I’ve recently been working on a new OSS project, and it’s finally been released on the phux Development forums. As it’s open source, it will remain free and the community has full access to modify it as they wish. If you do modify it, we ask that you post the mod’s in our modifications forum so that other users can have the chance to use it if they want.

Public modifications that are deemed fit by the community and the phux dev team, may be added to the phux releases (granted that the publisher gives us permission). Enjoy, learn and share.

Link: http://forum.phux.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=20

Open sourcing the world, one app at a time.
~Nito @ phux Development

I came across a question on answers.yahoo that I felt was somewhat – unintelligent? It stated something along the lines of “Is it alright for me to put 1,000 ‘good’ calories in, and then burn 1,500 calories daily?”. Then I did a little searching, and realized that most individuals have absolutely no idea how many calories they should be putting into their body to make up for what the exert during any given day.

Here’s how calories work… Contrary to popular belief, there is no average based on normality ie. 2,000/daily. It ranges based on four aspects, which are age, height, weight and your exercise routine. I found a few websites that offer visitors to view their estimated daily calorie intake, but any that allow you to manage it so that a user can manage weight loss are all paid membership websites.

I’ve started writing a script that will allow individuals to do the above, free. Because, why should you have to pay cash to use something that you will be inputting all the numbers yourself? So as most of my scripts, this will be completely free, and completely open source for others to learn, share and modify as needed to fit your needs.

You can find the script in ZIP format at http://phux.org/downs/calories.script.06072010.v0.0.1[www.nitobelmont.com].zip.

You can also find the script in readable format in a post on the phux forums: http://forum.phux.org/index.php/topic,316.0.html

Feel free to leave suggestions, feedback or comments =)

This is a quick and easy way to determine which page you’re currently on, and then setting your menu button’s overlay based on that page.

First we need to create a function to determine the page we’re on.
function getCurrPage() {
return substr($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],strrpos($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],"/")+1);
}

Next we need to check our this against the menu.
$thisPage = getCurrPage();
if($thisPage == 'index.php') { $navHome = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navHome = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }
if($thisPage == 'search.php') { $navSearch = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navSearch = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }
if($thisPage == 'about.php') { $navAbout = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navAbout = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }
if($thisPage == 'faq.php') { $navFAQ = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navFAQ = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }
if($thisPage == 'contact.php') { $navContact = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navContact = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }

After everything’s been checked, you can simply set your menu as-needed.
echo $navHome . $navSearch . $navAbout . $navFAQ. $navContact;

If you’re dealing with a dozen or more menu links, it would be more efficient to create an array to scan and verify the current page, but this will work fine for smaller menus. Enjoy.

G.ho.st – Global Hosting System – announced in the beginning of the month that it will be shutting its services down to its extensive community on March 15, 2010. This comes right after a switch to a new domain located at ghost.cc, and promises of new features. Any where you look, you will find the following message to its users.

Dear Ghost User,

We hope you have been enjoying our free Ghost service. Regrettably changes in the marketplace mean that it is no longer economical for us to host the Ghost service and we will be closing down the service on or around March 15. We will instead be focusing on licensing or selling our technology to larger companies.

We advise you to migrate ALL important folders, files and emails to another secure place before March 15. You might like to consider Google Docs or Microsoft SkyDrive for files and services such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail for email. Some instructions for migrating data are included below.

We are really sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you and are very grateful for the fantastic support we had from our community.

For those unfamiliar with the G.ho.st service, it was an extensive free Web OS. You were granted larger storage space based on referrals – 1GB per successful referred sign up. Being a Web OS, they offered an integrated messenger, email client, mp3 player, office applications (spread sheets, etc.) and many other features that made this the worlds most versatile Web OS.

Reading the G.ho.st forums, you can see that many of the G.ho.st users are unhappy with the decision to shut its services down. Many of whom state that they would gladly pay a premium fee for the service. G.ho.st won’t state whether or not they have already found a buyer for their service, or if it will be permanently commercial. They’ve also started a petition which can be found at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/ghostpersonal/

I know that all of the continual users will miss this service, and I hope that when it’s sold, the new owner releases it as a public service – even if it is a paid service.

As most of my regular subscribers may know, I’m anti-facebook, and have been since a few months after they came out. I read a piece on their newest monopoly move the other day about their patent application, which has everyone in the OSS world in an uproar.

On August 9th, FaceBook applied for a patent on Crowdsourcing Translation.

What is Crowdsourcing Translation?
The Crowdsourcing Translation has been used for years by multiple sites to allow members to create multilingual translations for websites/pages. It is a free open way to translate web pages to other languages.

What it means if FaceBook gets the patent?
To sum it up, it means that FaceBook would hold exclusive rights to Crowdsourcing Translation software.

What are my thoughts on this?
If this gets passed, OSS is doomed. Why you ask? Because this means that the government is overlooking the fact that this has been an open source of translation for years, and just allowing the first person/company with the money for to apply to get the patent.

What do you think about FaceBook trying to patent this open translation tool?

I started working on Midget URL again today, and ended up a few functions I think it needed…

1. Added a search function. This allows anyone who wants to look up what the actual site is for a Midget URL to see all the information we have on it. It includes the real URL, total clicks (an overall count of how many people have clicked that particular link) which can be helpful if you’re trying to keep track of it, the date the link was added to our database, and the description (which is completely optional) that the uploader added.

2. The “Look Up” page, which displays the search query output. I also added WebSnapr’s Thumbnail API, so visitors are able to see the image prior to visiting it.

3. If you’ve been to Midget URL before today, you’ll notice that there is now a “Deletion Password” box in the upload form. This will allow the user adding the link to delete the link at their own discretion. (I’m still working on the actual deletion page)

What do we have planned for the future of Midget URL? More functionality, while still keeping it as simple as possible. Possibly user defined url’s. Maybe even a true masking (No ad’s) service… But for now, we’ll stick to the basics, and keeping it simple and user-friendly.

Until next time,
Nito

So I’ve been doing a lot of bashing lately.. I just really hate when big companies change tactics because of competition. In this post, we have Facebook in the spotlight (yet again). What a fucking surprise, right? You’re probably asking yourself, wtf did Facebook do to piss Nito off this time?! Well, Aside from being a bunch of money hungry corporate assholes who can’t seem to understand that competition is GOOD for business, they’ve just fucking ripped Twitter off.

Some of my readers might not be aware of this, but Facebook attempted to buy out Twitter, who just turned around and gave them the bird. Facebook obviously didn’t like the tweet that Twitter gave them, and so here we are – Facebook attempting to make their network more along the lines of Twitters (This makes me lol hardcore).

Anyways, Facebook is (or maybe already has? I deactivated my account after the last rant about them) adding a function that will now allow you to ‘follow’ a user, instead of adding them to your friends list. Sound familiar? It should, that’s the way Twitter creates its users friends lists. So, was this at all neccesary by the people over at Facebook? Fuck no. They have a fucking friends list already, wtf would the point be in allowing others to stalk you too?

This is how I see it… Facebook sets all profiles, images, videos, etc. to public by default now and now they’re allowing ANYONE to STALK you.. Are they looking to get into the shithole as hard as MySpace is now? Have you looked at the stat’s between MySpace and Facebook lately? MySpace dropped dramatically, not only that, but now they’re downsizing their employee base.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I got on to Facebook because MySpace turned into a shithole over run with bots and kids that annoyed the fuck out of me. Facebook offered top-notch privacy, not allowing ANYONE to see shit about you unless you added them,a nd even if you did, you could limit what some people saw. And now they open the network, and allow stalking. For the fucking fail!

I can see the freelance boards now – “Looking for Facebook bot!” – “REQ’s: Must be able to auto-set follow and store addresses. Must also auto-post comments and auto-request friends!”.. You know, I see their next step in this piece of shit plan of theirs… “Hey, we should so totally allow anyone to post comments on peoples pages!”..

Fuck you, Zuckerburg, you greedy fucking piece of shit. You should have taken Microsofts offer- You’d of fit right in with the rest of the succubus staff there. You sir, are the fucking fail.

-Nito

I ran across this post from one of my followers on Twitter about how Facebook is scamming advertisers out of thousands of dollars with fraudulent clicks.. Advertisers are reporting 10:1 ratios, which pretty much means, for every 10 clicks, 1 is legit or actually recorded outside of Facebook. What a fucking piece of shit company.

See, there’s some times you need to keep some of your shit to yourself. If Facebook hadn’t opened their network to so many fucking developers, but instead charged them propietary fees to post their app’s and shit they wouldn’t need to pull stupid ass stunts like this. But then again, we’re talking about yet another online media community, which means that they’re nothing more than some money hungry suit wearing corporate douches.

In my honest opinion, advertising on Facebook to begin with is a fail. Sure, maybe you get a few legit clicks, but that fucking site is riddled with thousands of bot’s, which means that most of the clicks you get won’t be worth shit anyways. The advertising worth on that site is less than the towel I use to blow my nose with.

So for all you little investors, put your cash into other sites. You wanna get some cheap ass advertising, that’s going to get you a nice amount of clicks? You can go to Today.com or look for personally owned blogs with a couple hundred posts and a decent amount of subscribers. Send the owner an email, and make an offer.. I’m sure it wouldn’t have to be too big, since they probably don’t make cash outside of Google’s AdSense or some other low level advertising.

That’s it for now..

-Nito

I’ve been working on a new website based around spam posting. The website allows anyone to spam whatever they want. You can use it for free backlinks, spam your gaming clan/guild, or publicize your own website. There’s dozens of things the site could be used for.

A quick breakdown of the site and how it works…

The main page shows up to fifteen(15) random posts made for the current date or if there haven’t been any made, it will grab fifteen(15) random posts from the entire database.

The posting page has no type of Captcha, but does use a custom filter system to remove any harmful code or html type code. We don’t allow using html in any text areas.

Once a “spam post” has been posted to our database, the users IP is logged for security purposes. We then backcheck against that database to see how many posts that specific IP has posted. An IP is cut off from posting after four(4) posts in any given day. It then resets at 12AM server time.

The site has the potential to be an awesome free backlinking/advertising website. If you’d like to see the site in action, I’ve provided a link below.

The Spam Board

-Nito

I look at my email, and see an email from a company I don’t do business with. So I open it up and read it, and see what i already know to be a scam. Below is the contents of the email…

Dear [email address],

Your account is locked for outgoing transfers and credit/debit card payments therefore we cannot complete this transaction.

To unlock your account, you must restore your account. Please visit unlock.moneybookers.com and submin your information..

Thank you for choosing Moneybookers!

*******************************

Moneybookers Ltd., London, Registered in England and Wales no 4260907.
Registered office: Welken House, 10-11 Charterhouse Square, London, EC1M 6EH, United Kingdom.
Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority of the United Kingdom (FSA).

So I go over the hyperlink (unlock.moneybookers), which says something completely different. So, I copy the link, and throw it into a safe-mode browser, and go there. As soon as I hit enter it redirects me to another site (agsoftware.ca) where they (I guess) attempted to clone the MoneyBookers site, except for the fact that all the links were set for that site. So, I go to the direct agsoftware website, and find it’s just a blank page (Obviously by now, if someone hasn’t caught on, they’re complete idiots).

So I document everything (links, email content, headers, etc.) and start writing an email to the actual MoneyBookers company, which can be found below…

Hello,

I’m sending this email to give your company a heads up, in case you hadn’t already been
aware. If this is actually sent from your company, I sincerely apologize, but you could
see the cause for concern with the URI redirects, and misuse of non-localized websites.

I recently received an email stating that my account was locked, and a transaction could
not be completed until I followed the enclosed link and unlocked it.

I have attached the email in .txt format, with the corresponding URI’s from each step in
their scam.

Have a great day.

Regards,

Nito

So, hopefully they can get that taken care of, before anyone actually starts handing out their information to the scam site, which could potentially ruin that company. Can’t trust a company that can’t keep its customers safe.

Anyways, if you get an email from MoneyBookers.Com, saying anything close to what’s in this blog, do NOT follow the link and put your login information in.

[EDIT]

I just got an email back from the actual MoneyBookers company:

Dear [Name],

Thank you for notifying us. This is a phishing attack against our website and we are already investigating the issue.

Best regards,
Moneybookers Security

Until next time,

Nito

So, I’m not sure how many of my readers use or have used Jacob’s paste bin, but it was the best bin on the net. Due to douchebag skittles who seem to think botting is cool, the site’s down. A real drag, since I used the site a lot to post up random source and snippets for people to use daily. Another site downed due to retardation, so you guessed it, this is a rant post…

So I see a lot of nice useful sites being taken down due to abuse. It’s fucking stupid, and shouldn’t happen, period. Little fucking skittles who watched Hackers one too many times, thinking they’re fucking big shots with other peoples software, or opening command prompt and pinging the fuck out of some server. Real big, douchebags… 90% of them haven’t ever been outside of a Windows enviroment, and if they have, they’re using some pretty GUI based *nix.

You aren’t fucking “hackers”, I don’t give a fuck what anyone has to say. And if you want to defend the little bitches, go ahead – you’re as low as they are. This isn’t the fucking 80′s, tagging sites isn’t cool (not that it ever was, but some had it coming). But attacking sites that offer free services? Seriously? We take our own personal time to offer free services to you, and you just spit in our fucking faces?

How about growing a fucking pair. If you’re going to attack a site, atleast tag it so they can retaliate. You can’t do shit but spam comments and use some third party software to do the work for you? Bunch of nub ass bitches these days, lmao…

I’m done with this post. Jacob, I’m sorry you were forced to shut your service down due to ignorance.

-Nito

Alright, so as most who know me already know, I do a lot of freelance jobs.. I don’t ever go by the rules they post on the freelance sites such as “You may not start a project until your bid has been selected as the winner.”. I find this to be a retarded rule which shouldn’t be there. Who fucking cares if I work on it before I even get the job? Do you think the people buying the code really give a shit – I think not. If anything, they’d be happier since the job will then be done that much quicker.

Anyways, I recently bid on something people may need code for in the future. I’m not sure if I’ll win the bid, but whatever.. I’m posting the code for free here for future use. I don’t use CSS when I don’t have to, mainly because it’s kind of stupid to write it out if it’s not going up as a full page, or when it’s being integrated into a pre-existing site…

Now this has no fancy admin panel, as like I said before – it’s meant to be integrated into an existing website.

index.php

profile.php

enter_code.php

set_code.php

save_code.php

config.php

inc.php

sql.sql

So there’s the files if you wanna run through ‘em, and integrate it into your own site somehow. And remember, open source is free, so don’t fucking turn around and sell the code and scripts we write for profit, douchebags…

-Nito

Alright, so I haven’t updated in a little bit and I thought I’d drop in and post one… We’ve been busy with some web design jobs. Our main project is for a Refurbished Mac store. His site’s pretty much finished, and is based on the Mac interface. It has the top Mac menubar, as well as the bottom toolbar. Transparent boxes to resemble the folder opacity on Leopard.

Also, we’ve been designing websites for later auctions. What this means, is that we’re designing full blown websites to auction off later. I’m not sure where we’ll be auctioning them off, but I’ll post when I do.

Aside from that, there’s not much going on. I’ll update again in awhile.

-Nito

So, I ordered a Cricket Broadband modem from these guys about a month back. It gets here a about a week later, and I’m happy, because now I have a wireless modem to use when we get the stupid freak power outages around here. So I toss it into one of my USB drives to give it a go, install the software and connect.

Ok, so this is where this becomes a rant, and I go off on this company..

Well, the wireless modem itself is nice, I suppose. Black and green, and it’s got the neon blue bars to indicate wifi strength. So mine stays in the one bar (For the most part), which obviously means I have a shitty ass connection (Now remember, I live in the heart of the city – about a 10 minute walk from downtown). So I open FireFox to see how fast it work. Oh man.. I sat there for about 10 minutes waiting for Google to load. Now, if anyone reg’s Google, they’ll know that all it is is a blank white page with a couple of images and a text box, so wtf?! Yeah, so I disconnect and take it out.

A few days go by and the power goes out on our block again and I load it up on my laptop because I had work to do. Again, one to no bar. What a piece of shit… All in all I used the thing 3 times, racking up around 45MB of use (I wrote a little program to convert bytes into megabytes and so on, as the log only shows you in bytes, and who the fuck would want to convert that themselves?!).

Now, I hate their software with a passion. They activate the internet gateway option in your network panel (for those of you who have this, and may have been like how the fuck do I get back on the net I already have?!), which now restricts you from using any other connection method other than Cricket. Yeah, shitty software to go with their shitty service and shitty hardware – who’d of thunk it… So I unistall their software, and then have to go in and deactivate the internet gateway, reset the wireless connection I had prior to purchasing their piece of shit hardware.. It’s just a fucking hassle.

So, the month goes on, and now it’s today. I do my daily bank account check and find that $46 has been deducted to pay Cricket for a service I haven’t used. So, I call them. Now, I pressed 3 in the Cricket Broadband menu, signifying that I required help, but of course – an automated service asking me for the number I no longer have because I removed the shitty ass software from my pc. So after the third time of the service asking me for my number, you’d think MAYBE they’d send you to a help desk? WRONG! “Sorry, maybe you should try again later when you’re ready.” *click* You get disconnected. Oh grand, so now I’m not only pissed that I got charged for something I didn’t use, I got hungup on by a fucking robot…

So I call them back, and this time I press 2, signifying that I want to activate a new modem (of course their call service would be as shitty as the rest of it, right?) and I get a customer rep (about fucking time). So I give them my info and start asking them about a refund and cancellation. Blah blah blah. She says you get billed $1.36 per day no matter what, and that the deduction was a prepay? Where in the fine print was all this?! And when did I sign up for automatic payments? So now I’m going back to my pissed off German roots, and I start going off on her about the legalities of the ordering system and what-not. I continually ask to be refunded and cancelled, she continues to dodge it all. Finally I get pissed off and just start going off on her, and she says “I’m trying to keep this professional, but if you continue I’ll have to…” *click* I hang up on her ass. Yeah, because that’s what I want to fucking hear, right? Just give me the fucking refund and cancellation like I originally asked and there wouldn’t be a fucking problem. Honestly, how fucking hard is that to comprehend? I didn’t click the spanish button, right? We’re both speaking English? Refund and cancel, not hard to understand.

Bah, anyways.. I wouldn’t recommend this company to anyone I know. It’s complete bullshit from start to end. I think the only thing they have that actually works decent, is the payment process, although I don’t remember ever signing up for those automatic payments, nor was there any contract stating that I would be charged that fee per day. In fact, their main selling point is that there’s no contract, and you pay as you go. I actually plan on calling them back in a few minutes again, after I check my bank account just to make sure they’re refunding me. We’ll see how that one goes. =)

I called them back, but it seems my number got blacklisted (Can get customer rep on my girlfriends phone though), and goes straight to automated services no matter which selection I choose. So I google cricket communications and get another number to call, which I do. Guy tells me that Cricket doesn’t refund period, and in order to cancel your account, you just don’t pay? Yeah, because that’s not a credit conflict or anything…

So I end up calling my bank, having to cancel my current card so that I can’t be billed anymore (I don’t have access to the cricket account on the website unless I reinstall their software and get the phone number ***igned to me by connecting, which would then say I used the account in this billing month – nice right…). Anyways, I transfer to the payment dispute dept. of my bank, and we go through all the legalities of this and what-not. So I have to wait until the payment is completed to dispute it. Another three days at the most to file the claim, and hopefully I can get the money back.

This company’s a waste of money and time. How on earth can a multi-billion dollar corporation not do refunds? Maybe it’s due to the fact that they receive thousands of complaints a year about their services and the hardware that they supply.

Alright, so I haven’t updated in a couple months.. Still not much to update on I suppose. I started working on phuximg again. The admin part’s a pain in the ass – mostly because I don’t know what all to put in there, lol. So far I have live news, user and usage statistics and a couple of site settings. No idea when to expect any actual script updates, but I’ll keep everyone updated about it on here and the actual site.

Couple of side projects going on. New hosting company being launched, hopefully early next month. Working on a new interactive 2D MMO. Nothing big or fancy (yet). Not gooing to post anything quite yet, since I’m not even sure if it’s going to get past the intranent, lol.

I’ll update as I can.