So I was checking my traffic stats today and thought I was getting a pretty good flow of new traffic; as it turns out though I’m getting thousands upon thousands of requests from foreign countries trying to brute force crack my wordpress login as well as my forum login. I also saw a bunch of automated vulnerability scans trying to penetrate my site. The main attacking IPs appear to be from the Ukraine of all places. Who did I piss off in the Ukraine? No idea…
Don’t buy Windows 8 laptops
They are designed to be very difficult or almost impossible to downgrade or use an alternative operating system, and even more difficult to fix or restore. The hot keys for getting into the BIOS don’t work because the computer never displays any kind of BIOS splash screen. Hammering DEL, ESC, or F12 doesn’t seem to work either. Every one I’ve encountered so far comes preconfigured with Secure Boot enabled which blocks any unsigned boot loaders from loading. They also don’t come with any type of optical drive anymore, so bootable restore media is out of the question. The only way to get into the new EFI bios or into any kind of system restore menu was to first boot into Windows; which I couldn’t do because I kept getting a frowning error screen. Who thought this was a good idea? I also encountered another laptop that had a botched Windows 8.1 upgrade and refused to boot. It just kept trying and failing to redo the upgrade, never reaching the promise land. Since we’re on the subject of Windows 8.1; Why bring back the start button if you’re not bringing back the actual start menu?
I’m working on a few projects right now
One of them is a simple file hashing program in C#, and the other is a high-performance instant messaging server based on SocketAsyncEventArgs. I also want to get some small web-based applications up like I used to have on my older sites. I’ll also be uploading some of my older code that is still relevant. Hopefully I can get something done here this week.
Site relaunch
I’ve decided to re-launch my site. I’m not really sure what I’m going to put on it, but I’d like to release some new things rather than putting the same old 4~ year old source code and downloads on it. I haven’t had the motivation to work on this site in years, but I think I’m starting to find my creative spark again. I might work on some new plugins for the Minecraft server Bukkit. I also wanted to create my own forum/social network script and see what new ideas I could put forth on it since the conventional forum scripts out there seem antiquated. I was also going to try to post tech/gaming news on my site and possibly reviews on new products if I try them, but since i’m operating on a shoestring budget I probably won’t be reviewing too many new products/games. So with that, I hope to get something up by the end of the week as a small personal goal to myself.