Dushkin.org » website

New design coming up

dushkin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:17:54 +0000

Ahoy travelers of the internet.

I’m going to bring my website’s design up to more up to date standards in terms of looks. Long, long, overdue. I think this is the 3rd (if not more) year I’ve not done a major overhaul.

I don’t feel that reflects what I’ve actually done. I was in fact very active, and did a lot. No, my gallery doesn’t reflect that sometimes, but I most certainly have.

But why not just fix the problems with the current one first? Because I always felt it just didn’t cut it. That it wasn’t appealing enough. But I used it anyway, and just got incredibly lazy.

So here’s the photoshop mockup of what I have in mind:

Mockup of the new design of Dushkin.org

It’s not final, no, but this is version 1. I also intend to have only my latest tweet (or two) up on the site somewhere in a “what am I doing?” kind of box. (Probably under the menu)

A Blast from the Past!

dushkin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:52:44 +0000

It started last night. I was doing jack shit with a friend on wow, when I saw Mail.app had a strange email for me.

Dushkin.org was inaccessible to me: it was 404ing the whole time – probably my ISP’s cache to blame. None of my friends had a single problem, and the same was true for CGI proxies. I rang my ISP that day and they had clearly stated, “we have a problem.”

Fine. They have a problem. And fine, they cache my pages. And that cache is having problems, fine. It’s not the first problem I’ve had, and I’m honestly quite tired. Sick and tired.

The email though, read as follows:

Password Lost and Changed for user: dushkin

Password changed?

I had someone take a look at the site. Someone with… internet tubes that aren’t broken. At first I thought he was bullshitting me, “why is there a guy with a gun there?” But, no, he wasn’t lying, as I soon found out via a CGI-proxy.

In this picture: shitty javascript, real player and horrible English

Naturally, I freaked out. What else could I do? Of course I’d freak out, I assumed I protected myself against these things. But then again, wordpress is not flawless. It was to be expected.

I mentioned this one had something to do with Spice Girls? Well, I wasn’t lying, I’m serious. This stuff is a blast from the past. Some serious hardcore 90s trash. Take a look at some of the HTML: (Modified slightly for better lolz)

Holy shit. “Disabling” right clicking? FrontPage? All this page needs now is real player. Wait a second…

The only thing this page was lacking was a Spice Girl photo. And LASERS.

I reverted the database, changed my password and made changes to .htaccess among other things to ensure nobody gets in.

I don’t know whether the guy who did it was being even remotely serious. Namely because of the logs showing pretty clearly an IP in Egypt originating in Cairo:

41.232.6.15 – - [03/Jul/2009:13:43:26 -0500] “GET /visuals/?action=image&image=December%208.png HTTP/1.1″ 200 14458 “http://www.dushkin.org/visuals/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

The same IP is the one that changed my theme (which no longer has write access) in case you were wondering why I’m pasting this snippet.

Hey, at least he took the time to appreciate my gallery. I guess it’s something? I guess our Dr.MoZo at least appreciates art.

The second thing I have with regards to him is an email address on Yahoo, which was how he resetted the password by some unknown feat: mazika_aboezat@yahoo.com

Come on, that HTML is like sooo last decade.

Comment Spam

dushkin — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:08:12 +0000

Spam is everywhere. And it’s annoying. I can tell, it’s at an all-time high – email, blog comments, adware (none of me obviously ;)) and even bluetooth nowadays.

I remember back then a coulpe of years ago, you would only receive a few ads every now and then, and they won’t even use tricks, usually. Nowadays gif is all over the place, awful.

What I did was initially use SpamAssasin, which sucessfully kept spam under control. However, very often it’ll skip some messages and things like that. Really annoying if you ask me. So now I’m using BoxTrapper.

I was also forced to install Akismet on the blog. So far about 500 spam comments!!

By the way, Cornelius is looking a little sad.

“Incognito” is here

dushkin — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 13:29:04 +0000

After three weeks of work, it’s finally here.

It’s a little unrefined, true, but I like it.

New Design!

dushkin — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 19:27:59 +0000

Yes! Yes! We’ve done it! A brand new design, this time, it sucks much less.

I’d be glad to write more, but let me just tell you that I got some work to do, sorry everyone. However, I’m more than willing to hear some advice about this design, mainly complains actually – if you have any – please tell me.

I decided to officially name my plant Cornellius by the way.

Three Drafts

dushkin — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 11:38:27 +0000

Right now I have three different drafts of what the website might look like. It’ll take some time before I go anywhere with them, but it’s going somewhere.

Redesign in Progress

dushkin — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 23:54:23 +0000

Hello everyone, I just wanted to say that I’m currently redesigning Dushkin.org, and hopefully I’ll be done soon.

This time there will also be a new section coming up, and hopefully a more functional design.

By the way, this will be the fifth reincarnation of Dushkin.org so far.

I hope you’ll all like the new design.

I can give you a clue as to what it might look like by saying that it was inspired by the LP sleeve of David Bowie’s Lodger.

Better Design – Soon

dushkin — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 14:45:54 +0000

I realized that the current design of Dushkin.org is utterly flawed. Hopefully, I can spot the errors and fix it up.

To be announced soon. (~3 weeks time)

Dushkin.org All Over The World

dushkin — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 20:59:52 +0000

One of the more interesting things in having your own blog, and many would agree with me, is seeing who goes to your website – from what country, which picture in the gallery is most popular, etc.

I find the IP-based country statistic specifically interesting. For example, I see that the US pretty much takes most of my bandwidth, although I’m hardly in contact with anyone specifically in the US (perhaps with the exception of ##otw), and that Denmark only takes 8^th place, for whatever reason. Quite surprising. Also, I see a lot of countries I never even knew existed – Guam, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Trinidad/Tobago, The Discocracy of Xanadu and Maldives wherever that is. So it’s nice to know that I have some visitors from places like that, even though I never knew of their existance, I guess.

Now that raises a different question, how did they find me? Seems like the most effective way for visitors to come in is either from a link on the Inkscape wiki, and Google Images. Pretty nice, ah?

Now I had to stop my productive session due to the fact that my neighbors next door decided that smoking in their doorway is a perfectly reasonable thing. I don’t mind, except that, I can smell it all the way here. Stupid neighbors, if you’re reading this, move this smoking frenzy elsewhere, it’s making a lot of noise and smoke – yes, and I can smell it all the way over here, I swear.
I worked on some interesting thing this weekend, I mapped improved the Dvorak layout even further by adding some functionality, just some more tweaking and it’s all done and ready to be posted for other hackers, artists, and bored people to enjoy.

Right. Now go and save whales or something. Bye.

Recent Downtime

dushkin — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:21:45 +0000

Oops! The website was down in the previous two days, sorry for that!

Anyway. I thought I’d explain what was going on, so here goes.

Tuesday the 15th of March, 12:20 – I check my mail, and see some things and make a mental note to read them later.
Tuesday the 15th of March, 14:00 – I check my mail again to see that dushkin.org is down.

Wait a second, down? What? Why? I check the bill. No, nothing new really. I check different accounts, none of them seems to fit, until it hits me like a brick falling on me from outer space. “Bloody hell! I forgot to renew my domain!”

Terrified, I started mailing Hostgator who said “sorry, no can do, ask whoever supplies your domain”, so I asked eNom who said “sorry, ask your reseller.” The reseller went out of business a while ago, and that’s where the problems started. I started mailing eNom and the reseller with complains, mostly fruitlessly until the nice support at eNom transferred it to a new account for me and let me use it. I love you, eNom (and Hostgator too).

Anyway, if any of your emails bounced back be sure to send them again, I’ll read them and give you a free hug.