paran0id’s blog

I was out of town since Sunday and my portable internet connection isn’t very good so I wasn’t online very often. Anyways, I just got home today and I noticed that Whatpulse is alive again after 1 year and half. Personally, I never thought the owners would bother with this project again, I had it tagged as ‘dead’ for a long time now, but apparently they have a new guy in the development team and they just started developping with maximum strength.

For those of you that don’t know what Whatpulse is, it’s a small piece of software that counts your keystrokes and mouse clicks. Every 24 hours (depending on configuration settings) it sends (pulses) your keystrokes and clicks to the server and builds a nice page with your statistics and your rank worldwide. On top of that, Whatpulse also tracks down your mouse movement and tells you how many Kilometers have you walked with your mouse. For some people this might seem useless but I’m a sucker for statistics, I love this type of things.

The new Whatpulse release (1.6.2) features a lot of bug fixes as well as some new features. You can read more about it here.

There is, however, a new unofficial (for now) version – 1.6.2.1 – that includes some fixes and debug code wiping. You can download Whatpulse 1.6.2.1 here.

Today I decided to update my blog to the latest version of Wordpress. After updating, I felt like the theme was outdated too (I was tired of it, to be honest) so I went and changed the theme to something more… me.

After playing around with the usual customizations I have to do on the themes, i noticed my permalinks weren’t working. For some reason, I deleted my .htaccess file and I never replaced it. (lol!) Anyways, all links are working now.

For those of you that, ocasionally, come here and got tired of seeing all those ‘404 not found’ errors, I apologize. But hey! It’s your fault, you should’ve warned me about it. :)

(updated: 4.15pm GMT)
Ok, so now there’s more info on the table. BoB claims it wasn’t spy related. Anyways, here’s the latest news on the matter:

“NOL-M9 – A few hours after midnight on 05.02.111, Band of Brothers alliance was disbanded. The loss of formal alliance status forcibly relinquished all Band of Brothers held sovereignty, and thus is expected to render all their outposts vulnerable, pause the construction of all motherships and titans currently being built in their capital assembly arrays and interfere with the proper fuctioning of cynojammers and jump bridge waystations at their control towers. This effect has never been seen before on such a huge scale, so there is much uncertainty about the precise effects.

There are currently multiple theories as to the actual cause of the disbanding of the alliance. A director in Band of Brother’s executor corp, TinFoil, and director Haargoth Agamar of Black Nova Corp are alleged to have disbanded the alliance and handed over Black Nova Corp assets at the instigation of The Mittani of Goonswarm. Comments on the Corporation, Alliance and Organization Discussions section of GalNet, however, shed doubt on this claim.”

A Director from a BoB corp, states:
“I like how everyone is stating their opinions like it is fact… when in truth they have no idea what happened. I will state as a fact:

“1) it wasnt a bill/money issue.
“2) it wasnt spy related. “

Elitus of Reikoku stated on GalNet that the issue was not an unpaid bill:

“I’ll go and say this: previous bill was paid on the 6th of Janurary. Previous bill before that was paid on the 6th of December. Currently looks like HAT was compromised… Log shows 500 mil was removed from the wallet stating ‘mittani says hi.’ We are investigating.”

in http://myeve.eve-online.com/mb/news.asp?nid=2737

related threads on EVE-Online forums:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=990388
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=990381

Ok, not much to say at this point, still way too fresh. Let’s just hope Goonswarm did it through game mechanics and not through external ways.
More info here:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=990381

This is for all of you Ultima Online fans! :) UO is still alive and kicking. It’s been more than 7 months that i’ve returned to the UO scene and i’m amazed with the amount of people still playing this game.

A lot has happened while I was away of UO, UOGateway is no more. Now we have ConnnectUO which is currently being redesigned and should be done -very- soon.

Anyways, long story short, I returned to Oblivion Reloaded shard after a 4 year break. The shard is SO MUCH better now and the community along with the staff is great!
If you’re looking for a peaceful, interesting, with a good community and well-driven (dev wise), this is the place for you! :)

Take a look at Oblivion Wiki, all you need to know to start playing is there along with a lot of information regarding custom items, dungeons etc!

Okay, i just read this @ Dougal Campbell blog about Wordpress 2.3.x having major security holes as well as add-ons and plugins, here’s the post he wrote:

in Upgrade or else!:

Okay, people, if you are running any version of WordPress older than 2.3.3*, you need to upgrade now. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.2 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained. And search engines like Technorati are de-listing hacked blogs. Are you listening now? Do I have your attention? Upgrade your web apps before you get hacked and your site drops off the search-engine radar.

While the Technorati article specifically talks about WordPress sites, this goes for any web application. You need to pay attention to updates which are released, and upgrade whenever a security probem is fixed. WordPress gets particular attention due to its popularity and the sheer number of installed sites out in the wild. But it is no more or less secure than any other similar web application. So whatever you’re running, keep it up-to-date.

And the same goes for any add-ons — if you install third-part plugins or themes, make sure you keep up with updates. WordPress 2.5 makes updating plugins easier than ever. Review your Plugins page from time to time, and pay attention when it tells you that a newer version of a plugin is available.

read the full article here: http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2008/04/08/upgrade-or-else

So the owner of EVEHQ decided to run a contest for EVEHQ application (a tool for EVE-Online players that let them manage their chars skill training, assets, generates reports, map routes and a lot more) at the EVE-GFX website.

The process took nearly 1 month, a lot of artists entered the competion and there was a lot of nice works which also deserved the prize (400 million ISK).
In the end, there was only one winner and it was me. Besides the splash screens the owner also wanted the logo i come up with in the splash screens (the one you see at the top of this post).
I made 5 entries/versions of the splash screens which you can check below.

splash screens: v1 | v2 | v3 | v4 | v5

A friend of mine has a house for sale in Guimaraes, Portugal.

Here’s the link for the house information: http://www.casaemguimaraes.blogspot.com/

Enjoy! ;)

After one year and a few months of EVE gaming, i can still say that i’m addicted. With a char over 15,5 million skill points here’s what happened in the last year:

I joined WASP corporation back in September 2006, since then i engaged in corp pvp tournaments, mining operations etc. A friend of mine told about how to make ISK (eve currency) by making forum signatures and other misc graphics for corporations, which helped me a lot in my evolution as a player. Around january we managed to negociate with some other corps that had sovereignity over a dead-end solar system where we went and lived actively for 4-5 months. It is a good system, it had a serpentis complex and some nice asteroids for mining. In june a new project stared up for the eve players that often made signatures for other players; EVE Graphics Team was born. For the next couple of months I went kinda inactive mainly because college was taking way too much time. I came back in late august/early september and everything was a little bit different. We kinda stopped living low-sec and moved back to empire, i had a talk with my CEO and convinced him about applying to join a major alliance set in deep 0.0 space since i knew a guy there, i was given permission to start the negotiations and a couple of weeks later we were accepted.

So, basically, my corp now is set in 0.0 in a big alliance known as Interstellar Starbase Syndicate (ISS) and is very active in PVP.
For those interested in knowing more about this alliace visit eve-spirit.com. If you’re looking for someone who can make you some pretty cool forum signatures, website layouts, killboard banners etc feel free to contact me by EVE-Mail (char name: JadeO), my portfolio is available here.

Getting this error? Googled for a solution but none worked? Then this is for you:

For some reason unknown to me (and apparently, unknown to Sun(tm)) Java gives you this error when you try to update/install a newer version of it’s JRE. After a good 30mins of beating the crap out of my computer trying to install JRE without this annoying error i found a way to do it. Simply download this file: JDK 6u1 with JRE.

Run it and you’re good to go! :)

So, finals were over and i started working on some stuff. First I started working on a module for phpBB that would allow a person to run a forum in which the users could register through the EVE IGB (ingame browser) and thus use the information provided by the EVE client to create the account. After that i got way too hooked on doing signatures for the EVE boards (there was a lot of people asking for them and the money (ISK) coming from them was/is needed :P). After that i decided to start working on my personal portfolio for EVE related art work. Made a pretty cool layout, picked some nice colors, made some graphics on PS etc..

Then the 2nd semester in college started. God damn it that screwed me. After 1 week i had a crap load of works to do, projects to start developping and a huge amount of classes to attend to.
So basically i haven’t managed to finish any of the stuff i started. The only thing i’ve made in a somewhat regular basis were the signatures.

I have no idea when i’m going to finish them.. plus i still want to make some stuff for wordpress (one of them being coding the Calendar plugin from scratch) but honestly i don’t know if i’ll have enough time to do this in the near future.