Cranked.Me

How to make gnome-shell default Gnome Linux shell

2010-07-15T15:33:00.000+02:00

Launch gconf-editor

Go to /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/

Change windowmanager parameter to gnome-shell

Thanks this thread on ubuntuforums.

Funny/Geeky/Weird/Grim pages in Wikipedia

2009-03-31T22:01:00.005+02:00

Stumbling through Wikipedia, I've found some pages I like to revisit from time to time. The list of the pages grew bigger, until I decided to share it. What are yours favorite pages from Wikipedia? :)

Real-time statistics

Want to figure out what's hot now on Wikipedia? This page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Popular_pages has it :)

Grim statistics

Pages like these give me creeps under my skin. Watch deaths as they occur in real time - htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_in_2009

Users

I find this user page funny: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jesus_Lover

Bots

Love the design of control panel of this bot (by the way, he's also the most active bot on Wikipedia): htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SmackBot
The big red button is just amazing:)

Wikipedia's "official fun pages"

htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_humor
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Department_of_Fun

Wikipedia's "official weird pages"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles

Gambling

Wikipedians gamble by making bets on the day something will happen. Like, 666,666th article - htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:666,666th_pool
All wikipedia pools: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pools
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Last_topic_pool

Wikipedia also has a feeling of self-importance

htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Awareness_statistics
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_referenced_articles
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_charts

As well as wikipedians

List of wikipedians by number of edits - htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits

And even their bots :)

List of wikipedia bots by number of edits - htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_bots_by_number_of_edits

Web-comics

Want to know which webcomics are recognized and cool?
htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-sufficient_webcomics

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

"Just as many hotels have no thirteenth floor (to the great dismay of several late bungee jumpers), Wikipedia will skip the 666,666th article out of systematically biased prejudice. Or threat of lawsuits from extreme religionists. Radiant 12:50, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)"

The fear of number six hundred sixty six is called Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, and also has it's page on Wikipedia: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

Vandalism

Vandalism in Wikipedia happens quite often (hence so many anti-vandal bots exist). However, it's not always performed because of evil intent. Sometimes it is made for lulz :)
Funny Wikipedia Vandalism - htpp://www.imserba.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-94521.html
Funny Wikipedia Vandalism about government: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Government&diff=118335356&oldid=118335061

Extras

While writing the article, I also found some other nice leads which I would also like to share.
Meet Fucking, a village in Austria: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*******,_Austria/
What makes it even more fun, is that this village is only half an hour away from Kissing and Petting :)

How to post an image in its original size on Blogger or "Blogger scales down my images"

2008-06-05T08:17:00.005+02:00

In this post I will explain why Blogger scales your images down and how to post an image in it's original size in Blogger.

Why this happens? By using a Blogspot blog you receive an option to upload photos directly to your blog from the editing interface. The photos will be stored in your Picasa account. However, Blogger restriction for this is that it doesn't allow you to hotlink to your photos in full size - the maximum hotlink size of your image is 800x800.

Even more. By default, even if you choose "Large size" when you upload your photo, it will still return you a link to 400x400 images, and it especially hurts if you want to post some code snippets or precise pixel images.

What to do? There are some good news though. Most of the Blogger posts aren't more then 800 pixels wide (and even if they are, you should always think about how it's gonna look on a display of someone who doesn't have 1600x1200 resolution - you also have right and left columns that hog the display space, right?)

To make your images/pictures/photos look fullsize in your blogger posts you need to edit the link to this picture. Once you upload an image from the editor interface, the code for the image will look like this:
<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bpV.blogger.com/ WWWWWWWWWWWW/XXXXXXXXXXX/YYYYYYYYYYY/ ZZZZZZZZZZ/s1600-h/my-sample-image.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bpV.blogger.com/ WWWWWWWWWWWW/XXXXXXXXXXX/YYYYYYYYYYY /ZZZZZZZZZZ/s400/my-sample-image.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_UUUUUUUUUUUUU" /></a>Where UUUUUUUUUUU, V, WWWWWWWWWWWW, XXXXXXXXXXX, YYYYYYYYYYY and ZZZZZZZZZZ will be some mixed digits/letters.

See the text s400 that I've highlighted here in green? That's what you need to change. Change it to s800 and you are done.

Update: Blogger has recently started to add width and height into the <img> tag, so now you also have to remove them. Just look for the text height="XX" and width="YY" and remove it before publishing the post.

This guide will help you to post full-sized images to your BlogSpot blog, if these images have less then 800x800 resolutions. If you need to post a bigger image — use services like imageshack. There is a great list of image hosting sites available on the Blogger templates blog. I wouldn't recommend to use Photobucket as it has some PhotoBucket image hosting issues though.

That's it. Enjoy.

How to make Flash under Firefox finally work under 64-bit Ubuntu

2010-01-31T16:07:00.001+01:00

I've finally managed to make my Firefox usable again under amd64 Ubuntu by installing the proper version of 64bit Flash player directly from Adobe (current version is 10.)

I don't have stupid problems with stupid npviewer.bin anymore and my notebook finally doesn't lag.

Here's what you should do to install a native 64-bit version of Flash under Ubuntu:

First of all, uninstall the original flash player:
sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-installer nsplugin-wrapper
Download the 64-bit version of Flash player for Linux from Adobe 64-bit Flash download page
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.42.34.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz tar -xf libflashplayer-10.0.42.34.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
Replace the old Flash player with new one:
cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

That's it. You now have a non-laggy Firefox.
If you are interested, I've also stumbled upon this ubuntuforums thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1358591. The guys there, however, do too much in my opinion - it looks like rocket science and shooting sparrows using a cannon for me.

P.S. I have found the logo image for this post while googling for 'firefox icon'. Clearly it will become a new firefox logo very soon.

How to enable jack-sense audio support for Sony Vaio notebooks in Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

2008-05-12T14:45:00.009+02:00

Add line
options snd-hda-intel model=vaio
into your /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

Restart alsa:
sudo alsa force-reload

Thanks to Helder for pointing this out.

Navigate this thread:
Previous: How to make Flash and Java work on Kubuntu AMD64 (Using Firefox 32bit)

Next:How to disable touchpad while typing in Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

How to optimize your Blogger post page titles for search engines moving the blog name to the end of the title

2008-07-09T16:51:00.003+02:00

By default, Blogger blog titles look like this:

Eterniel: How to optimize your Blogger post page titles for search engines

having your blog title, a semicolon, and the post title. In this order.
Considering the Google love for page title to look exactly like a search query (or at least start like this), this is not the optimal layout. And if you are not a self loving git like me, your blog title might not be a one-word nickname of your own, but something like 'A blog about my little kittens'. This will turn your post page titles into something like this:

A blog about my little kittens: How to optimize your Blogger post page titles for search engines

with page titles like this, you might try your luck fighting wikipedia and kittenwar for kitten-related searches, but your 'Blog title optimization' posts can end up somewhere at the end of 17th page of search results.

To optimize your blog titles, moving the blog name to the end of the title and giving search engines an easy time to index your hottest link-bait post titles:

Go to Blogger dashboard
Choose Layout->Edit HTML
Search for the following code:<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
Replace it with the following:<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'> <title><data:blog.title/></title> <b:else/> <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'> <title><data:blog.title/> archive: <data:blog.pageName/></title> <b:else/> <title><data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/></title> </b:if> </b:if>
This code does the following (in the following order):
1. Leaves your main/search/label page titles the same
2. Changes your archive pages to the following format: <Blog title> archive: <Date>
3. Changes your post page titles to the following format:<Post Title> - <Blog Title>
Save the template.

This is it. You can experiment with page titles modifying the data between <title> and </title> tags in the previously mentioned code.

Blogger data:blog.pageType variable possible values:

"index" — The 'index' pages. This includes your main page, search pages, post by label pages
"archive" — 'Archive' pages. This is what you get if you click on some month/year link in 'Archives' widget.
"item" — Blog post pages. Your post opened in a distinct page dedicated to it.

SEO flavor by country - a definitive list

2009-04-02T12:00:00.011+02:00

American SEO: Create a website containing words 'searchengine' in its name. Talk about SEO until everybody considers you an expert. Afterwards, demand 5-digit prices for your 'add alt tags to images' advices.
Russian SEO: Create a hundred of doorways leading to fifty illegal mp3/cracks/erotic sites. Stuff them with endless popups leading to a dozen of half-legal erotic/mp3 sites. Redirect some clicks to lead to half a dozen perfectly legal online stores - either for referral bonus, or run the stores on your own.
Turkish SEO: Pick a niche. Subscribe to 30-40 middle-popularity blogs in that niche. Every day republish one of the posts you read in your blog, removing all the credentials. However, forget to check all the links in the post, accidentally linking back to the author and creating a backling.
Vietnamese SEO: Find a blog template/widget/picture. Modify the backlink to point to you instead of original author. Redistribute.
Ukrainian SEO: Create a website, claiming that you are a success story, and everybody else are losers. Offer others to visit your trainings to learn to become a success story themselves. While doing this, look pathetic, so others in attempt to say 'just look at this idiot' will generate a bunch of links to you.
Indian SEO: Write a howto article, describing a trivial action (How to properly switch off your computer, for example). Repeat for every possible Google query.

Did I miss any? :)

Firefox is slow - how to make it faster?

2009-02-15T18:36:00.001+01:00

Firefox was quite slow and had the following symptoms:

A delay when resolving host names
A couple-second delay when switching between tabs
Slow scrolling inside the page

I did some research and tweaking, and now it runs blazingly fast. This post is here as a reference if I ever have to do it again.

My current setup:

Sony VAIO notebook
Nvidia videocard
Linux Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
Firefox 3.06 - 3.1 beta - both were lagging about the same

What I did:

Disable IPv6

(this helps with DNS responses from sites)

Type about:config in Firefox address-bar
If needed, press I'll be careful, I promise button :)
Type network.dns in the Filter field, find network.dns.disableIPv6 value in the list below and double-click on it to make it change to True

Speed-up page loading times by increasing the amount of http request Firefox issues simulataneously

On the same about:config page
Type network.http.p in the Filter field
Set network.http.pipelining to True
Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to True
Increase network.http.pipelining.maxrequests value to about 16-20 from the default 4.

Tell Firefox to start drawing page immediately after it receives some part of it from the server

Right-click somewhere in about:config window
Choose New->Integer from the context menu
Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Set it to "0"

If you are an Ubuntu user with Emerald

update your Nvidia driver (this can give drastic performance boost)

Even if you have automatic updates on, you might still have old Nvidia drivers. There is a known interoperability issue between Nvidia drivers and Emerald, so you can either switch to another window decorator, or update drivers.
The easiest way to do it is to use EnvyNG:

Install envyng-gtk if you use Ubuntu/Gnome, envyng-qt if you use Kubuntu/KDE:
sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk
or
sudo apt-get install envyng-qt
for KDE
Launch Applications->System tools->EnvyNG
Choose NVIDIA->Install the NVIDIA driver (Automatic Hardware Detection)
Press Apply and then restart your computer when asked.

Firefox should be now faster than lightning.

References:

I am sorry I wore grim reaper costume for your grandmother's 82nd birthday party

2008-07-04T00:28:00.003+02:00

Duplicate title tags, part 2

2009-03-24T20:27:00.000+01:00

Hello everyone,

I'm still experimenting on Duplicate title tags/duplicate meta descriptions issue in Blogger.

I've roughly described it in my Tweets:

Eterniel:Just did some changes to my website template. Hopefully they will resolve most of the Duplicate Title Tags issues.
Eterniel:The biggest problem in this issue, of course, is blogger
Eterniel:It generates unneeded '?showcomment=' urls, which are then interpreted by Google Webmaster Tools as distinct pages
Eterniel:Furthermore, Blogger exports these links in /feeds/comments/default feed
Eterniel:So you have to throw away 'all-head-content' includable and replace it with your own.

I'm quite sure this will resolve all the issues. However, it takes quite some time while Google re-crawls the whole site.

I'm quite impatient, so I will use one trick. Don't pay attention to the following lines, that's just some too complicated robot SEO magic:

<!-- **robots -->
<script xmlns='http://www.googlebot.com/1999/gsa-crawler' xmlns:meta='http://www.googlebot.com/1999/gsa-crawler/meta' >
<user-agent name="Mediapartners-Google">
<page>
<uri>http://cranked.me/2008/04/but-i-figure-if-it-isnt-little-scary.html</uri>
<index>1</index>
<follow>0</follow>
</page>
<page>
<uri>http://cranked.me/2008/04/reason-i-dont-shop-online.html</uri>
<index>1</index>
<follow>0</follow>
</page>
</user-agent>

</gsa:script>
<!-- /**robots -->

Корованы и Свиборги или реалии современного гейммейкинга

2008-04-29T16:12:00.007+02:00

Здраствуйте. Я, Кирилл. Хотел бы чтобы вы сделали игру, 3Д-экшон суть такова… Пользователь может играть лесными эльфами, охраной дворца и злодеем. И если пользователь играет эльфами то эльфы в лесу, домики деревяные набигают солдаты дворца и злодеи. Можно грабить корованы…

Всё по порядку. Я всю жизнь мечтал делать игры. Даже программировать учился для того, чтобы в играх себе ставить вечные жизни.
Не сложилось. Все вокруг меня делают игры, все друзья, коллеги, знакомые, и только я один "не такой". Делал всё — от автомобилей до spyware, от операционных систем до мобильных телефонов. И только с гейм девелопментом так и не сложилось. 15 написанных мной игр до сих пор пылятся где-то далеко на секторах трехдюймовых дискет. В то время, как у всех остальных уже компании по производству игр — WST.

И потянуло же меня, когда уже собирался спать, и получил сообщение от Merkredy (который по совместительству является директором этой WST) в непонятной кодировке, запустить icq2go и выяснить, что же мне писал великий гейммейкер Merkredy. Очень зря. Ибо затем еще половину ночи хохотал над линком, который он мне дал. Над корованами, а также угловатыми гнумами и Свиборгами, которых я нашел в процессе поиска ресурсов по корованам.

Итак.

Корованы

Все началось с этого письма мальчика Кирилла в компанию по разработке компьютерных игр Мистленд:

Здраствуйте. Я, Кирилл. Хотел бы чтобы вы сделали игру, 3Д-экшон суть такова… Пользователь может играть лесными эльфами, охраной дворца и злодеем. И если пользователь играет эльфами то эльфы в лесу, домики деревяные набигают солдаты дворца и злодеи. Можно грабить корованы…

— А что умеет твоя прога?
— Можно грабить корованы

Корованы - это бренд. Рекомендую мальчику Кириллу зарегистрировать свои авторские права на это слово.

Больше информации по корованам:
Как правильно грабить корованы: руководство на абсурдопедии.
Корованы - статья на lurkmore.ru

И в окончание, браузерная massive singleplayer online non-role playing game Корован Френзи.
Отличительные особенности игры:

Можно грабить корованы
Можно не грабить корованы (aka полная свобода действий)
Можно грабить несколько корованов одновременно
Отсутствует всё лишнее и мешающее грабить корованы

Гном

О гноме кратко. Человек выложил на форуме gamedev.ru 3D модель гнома для оценки. Модель была настолько угловатой и корявой, что сразу же получила признание.

Появилась даже номинация Gnome Award:

Gnome Award, высшая степень «жжош сцуко»	Gnome Award, степень «зачот»	Gnome Award, степень «КГ/АМ»

Гном — неофициальный символ русскоязычного геймдев-коммьюнити. Кроме того — он ни что иное, как и его скрытая суть — гениальная и производящая фурор идея в странных и, возможно, необработанных, статичных формах, где форма и идея связаны друг с другом нераздельно и постоянно.

http://www.gamedev.ru/terms/GNOME

Можете еще насладиться аски-артом фанатов:


                             .Q#HHHQ.
                            JQQQUQ##QL
                           (F/._ .(_JQ)
                           ()    ()`(UH
                         ._##UAAUUUUU##L__
                      _JAUU#####H####HH#UUUAU_
      ._     ______L "A4DAU###########HQA"4UQF(JD.____  .___.
      (DDDDDDDADDADDDDDDF4_############  JQUADDDDDDDDADDDDAD)    ()
       DDD)DAAAAAADDLDAAADU##########HQJQAAAAAAAAAAAAAA4(AAA)
      `(`F`""4UUAQAADDDDDDUH####HHHHHHQUAAAAAAAUUUAUU"""` `""
                    ` (DDL(HHHHHHHHHHHQDAAAU""
                      `DDDAAAQ###QUAAUAAAAUU
                       ADDAQ#UF44DDDAAAAUAU)
                      _UUQ#ULJLJDDDDAAAAAAU`
                    Q#QQUADD"DDDFDDDAAAAUUQ)
                    ###QUUUUAAAAAAAAUQQQQQ#)
                   .QQQUUQQQQQQUAUQQQ######)
                   (QQUAD"DAAQUUAUUUUUUUUUU)
                   `""4UUUUAAAAADDDDUUUUQQ#)
                       A""""AUUUQQUUUU""""4)
                       `DAAAA_A_A).JADAAUUU)
                        AAAAAAUAAADUAAUUUUU)
                       )4UUAAAUAAFAUUUUUUUU)
                        (UDDAAUAULAAAAUUUUF
                        `UUUQQ#QU)UQQQQQQQ)
                         JAAAAAUA)AUAAAAD))
                         UAAAAUAA)4UUAAAUA`
                             ""4U `"F"""4
                               ()
                               J`
                        L_____J)  (.     (

Ссылки:
Тред форума gamedev.ru

Шар Свиборга

История со Свиборгом повторила и даже превысила рекорд Гнома. 200 страниц фотошопа "Swiborg for president" здесь. По мотивам Свиборга создают сообщества, игры, а также вот такие видео:

Свиборг - чрезвычайно веселый персонаж. На следующий день после интернет-знакомства, работая над проектом визуализации я создал класс CSwiborg. И функции CreateSwiborg, MoveSwiborg, ResizeSwiborg, PositionSwiborgs и т.п. До сих пор смущаю сотрудников, когда хихикаю, работая над этим кодом.

About Gary Schubert

2008-01-01T13:37:00.009+01:00

Hello, my name is Gary, and I have created this place.

I am an engineering geek that lives in Bern, Switzerland. My inner laziness, impatience and hubris had pushed me into engineering, and after winning some national programming contests my life has became fun and easy.

My former employers are Volvo, Flextronics and Samsung. Currently I design and build next-gen telecommunication devices for Patton Electronics in Switzerland.

I own a small outdoor advertising agency in a third-world country.

My free time I spend practicing Ju-Jitsu and updating this cozy engineering and optimization blog.

Feel free to check my top posts, latest posts, subscribe to my feed or just drop me a line here or on twitter :)

Bonus:

P.S. I miss the times of Web 1.0

Seo is going to die... Isn't it?

2008-12-10T13:31:00.001+01:00

About half a year ago I was planning to make a fortune by creating a socially-tailored custom search engine pages. I even started to write a Firefox addon like StumbleUpon Toolbar. But then I discovered scour.com.

Couple of weeks ago, Google has introduced SearchWiki. The search will never be the same again.

My rant: frankly, I think this sucks. Playing with the system was fun. Discovering the things that the system "likes", being fast to react and getting thousands of hits from search engines (recent example: g00d-stuff epidemy).
Now it all is pretty much gone. Seems botnets is the future of SEO.

Live Firefox 3 Download Day Pledge Monitoring tool.

2008-06-18T17:24:00.003+02:00

Live Firefox 3 Download Day Pledge Monitoring tool written by me in a couple of hours (most of the time was spent on correlating Spreadfirefox country name database with the others on internet.)

MSN worm / virus g00d-stuff.com epidemic launch

2008-08-14T00:09:00.032+02:00

This page describes the http://g00d-stuff.com MSN virus/worm (also known as PICS FOR MSN FRIENDS), that has been activated on Aug 14th, it's sources and methods of infection, vulnerable platforms/browsers, methods of removal of http://g00d-stuff.com and similar MSN viruses/worms.

Information about http://g00d-stuff.com and similar sites

g00d-stuff.com is an MSN worm that spreads through MSN instant messenger with provoking text description, encouraging users to follow the attached link.

Sources of infection

MSN user receives a text message from one of the users in his contact list. A message can sometimes contain a provoking text and always contains a link to a site, containing a virus.

Provoking message can be one (but not limited to) of these:

"Album photo.zip"
oh you and me? nah its me the clown again"
"lool someone put ur photo here: D"
"i want you to swim with me! send this file to swim with me!"
"lool someone put ur photo here: D"
"lol someone has put your photo here: D"

Embedded link can be one of these:

g00d-stuff.com
username.bl1ng.info
username.jumphost.info
username.n1cestuff.info
checkdiz.info
username.awes0me.info
username.ther1ng.info
username.snapsh0t.info
username.da-real-deal.info
username.ch33se.info
c0ol-th1ng.info
imgeshack.info
m0bil3.info
imageloko.info
imagedino.info
imagealina.info
hostapic.info
holyimage.info
imagrshak.info
get-that-stuff.info
coooool.info
datsyou.com
is-thatt-you.com
is-dat-u.com
thatzyou.com

After visiting, the virus uses an unknown yet vulnerability of Firefox/Internet Explorer to infect the victims machine and distribute itself by sending links to further contacts.

Malicious website forms and variations

There are two known forms of g00d-stuff MSN worm page: The PICS FOR MSN FRIENDS phishing page and "FREE RINGTONES, WALLPAPERS, JAVA-GAMES" page etc.

PICS FOR MSN PAGE will look similar to MSN login interface and will ask you to enter your MSN login credentials to proceed. DO NOT enter your credentials there under any circumstances.

"FREE RINGTONES, WALLPAPERS, JAVA-GAMES" page looks like this (photo from Switzerland):

Both pages are heavily booby trapped with viruses and exploits, and if you use Windows and Firefox lower then version 3.0 or Internet Explorer - you are probably already infected.

Vulnerable platforms/browsers

List of known vulnerable platforms:

Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista

List of known vulnerable browsers:

Internet Explorer
Firefox 2.0

First things to do

First of all - DON'T PANIC! :)
It really helps not to open the link, enclosed in the text message. However, you have probably already opened it - and that's why you are here
Try to notify your friends and warn them not to open any links they will receive.
You can also set a warning message as your status in MSN
And if you didn't open the link - you are pretty much done :) If you actually did and you notice that you keep sending links to other people - proceed to g00d-stuff removal instructions

How to remove http://g00d-stuff.com MSN virus from your system

Download MSNFix utility (yes, it is safe - I can clearly state it after checking the batch file code and finding other reputable sources linking to it (like this site with 34 thousands subscribers)).
Extract the contents into some directory on your hard drive (for example, C:\MSNFix)
Run MSNFix.bat
Choose your language
Press R to start virus scan

(Update: Author of MSNFix has left a comment here, asking for submission of all non-detected modifications of virus to http://upload.changelog.fr/. There you can leave your nickname, url where you've gotten the virus, your comment, and an infected file - so it will be analyzed and MSNFix will be updated to be able to cure your modification of MSNFix as well (Just in case: the button for download is marked Envoyer, not Annuler)).

After test and removal is performed (so you don't have any spyware/malware/keyloggers on your machine), you will need to reclaim your MSN account:

1. Go to http://login.live.com web page and click on Forgot Your Password.
2. Type in your MSN e-mail address, type the characters that appear in the Picture box, and click Continue.
3. Click Send yourself a password reset e-mail message.
4. Click Send Message.
5. Click Done on the confirmation page.
6. Open your e-mail and follow the link in the e-mail message to reset your password.
7. On the Confirm your e-mail address page, type your e-mail address, and then click Continue.
8. Type your new password two times, and then click Continue.
9. If you want to enter an “alternate” e-mail address, type the address two times, and then click Continue. If you do not want to enter an “alternate” e-mail address, click Skip.
10. When you receive the “You’ve changed your password” message, click Done.

If you want to receive updates about the g00d-stuff virus activity and methods of removal, subscribe to my rss feed - I will keep an eye on that one since couple of my friends are still infected.

References

First report of a new g00d-stuff form of known PICS FOR MSN FRIENDS virus (French)
Description and removal instructions page (French) (doesn't look very trustworthy to me to be honest)
MSNFix - MSN virus removal tool (zip file, 772kb)
PICS FOR MSN FRIENDS description (English) - quite good and informative source
Relevant Yahoo! Answers thread (Italian) - good for watching for updates

This article has received hundreds of hits from Google by "g00d-stuff"-related queries in first hours after being published, meaning it has became a real threat due to unknown before vulnerability of Firefox. Judging by geographical locations of requests through the day (over a thousand), I can say that the most affected countries are USA, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Australia.

Duplicate title tags / meta descriptions: Google Webmaster Tools and Blogger blogs (fix-it manual included)

2008-11-13T14:37:00.019+01:00

Sometimes I receive very interesting e-mails or insightful comments like this: Have you found a solution to duplicate title tags/duplicate meta description issue?. I try to respond as extensive as possible at that moment, and often even dedicate posts to describe it in more detail.

So today's post in dedicated to Blogger generated "Duplicate title tags/Duplicate meta descriptions" warnings in Google Webmaster Tools.

I know how bad duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions are, just give me "fix it" paragraph fast.

What is "Duplicate title tags" or "Duplicate meta descriptions"?

Search engines nowadays are smart. Very smart. However they are still what they are - machines. Sometimes they can't decide which exactly your page matches the search query the best - so they check everything that can give them more clue - titles of your pages, their meta keywords, meta descriptions - everything. However, if two your pages have the same title and same meta description, there is no such clue. That's the reason search engines consider duplicate meta descriptions/title tags as "bad", and can actually penalize you for that.

What is Google Webmaster Tools and how is it related to Duplicate title tags and Duplicate meta descriptions warning?

We all know Google Webmaster Tools. It is a great tool that gives you some insight on how your website is seen by Google (and can also give you some hints about up-to-date Page Rank of your pages (while toolbar rank is updated once in a couple of months, data in Google Webmaster Tools is more fresh, see "Crawl stats").
However, sometimes Google Webmaster Tools provide us with such an intimidating picture:

(Numbers in this image are photoshopped, since after applying everything I wrote in this guide I don't have any duplicate title tags/meta descriptions issues anymore)
These numbers can indeed be scary.

Why it happens?

Blogger has a bad habit to refer to comments through links like this: http://cranked.me/2008/07/blogger-templates-and-xhtml-markup.html?showComment=1219419960000#c7051926467725606787. Thus Google threats links like these as separate pages (while it is actually simply a link to an anchor on your page). Actually, there are quite a few other SEO problems in Blogger as well (doesn't mean they can't be fixed though, we'll see it later :)

How bad is it for SEO?

For every comment you have in your blog, Google thinks there exists another page with the same title tag and meta description, thus Google might decide your site is not search-engine-friendly. (Since it's actually one page, these "multiple" pages in Google's eyes will also have the same content, which can lead to duplicate content issue as well). Google Webmaster Tools doesn't show you any statistics about your pages that are considered 'duplicate content', however numbers of 'duplicate title tag issues' and 'duplicate meta description issues' might ring a bell and give you the general idea.

Ok, duplicate title tags/duplicate meta descriptions are really bad. How to fix it?

Basically, all we need to do to fix duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions issue in Blogger is to hide links to comments in your posts from search engines. Content of the comments will still be in search engines because it is a part of your post page.
So the fix is performed in three steps:

Edit template
Wrap blog archive widget
Remove or replace recent comments widget

Note: there is a small twist though: Google will still be able to dig some links to your comment pages from your comments feed (usually located at /feeds/comments/default).

Step 1. Edit your blog template

We need to hide the permalink to the comment from search engines:

(the link that says August 22, 2008 5:46 PM). However, we would still like to be able to link to the comment if needed, so the link should still be there for users.
I'm not a big fan of JavaScript because content generated by it cannot be used for SEO purposes, however this time we will use this weakness for our benefit.

So, open your blog template (remember to previously save it). Tick "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox, and find this code in your template:

<a expr:href='data:comment.url' title='comment permalink'>
  <data:comment.timestamp/>
</a>

It should look like this:

Replace it with the following code:

<b:if cond='data:post.commentPagingRequired'>
  <a expr:href='data:comment.url' title='comment permalink'> <data.comment.timestamp/> </a>
<b:else/>
  <a expr:href='data:blog.url + &quot;#&quot; + data:comment.anchorName' title='comment permalink'> <data:comment.timestamp/> </a>
</b:if>

Save the template and check how it looks. It should look the same as original, however now timestamps should link to comments by their anchor ID's, without confusing Google crawler with ?showcomment= part. (In case multi-page comments are required, the long form will be used).
The described trick works in all browsers that I know of.

Step 2. Wrap blog archive widget

Blog archive widget for Blogger is very nice, however it has a bad habit of generating long links Google doesn't understand. This leads to duplicate content issues and duplicate title tags/meta descriptions. It is easy to fix, however: click the small wrench icon under your blog archive widget, and choose flat list option in the settings window:

Don't forget to press Save button :)

Step 3. Remove recent comments widget

Recent comments widget is made by creating a feed widget with http://<yoursiteurl>/feeds/comments/default url as feed source. It is nifty to have, however it supplies search engines with links to your blog comments, what we try to avoid (because comment content goes to search engines' index with your post page anyway). Either remove the widget or use the javascript recent comments widget. (The javascript one, however, might slow down loading time of your sidebar a bit).

After following instructions supplied here, Google Webmaster Tools will not bother you with the duplicate title tags/meta descriptions issue as there will be none (it takes time for Google to re-crawl all your site, so be patient, takes about 2-3 weeks). This will boost your search engine rankings a little bit since Google now thinks your site is "Google friendly" (and in fact it is).

In the next post I'll describe how to teach Blogger to highlight your own comments with different color/style, so make sure you subscribe to my rss feed.

Good luck and enjoy your Google Webmaster Tools experience :)

Python regexp quiz for geeks

2008-05-27T17:52:00.003+02:00

What does blackbox function return?


import re
def blackbox(num):
  return not re.match(r"^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$", "1"*num)

Direct traffic from Montara - yet another search engine launch? :)

2009-02-19T18:15:00.004+01:00

Today I have experienced a spike in direct traffic coming from one particular city: Montara, California (website)

Montara: is a small city in California, with less than 3,000 inhabitants. A hundred visits a day from city that big was suspicious.

It seems not only I have experienced this.

'The visitor' reports Internet Explorer with resolutions 1024x768 and 800x600, Flash version 10 and Java support.

Do we experience a rise of yet another web crawler? :)

Even if you quit World of Warcraft, you are still one of them...

2008-07-21T11:08:00.010+02:00

Originally posted to Game-Guide.me

I feel sooooo same as Tycho... I didn't even think a second about a phrase Gabe said.

There should be one called "Win Omen", for when you raidwipe by drawing aggro from the MT with dots.
Right? It's like... L2P, nub.

I didn't even ponder a second when I read that... That was just... normal for me. And only after reading Tycho's comment I felt that something is indeed not good :)

For those of you who come here from search engines looking for term definitions (Win Omen definition in the end):

wipe: A situation when the entire party is killed. (short for "wipeout")
raidwipe: wipe, but applied to entire raid (25-40 people)
drawing aggro: Incrementing the monster's internal 'hate to personally you' counter to a level when he leaves his current target and switches on you.
MT: see Main Tank
Main Tank: a person who is responsible for drawing attention of the monster, thus making the monster focus attacks on the provoker (while the rest of the group is 'relatively' safe because they don't receive direct hits).
DOT: An abbreviation for 'Damage over Time' - a shortcut for spells/abilities or their part that don't do massive direct damage, but instead spread the damage over a certain period of time.
L2P: An abbreviation for 'Learn to play' — a phrase often used to piss-off someone by belittling his gaming skills.
nub: an offensive short form for 'newbie' — someone who is not yet familiar with a game.
Win Omen: The term refers to Omen Threat Meter — an interface addon to World of Warcraft that estimates and shows amount of 'hate' a given monster has to each player. The player that tops the list (Wins 'top the Omen' competition) usually receives a focused attention of the monster, and if the victim is not Main Tank - consequences can be dire not only for the 'Winner', but to the whole raid.

Linux Mud Clients Overview - TinTin++, KMud, Lyntin and KMuddy

2008-06-17T18:54:00.003+02:00

Update 20.02.2009: I am using Tintin++. Because:

It is Tintin++ compatible :)
You can actually edit your scripts from your favourite text editor and then just reload it with one command - you don't have to create your 20-line aliases in command-line
#split command provides quite good windowing possibility
#prompt command provides powerful statistics possibility (it's possible to create multiline prompts, and dump everything you need there)
You can do quite some window-work with screen or terminator
You can use tintin++ over ssh (to workaround firewalls etc)

I've been using ZMud for quite a while. Now that I've moved to Linux (currently Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron) as my primary and the only operating system, I've found myself in need of a good MUD client. Zmud runs out-of-the box on Wine, though it runs quite slow (especially settings windows) and stub-buggy (like RichEdit input box doesn't show the text you've inputted Update: to fix it, turn off spellchecker). It also likes to crash sometimes (that can be deadly).

So I've went on a path of finding a suitable Linux Mud client for me. My main criteries were:

TinTin compatibility (given a fact I have plenty of scripts written already in ZMud, I would like to be able to export most of them, or at least port them with minimal effort)
Ability to import scripts from other mud clients (would save me a lot of work if something could import ZMud scripts)
Ability to export scripts — in case of next "migration"
Script editing UI. I write quite complex scripts and often tune them in process. It will be a hell in a command line. (Yes, they are far more complex then stupid cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6)

Clients I've reviewed so far:

TinTin++
This is one of the oldest mud clients, with scripting system that is now considered "standard" for mud clients.
Pros:
- 100% TinTin compatible :)
Cons:
- Totally console. No fancy buttons, gauges, mxp hyperlinks and stuff. And most importantly — no visual editing.
KMud
Pros:
- Script editing UI
Cons:
- Not TinTin-compatible.
- Unsupported. Last update — 6 years ago.
Lyntin
Pros:
- Tintin compatible
- Tk UI (limited to multiple output windows though)
- Originally written in python so it easily accepts hot-swappable python plugins and extensions
- Crossplatform
- Supported and developed
Cons:
- No script editing UI
- Pretty much console, even in it's "Tk" form — no buttons, gauges etc
KMuddy
Pros:
- Script editing UI. Quite advanced, I must say — regexps, variable triggers etc.
- Supported and developed
- Graphical — buttons, gauges and stuff, yet with simple and nice layout.
- Online-execution of external scripts
Cons:
- Not TinTin-compatible
- Quite unpretentious scripting — probably not enough to implement everything you might want (for example, you can't create a new trigger from a trigger), plus stupid multiline constructions like /if ... /endif
- Troublesome to write aliases that accept variable amount of parameters

Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - tags on last.fm

2009-02-18T13:26:00.001+01:00

I like how "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley is tagged "brutal death metal" on last.fm :)

Netvibes.com - the worst first impression I ever had

2009-02-19T15:25:00.004+01:00

— You never have a second chance to make a good first impression.

Today I have visited Netvibes

I havent seen so much fail in quite some time.

The page is composed from modules that use _three_ different languages at the same time - English, German and French. This is simply incredible. Different languages are even within the same widgets (see "Liste de tâches. Nothing to do")
Every service I've seen so far properly identifies my IP as Swiss. Netvibes shows me weather report for Paris, France. Even more, it shows me news from Switzerland and offers me to use german Google Site (google.de).
Too much spam in the first few seconds of our acquaintance ("Set netvibes as my default homepage", "Sign up now, it's free"). I want to see first what you can give me, not what I can do for you.
Inconsistent interface - three different types of "close" buttons on the same page.
Set netvibes as my default homepage image gets cut badly on lower resolution (not seen properly on screenshot)
Duplicate search boxes. Why would I need two google searchboxes on the same page? Oh, I forgot, one is german Google search, even though I am in Switzerland.
What the hell will happen when I press "close" button near "Remind me later" and "Don't show this again"? "Remind me later" or "Don't show this again"? One out of these three ("Remind me later", "Don't show this again" and Close Button) is clearly redundant and even brings confusion.This is overall poor design - and on the page that is supposed to make the first impression on the user, in the most important part of screen real estate - header (see Fitt's law).
Wtf does that check box does near search field in "Recherche Web" multilingual failwidget? You'll have no idea until you click it when you already have some search results to display

Google-bomb "failure" should point to http://netvibes.com/ , not G.W. Bush's profile. I wouild rather set my browser's homepage to about:robots - it is as much informative as default Netvibes page, however less irritating. The only real use of Netvibes was, probably, this.

Hidden text links in comments

2009-02-10T13:37:00.001+01:00

I was searching for "how blogger generates comment urls" for my post about duplicate title tags/meta descriptions, when my eyes stumbled over the heading of this post - not because it was particularly relevant to my query, but because I eventually did it myself for my blog - style author comments.(This guy came out with JavaScript method though, I do it with raw templating & CSS).

The blog, unfortunately, seemed pretty abandoned. Scrolling through spammy comments, I've noticed this particular one:

What was that rectangle to the right? I mouse-overed it with FireBug - it was link-infested:

Of course, when I turned off Highlight Nofollow Links in SearchStatus, the comment looked perfectly ordinary:

But how can it hurt me, if these links are nofollowed and even non-clickable?

These links are hidden, thus subject to violating guidelines for Google-friendly sites, which can even result in automatic removal of your page from search index
These links slow down your page . The described above link-pack was 5kb - compared to 30kb original post. Take 6 commenters like that - and your page will load almost twice longer.
It can (needs more testing) change the keyword density of your site. (It's not caused by this particular comment, but two most popular keywords on that page are "Viagra" and "Tramadol", making 20% of page content. If you were an indexing robot - what would you think that page is about?)

How to fight it?

It would be possible to make these anchors visible using CSS (for example, specifying padding and background color for <a/> tags), however, everyone who visits your page would see them - and even worse - will be able to accidentally click them - which is not exactly what we need. Instead, have Highlight Nofollow Links or similar feature turned on - and once a spammer is detected - fire at will.

P.S. FireBug and SearchStatus are two great Firefox addons. No competent web developer/SEO can imagine his life without them.

I am glad E.W.Dijkstra was wrong

2008-04-22T13:08:00.000+02:00

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

I'm sorry, mr. Dijkstra, but it seems that the Pascal language that you liked so much (a boring article that proves that E. Dijkstra loved Pascal) didn't flee far away from BASIC. At least BASIC gave an ability to loop with custom step (not 1 or -1), didn't have ugly 'begin' and 'end' block marks, didn't have meaningless keywords like 'program' and all the other useless and ugly shit. I'm really sorry for coders that had to write 'procedure' before every void func declaration.

It makes also quite clear why the new programming language cannot be expected to be an improvement over PASCAL, on which the new language should be "based". (I am pretty sure that the new language --if it ever gets designed at all-- will be much, much worse than PASCAL if they proceed in this fashion.)

I'm really sorry for those who had to write something like fucktorial := fucktorial*n; exit function instead of using a simple return operator. The most stupid thing in this language was the fact that the use of semicolon ; operator before the end keyword was optional — actually, using it could get you into a trouble in if ... else constructions — and the . symbol after the final end keyword.

Pascal is an indication of a bad taste. It's an indication of a mind of a slave that tends to listen to what the 50-year-old teacher said you should stick to, instead of seeing much better tools around. (It applies to the time 10 years ago, I doubt anyone at all uses Pascal nowadays).

Pascal sucks. Even Brainfuck is more suited for everyday coding then Pascal.

I uncomfortably shiver when I remember ugly blocks of forward declarations. And I'm really glad that honorable E.W.Dijkstra was wrong.

How to add social bookmark links to your posts in Blogger

2008-06-03T18:13:00.011+02:00

This is just a remake of original post by Amanda Fazani about how to add social bookmark links to your posts in Blogger. The original posts had it's template code put into a blockquote so it got processed by "prettyprint" and got all template code garbled. I posted a reply there and pasting a correct code here.

So, in order to add social bookmark links to your posts in Blogger you should:

Open your edit template code page (Customize->Layout->Edit HTML if you have a Navigation Bar on top of your blog, http://blogger.com/home->Layout->Edit HTML otherwise)
Click on "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox.
Search for the line starting with:
<p><data:post.body
(Just for this code, because it is likely that your custom template (like my Jeans one) doesn't have a space character before this and the the closing /></p> part)
put the appropriate code directly after the line (if you want every social service to be placed on the different line, place a <br/> tag in the end of each line):
- For Digg:
  <a expr:href='"http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' style='background: url(http://digg.com/img/badges/16x16-digg-guy.gif) left no-repeat; padding-left: 20px;' target='_blank'>Digg It!</a>
- For Del.icio.us:
  <a expr:href='"http://del.icio.us/post?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' style='background: url(http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.med.gif) left no-repeat; padding-left: 20px;' target='_blank'>Add to del.icio.us</a>
- For StumbleUpon (please note, that it should be submit.php, not refer.php):
  <a expr:href='"http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit.php?url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' style='background: url(http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble.png) left no-repeat; padding-left: 20px;' target='_blank'>Stumble This</a>
Preview and save the template.

Now you have links to social bookmarking sites in your blog so it will be easier for your readers to bookmark your posts (and actually, even visually stimulate them to do it).

An important lesson: always check the output once you embed raw html as a sample in your blogs, because only heaven knows who's gonna parse and autoformat your message and replace all 16x16 with 16×16 and " with ”, like it happened with Amanda's exceptional original entry.