Welcome to Kirsle.net!

Finally, I've shipped Tk::HyperText version 0.06 on its way to CPAN's network. It won't be up immediately but in the next few hours the following link will go to the page for version 0.06:

Tk::HyperText.

Here's a screenshot of the demo program that comes with it:

There's a retarded new breed of forum spam bot crawling the web lately. Unlike the spam bots that try to stuff posts full of links to virus-ridden websites, these bots just seem to register and say things like "Nice site! Where'd you get it?"

The RiveScript.com YaBB forum has gotten at least two of these low-hanging spam bots recently. I modified the YaBB source to try and stop these things from being able to register by employing some of the same techniques that keep Cuvou.com safe from "dumb submitter bots" and we'll see if that helps...

Remind me to write a big long article about spam bots and how to fight them. I have some pretty good techniques that seem to work quite effectively but I currently don't have the motivation to write about them at this point in time.

Update: I've written an article about stopping dumb submitter bots: Trapping "Dumb Submitter Bots".

I've added a page about my RiveScript project. It's something I started work on a good 4 or 5 years ago, then abandoned, then started work on again. I thought it needed a page.

So here's its page.

I've come up with a new design for my software pages. The 4 pages under the Software heading on the navigation bar use the new page style so far. I'll work on the other ones later.

Basically, I went with a tab approach. Instead of having EVERYTHING be all on a single page, they're divided up into tabs. JavaScript tabs, so clicking from tab to tab is instantaneous. Users without JavaScript will just get a normal hyperlink to a new page where their selected tab is visible.

Also they're getting their own 400x90 pixel logos. So I think the pages are a little more fun now. :)

Alright, after more than a week of downtime, cuvou.com is back up. It's (temporarily?) being hosted by Lunarpages, a web hosting company based out of California somewhere... so at least I know the server time will match my local time here.

That's all the updates for tonight. Hopefully I wasn't penalized too much by Google for disappearing for a week. I'm pretty sure they need 404s for longer than that before they remove me from the index. ;)

Finally, I'll discuss further my trip to Los Angeles.

Back in April I was chatting with Matt Austin, an online friend I met about 5 years ago through the hobby of chatterbot programming. He's working as a software developer at Fonality and threw out this random idea of, "why don't you move out to LA and work for Fonality?" So I was like, sure I'll check it out. If anything it'd add some more options for where I could go in the near future. Immediately the director of engineering starts chatting with me about it.

I didn't realize until I chatted with Matt some more that the director of engineering is none other than Samy, the guy who wrote the Samy is my hero worm that swept across the MySpace network a few years ago. It was pretty cool to find out that this is who I've been talking to. It was like knowing a celebrity.

Anyway, a couple weekends later Fonality flew me down to Los Angeles to check out the company, the area, and for the semi-formal interview. I hung out with Samy and Matt and their other roommate in their apartment while I was down there. The weather though kinda sucked, it was in the 50s and 60s or something that weekend... exactly the same as the weather in Michigan at the time.

At any rate, I'm going for it. I start on June 2^nd as a software developer for Fonality, so the week before then is the "moving to Los Angeles" week. That's gonna be a load of fun, getting to drive through the desert and the mountains and everything. Also, since I left Liquid Web, I'm back to hosting my websites off my home Linux box again. So unless I get a new web host, my sites will be going down like a cheerleader at homecoming when I unplug my computer and won't be back up until I get settled in at LA and get Internet access there.

If anyone cares, I released my Cuvou::Traffic module for download. The module is released under the I don't give a damn license, if you find it useful then good, but YMMV.

It's on the libcuvou page.

Here's another update about my content management system. I've added something called "page comments", which works just like blog comments but they can be used anywhere else where needed. Having said that, I've put my Guestbook page back up, and it directly uses this "page comments" module. Also, Photo Albums support commenting on the pictures. :)

Today I've begun reprogramming my Tk::HyperText widget. The old module didn't use any "real" HTML parsers, so it was reading the HTML code in as plain text and trying to figure out how to display it that way. The new module is going to use HTML::TokeParser, which will make the code cleaner and also more efficient and less buggy.

I've only been working on it for a couple of hours so far, and all it supports so far is the font tag, bold, italic, underline, and line breaks. Here's a screenshot:

The functionality of the module when it's done is going to be drastically different to what's currently on CPAN. I don't know if anyone has actually used Tk::HyperText in their programs yet, but the new module will definitely break programs that were relying on the methods provided by the old module. I'm thinking I'll have the module use similar methods and handlers to Wx::ActiveX::Mozilla.

Update (4:54 PM EDT) - The module now supports pretty much all the markup tags (not links, lists, or obscure tags like abbr and acronym though). Something else of interest is that only the first body tag found will recolorize the widget as a whole; any additional body tags will only override the colors of the current text style, so you can get the "AIM effect" with it (where each message can have its own background color which covers its entire horizontal space).

I'll probably have the new module on CPAN within a few days.

Update (5/9) - It supports tables now!

I finally declare my blog software as having been completed. There will likely be some bug fixes still, but most of the features I wanted to add to the blog software have been implemented. Specifically, today I made numerous additions:

• I get e-mailed when new comments are added to the blog. As this particular blog is pushing 10 posts, soon the older posts will go onto a second page and it would be hard to keep up with comments on old entries if not for e-mail.
• I added an RSS feed for the blog. It's at /rss.cgi on this domain name. There's a feed button on the left navigation bar underneath the "Powered by Redhat" button.
• Time stamps on the "post an entry" page are written out as full, editable-and-JavaScript-updateable dates and times instead of Unix time. The timestamps are converted to and from Unix time when needed.
• Labels such as "1 comment/n comments" are moved to the configuration so they're easily changeable.
• The headings on the blog entries in the "multiview" mode aren't H2's anymore, but now are divs that take their styles from the web design's style sheets.
• There are probably other changes I forgot about already.

I've been trying with a high priority to get my blog software completed lately because I plan on starting a new site, which will be mainly a web blog, where I'll write about interesting things. And by "interesting things" that will probably involve a lot of technical topics, but explained in a simplified way... for example I want to write some articles that explain how file shredding works and why it's difficult to permanently delete data, and explain how that all works using diagrams and stuff.

I still have yet to discuss further my trip to Los Angeles this weekend. That will come in a later post.