, I pumped over 9 gigabytes worth of traffic - most of it likely those images. Had I been on a 'lesser' web host, that could have cost me a lot.

Yesterday afternoon, I saw The Simpsons Movie. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised.

Anyone who is a fan of animation (like me) has no doubt heard of The Simpsons. It's an animated 'sitcom' that's been running on Fox for 18 years now. I think it's the longest running animated sitcom of all time. Frankly, I'm surprised it's still on the air. I used to be a huge fan of the show years ago. In it's early years, it was one of the funniest shows on TV. The problem is, in the last 5-10 years or so, it went from being funny, to just plain dumb. The best part about the show was the tons of 'in-jokes' that they would throw into every episode. There would be sight gags that go by very fast, lots of references to obscure books and movies, etc. It was great. The writing has gone seriously downhill though. Years ago, South Park replaced The Simpsons as my favorite animated comedy. South Park just had better writing and was a lot funnier. I have to say, though that the Simpsons movie was pretty good. The writing was clearly better on this one.

The movie opens with a really funny opening sequence. We see a big, elaborate Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. Itchy & Scratchy are a cartoon cat and mouse who have been killing each other violently on the show for years. Bart watches this show on TV. It's an obvious parody of the old Tom & Jerry cartoons. After watching the whole Itchy & Scratchy sequence, we suddenly see the Simpsons sitting in the chairs of a movie theater. They were at the movies watching an Itchy & Scratchy movie. Homer's first comment is to complain that he can't believe people would pay to see something at the movies that they can see for free on TV, refering to the movie, but obviously refering to the Simpsons movie that the real audience is watching. A nice shot.

Another really funny scene is when Homer dares Bart to skateboard naked. We are then treated to a long, elaborate skateboarding scene where Bart skates around in the nude, with hundreds of conveniently placed items to hide any 'private parts'. After several frenzied minutes of this, there is a brief scene that totally reverses this hiding and shows ONLY his private parts, very briefly (in a very cartoonish way). It was all a very funny setup.

All in all, I gotta say I was impressed. It was a very entertaining movie. Was it the funniest movie I'd ever seen? No, but it was quite good.

Link: http://news.com.com/New+virus+travels+in+PDF+files/2100-1001_3-271267.html

Lately, I've been getting a lot of emails which are completely blank. There is no body to the message and there is usually no subject. The only thing in the email is an attached PDF file, with filename that seems to vary. I've been suspecting that it's a virus or spyware of some kind. I haven't looked at the specific PDFs I've been getting, but it appears to be this Peachy Worm.

Fortunately, this worm seems to be pretty benign. It only affects people who are running the full Adobe Acrobat application, not the Adobe Reader that most people have. Also, it only appears to show a simple 'Peach' game on the screen, so it doesn't appear to do any harm.

We definately need to keep an eye on these though, now that we have virii spreading in PDF files too. If you see an email like I describe, just delete it and don't run that attachment.

Hmm, it looks like our friends at the United States Medical Association are back.

Today, I got yet another spam email from them. It was the exact same email, that I wrote about before. I had noticed, not long after I wrote that article that they appeared to have had their site shut down by GoDaddy due to being spam. I did the same Whois search on the domain today after receiving their email, and it looks like yesterday they moved their hosting to 1and1.com. Let's see how long they survive before 1and1 shuts them down again.

Last night, I finally finished reading the last Harry Potter novel. Great story! Very different from the others though.

I'll hold off giving my comments on it for a while though to give everyone else a chance to read it before I spoil anything. :)

While everyone (like me) is reading the last Harry Potter book, I thought I'd make some humorous sugestions for how the book should end...

1. The U.S. government declares Hogwarts to be an Al Qaeda training camp, and utterly destroys it in a massive 'shock and awe' campaign.
2. We discover that Harry is actually Voldemort and Voldemort is actually Harry. We've been cheering along the wrong hero all along!
3. Ron and Harry fall in love and marry in a beautiful wedding ceremony on the steps of a Massachusetts courthouse.
4. Harry wakes up in an insane asylum to discover that everything thats happened was just his insane mind playing tricks on him.
5. We discover that Harry was replaced with a clone many years ago. When the real Harry shows up at the end, it turns out that we've been following the adventures of Harry's clone all these years. (Note: this is an obscure comic book reference. Let's see who can guess it?)
6. Dumbledore returns to life, dressed in black, mechanical armor and declares to Harry, "I am your father!"
7. Harry, after defeating Voldemort, decides to take up acting on Broadway. He proceeds to star, in the nude, in a musical involving a boy who loves his horse way too much.
8. Harry, seduced by Black Magic, ends up turning on Dumbledore. This leads to a fight over a volcano. Harry is badly injured, but Voldermort saves his life by encasing him in black, mechanical armor.
9. Harry gets a magical sex change operation and becomes an exotic dancer.
10. Ron and Hermione fall in love and get engaged. As his wedding gift to Ron, he provides a pair of magical 'enhancements' to Hermione...

Link: http://www.facebook.com

Facebook has been getting a lot of press lately. And most of it good press. Facebook is a social networking site. Exactly what that means, I'm not entirely sure, but since Facebook has been so popular lately, I decided to sign up and see what it's all about. A couple of days ago I did just that.

I have to say, my first impression of Facebook is quite good. The site has a very clean, professional feel to it, unlike the God-awful ugly Myspace. It's not too cluttered, and it seems to be pretty easy to use. One of the points of a social network is to find and connect with friends. You use it to keep up with what they are doing. One of the nice features that Facebook has is the ability to search for people based on what college and what high school you went to. I haven't found any friends on the high school search yet, but I did locate an old college roommate of mine.

This college roommate of mine (who's name shall remain anonymous, in the interests of privacy) and I shared a dorm room for the better part of a year at school. At the time we met he was also a Computer Science Major, as I was. He was also a Windows user at the time, as I was. Later, after we were no longer roommates, he switched to Macs and MIS as a major. I stuck with Windows from that point up until only recently. It looks like he may have been right about Macs way back then. He was also a very strict Christian at the time (and he no doubt still is). At the time, he was also straight (meaning heterosexual). He went on various dates with girls while we were roommates. All very standard stuff. Him and I got along fine. At the time however, I had this distinct feeling that he might be gay, and that he just hadn't realized it yet. Of course, I never mentioned it to him, but I always had that feeling. It turns out that I was right.

Yesterday, a good 15 years after graduating college, I found him on Facebook. I read his profile only to discover that he was, in fact gay (bisexual apparently). I'm impressed that he is that open about that on his profile. That's a thing that many people would find uncomfortable admitting in public. I was pleased to see this. Not because it proved my hunch at the time correct, but because apparently somewhere along the way he realized this fact himself and accepted it. I'm proud of him.

Way to go, my friend!

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of privacy in the world of blogging.

I've been running this little blog for over two years now. In that time I've written a lot of articles on various subjects. From reading the blog, you can deduce many things about me. From the title of the blog you can deduce that my first name is 'Rick'. From the domain name of the blog, you can deduce my last name is 'Ekle'. I even have my full first and last name and email address sitting right there in plain sight on the upper right hand corner of the page. Do a quick Whois search on the domain name and you can find my complete address and phone number. I have never made any secret of these things. With these bits of information an enterprising person could do some Google searches and find out a great deal more about me. My last name is fairly unusual, so you are unlikely to find another person with my name online. That being said, however, I do maintain a great deal of privacy on this blog.

I have mentioned my family in passing on my blog over the last couple of years, but I have intentionally not said anything that would allow people to easily identify them. I have never mentioned my parents by name, and I believe I've only mentioned my brother's name once. My brother doesn't like the idea of me talking about him in 'public' on the blog, and I can't blame him. That's why I've said little about him and my family. While I have to a certain degree 'exposed' myself on this blog, I will not do that to my family and friends without their permission. I tend to see this blog as my own little 'newspaper column'. I write articles about whatever is interesting to me at the time, but I rarely bring my family and friends into it.

I have seen other blogs, and know other bloggers who have revealed a great deal more personal information about themselves and their families on their blogs. That's not my style. If you want to read the latest sob story about some major medical problem me or a family member has had, go elsewhere. You won't find it here. If you want to read the occaisional interesting article about programming, computers, music, or fuzzy little cats, feel free to read on... :)

Today is my birthday! 38 years young as of today...

My blogging software keeps logs of what strings people are searching for in search engines when they end up on my site. Some of the search strings people type are very strange. I figured I'd try to answer a few of those odd messages...

NSArray* arrayOfFileNames = [[NSFileManager defaultManager] directoryContentsAtPath:pathName];

NSArray* pArray = [[NSArray alloc] init];