Mercwear.com – Curtis Morris

So I go to check my web stats yesterday with Urchin and find a weird anomaly in my traffic, it has more than tripled for the month of December. My average traffic use is around 15GB a month, for December it’s going to be about 50GB, this of course worried me. Having worked in the web hosting industry for the past 3 years I know what a traffic spike usually means: You are hacked.

Luckily this was not the case in my situation, after about 3 hours of sleuthing I found the culprit that was causing my traffic spike: A single image that I posted over 1 year ago. An image of Jason Alexander (George on Seinfeld) wishing everyone a happy Festivus. The traffic came from a both Google image search and myspace.com, I am guessing that someone at Myspace went to Google and did an image search for the word “Fesivus” and hot linked the image from Mercwear, sucking down my bandwidth at an average rate of 600k/sec.

It is amazing how fast the image spread at Myspace.com, I did some traffic sniffing on the server and noticed over 30 hits in 25 seconds from different profiles on the site. The evil part of me wanted to replace the image with something vulgar however the cheapskate in me did not want to pay for even more bandwidth.

Below are some of the Urchin pages that show the traffic:

Total hits for the image file:

Total hits from Google and Myspace:

Total transfer over the last 5 days for the image:

404 error count since I enabled the hotlink protection:

I found that the best way to stop this was to simply disallow hotlinking to Mercwear, I did this by utilizing a tool called Hotlink Blocker from www.helicontech.com, if you use IIS for your webserver I highly recommend checking it out.

I also use my Robots.txt file to exclude all of my images from being indexed by Google, this will cut down on the possibility of this happening again, adding the following code to your robots.txt will stop the Google image crawler from indexing your images:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

Forbes has an interesting write up on what they are calling the “Fictional 15�. They have taken 15 fictional characters that have been elevated to the status of real people in terms of popularity and wealth.

Some of the names include Santa Clause, C. Montgomery Burns and Cruella De Vil, good stuff.

Link to the full story:
The Forbes Fictional 15

Yep, you read that correctly – I am engaged, I asked Andrea to marry me on September 16, 2005. We have been together for over 7 years now and for the last 2 or 3 months I have really been thinking of how to ask her etc, what I came up with is below.

I took her to a brand new PF Chang’s (opening night) at a new open air shopping mall near our apartment for dinner. I knew she had a big test coming up so I made up a story about winning a free meal in order to make sure she would go. Our reservations were at 9:30 and I had gone to the restaurant earlier in the afternoon to plan things with the staff and pickup a few fortune cookies.

The way I planned to ask her was to create my own message and stuff it inside a fortune cookie, this worked out quite well (I did it without breaking a single cookie!). After picking Andrea up from school at around 7:00pm we headed to our apartment (I had the ring and cookie in my pocket), we took about 45 minutes to get ready and headed out.

Andrea had received a few discount offers in the mail from a store she likes so the first thing we did upon arrival was visit Express. Andrea was totally unaware of my plans so she was as cool as can be, I on the other had was worried that someone was going to bump into me and crush my cookie.

After leaving Express we checked out the rest of the shopping center (The shops at La Cantera) which was very nice (I am sure we will be spending a lot of time there with Andreas shopping habits). Of course all this time I am still trying not to bump into anyone or anything for fear of damaging my cookie.

At last 9:15 rolls around and we head to PF Chang’s, after being seated I headed to the restroom to make sure the cookie survived (it did!). When I got back to the table we both ordered our drinks and food, then Andrea headed to the restroom – now was my chance to hand the cookie to our waitress. I asked her to place it on a plate and bring it to Andrea telling her that in celebration of opening the new restaurant they were giving away prizes and that the cookie was the game piece. Andrea took the cookie, opened it and read my message. I put the ring in front of her while she was reading the note and the rest is history.

We won’t even begin to plan our wedding until after she is done with law school, but rest assured that the engagement party is right around the corner!

I will post pictures of the ring here soon.

I have always been pretty big on the emulation scene, after all the appeal of playing all of the games I grew up with is something that I just cant fight! This weekend I discovered a way to play SNES (Super Nintendo) games in multi player mode over the internet.

This means I can play all of my favorites (Killer Instinct, Mario Cart, Mortal Combat) online with 100’s of other people! Nothing like this has been available since the XBAN era which was over long ago (1997 I think).

It actually takes 2 different applications to play online, the first is ZSNES which is by far the best emulation software for the Super Nintendo. The other part of the combo is zbattle.net which is simply a meeting place for gamers that want to play. If you are serious about your SNES games and want some great online matches I highly recommend you check these applications out.

Now if you will excuse me I am going to go play some Killer Instinct.

ZNES Home
Zbattle.net Home

Over the past several months Mercwear has become a victim of a fast growing blog epidemic: Comment Spam. We all think “Oh it wont happen to me� or “A little spam never hurt anyone!� well, it’s time that you open your eyes – comment spam is a headache causing, time wasting problem that is here to stay.

For those of you that are not familiar with comment spam let me take a moment to fill you in:

Comment spam is not a traditional type of spam such as the unsolicited emails that flood your inbox each day, it’s a far worse and even more devious type of spam. The way that comment spam works is the spammer visits your blog and sees that comments are open to the general public, this allows them to add your site to an application that will continually bombard your site with ads for a variety of different things (mine are mainly links to online poker sites asking people to play).

At first thought you probably think that these links are there to solicit readers of the blog to visit these sites, while that may be PART of the reasoning behind comment spam it is NOT the main goal. Comment spam is popular for one reason – Google ranking. How you ask? Well Google ranks web sites from 1 to 10 based mainly on how many links to the site being ranked are found on OTHER sites around the internet. This means that if a comment spammer sets their spam program to go out and create 50,000 fake comments on 50,000 different blogs containing a link to a site, the next time those blogs get crawled by the Google bot (the program that Google wrote to search internet sites so Google users can find them when they search from Google.com) the site that the spammer was peddling will gain a higher ranking. Higher site rankings in Google mean that more people will find and visit the site resulting in more $$$ for the site owner.

There are a number of ways that people have come up with to combat comment spam, I for one have been using a system that analyzes each comment that is submitted and searches it for key words (like online poker) and if the comment contains the words it is placed in a queue for me to approve or delete before it is displayed on the site. This solution will keep the comments off the blog and does noting to help the spammers however there were two main problems:

1) If someone spams the blog with a comment that does not contain the key words that will cause it to be quarantined before being posted it is automatically posted to the site.

2) There is a lot of work involved in clearing out the queued up comments, on average I get about 20 fake posts a day from spammers and I for one do not like having to login and delete 140 fake comments each week!

So what I have done is created a custom solution for my comment spam problem, when you post a comment you will be prompted to type in a string of text that is displayed as an image, if you type it in correctly (and the comment does not contain any of the key words that spammers use) then it is posted. On the same token if you fail to type in the text correctly then the comment is not posted. This method is simple and adds an element of human interaction to the comment posting process (it is VERY hard for a computer to interpret the text of these type of images).

Please feel free to try out my system by posting a comment to this article, any feedback you have is appriciated.

Shortly after getting my ipod and transferring some of my mp3s to it I noticed that the ID3 Tags of my songs were in total disarray. At first glance many people would say ?so what? well once you have the files transferred to your ipod you will discover what a nucance this is.

These are just a few problems I had because of messed up tags:

* The same artist showing up two or more times on my ipod menu (example would be an id3 tag with a misspelled name or an artist with a ?the? in front of their name like ?The Beastie Boys?, some people would only put ?Beastie Boys?
* Albumbs that contain songs that don?t belong on them
* Incorrect song names
* Incorrect artist names

I guess this was to be expected, a lot of my mp3 collection was built during the golden days of Napster. This meant that I was depending upon other people to provide the correct ID3 tag information on the songs which simply was not going to happen.

So here I am with thousands of mp3s that need to be “cleaned”. I started this nightmare by using Apples Itunes to edit the tags, the process went like this:

1) Use the Itunes “get info” option on the song I wanted to edit which would bring up the ID3 tag editor interface.

2) Lookup the song on Amazon.com and copy the info from there to the ID3 tag of the song.

3) Start the process over on a new song.

As you can imagine this was quite a nightmare, on average I was doing about 1 song a minute and have more than 2,000 songs to do. It does not take a math whiz to see that this would take a LONG time (over 30 hours), so I set out to find a better solution.

A quick Google search lead me to Tag & Rename, a self proclaimed ?Powerful and easy-to-use program for organizing and archiving your library of music files.? I would later find this quote to be a huge understatement.

After using Tag & Rename for about 10 minutes I knew it was the answer to all of my MP3 organazational problems.

A few features include:

* Batch (mass) processing of file name changes based on the ID3 tag info of the mp3s

* It will automatically go out to Amazon.com and auto populate the ID3 tag info for songs with the correct information (I only download full albums so this was a HUGE time saver)

* Downloads the album art

With the help of this program I was able to edit the ID3 tag info on over 1,000 songs in less than 2 hours – If you are in the same situation I was in I would recommend getting this app ASAP.

www.Worldofwarcraftblog.com is a new site I am working on that will provide players of the Blizzard game World of Warcraft with free blog hosting space so they can write about their character and in game experiences. I have already setup some user accounts and everything seems to be going well, feel free to signup if you are a player.

Today I finally drove out to Devil’s Den here in San Antonio, for those of you that have never heard of “The Den” it’s the mecca for all San Antonio off roaders. People have been telling me about the den since I got my jeep, however I had never actually gone, now that I have I will be a frequent visitor!

The Den is located at Ingram and 410, right by Ingram Park mall, this was a surprise to me because it’s only about 8 minutes from my apartment complex – to think that a major Texas off-road spot is basically in my back yard it still a little strange to me

I took some video and pictures while I was there which are posted below, the videos are of a couple other Jeepers that were there – Scott and Cliff . They were both very nice guys who were happy to explain the inner workings of the Den to me. Most of the Den is flooded from the recent rains that we have had in San Antonio – I believe that it acts as a sort of flood basin for the city so you can imagine how much water is collected there.

After chatting with Scott and Cliff for awhile, I followed Scott down a few trails and he showed me a few other places in the back of the den that are great off-road areas when it’s dry (They were all under water at the moment).

All in all I had a great time and finally got to push the Rubicon (my Jeep) further than I have in the past, it succeed with no problems.

My accomplishments at the Den included:

• Deeper mud than the Rubicon had seen
• Forging water for the first time that was anywhere from 1 to 3 feet deep.
• Meeting up with more San Antonio Jeepers

Click Below for the videos and images:

Videos

Pictures

I threw this little app together for the stress test.. Feel free to download it if you want.. It will convert images taken with the default screen shot format in World of Warcraft to *.jpg files

WoW Image Converter

With the WoW Beta being down this weekend (See the post below!) I have had some extra time on my hands (damn seeing that in writing makes me feel like such a geek) so I decided to reinstall my file server at my apartment with Fedora Core 2.

I had been running a copy of Windows 2003 server on it, however when I did the last security update it also locked the OS down because it was an unregistered version, so rather than fighting with the OS to get it back up I decided to re-install the server with Linux. It has been a while since I have really played with Linux so I was looking forward to getting my basics back.

After looking at various distros online I decided to go with Fedora Core 2, it picks up where Red Hat Linux 9 left off (From what I understand) and best of all it’s 100% free! I got an iso from http://fedora.lsu.edu/install.php that would allow me to install the OS over the net which I think is a really cool feature that Linux offers, sure you can do it with Windows however who wants to mess with the pain of setting up a server just for that.

After downloading the 4meg file from http://fedora.lsu.edu/install.php and burning it to CD I placed it in the cdrom of my file server, rebooted and was off! The cd booted right up and after entering a few parameters for the install I had the OS installed in about 30 minutes. Once X was up and running I noticed that there were over 200 updates for the OS and this is the only place I ran into problems. Up2date (the Linux updater) would not run correctly from the GUI, it would only download about 5 updates and then freeze. I got around this by using SSH to run up2date from the command line (from my other desktop) and everything worked fine. Fedora is very user-friendly and if it was not for so many popular software compatibility issues I think that is would really give Windows a run for it’s money.

The primary purpose of my file server it to backup the content of this website and the files on my main computer. I am in no way a Linux admin so the FTP server cannot be reached from outside of my home network, however this is a great way to backup all of my files for free.

I got home from the beach a few hours ago – I am beat… The sun really does take a lot out of you and the fact that I had to go clean the jeep as soon as I got back (both the interior and exterior) did not help. I went down Saturday and spent the night on the beach with a buddy of mine, I got to test the new tent and some other camping supplies I got, and best of we got to take the jeep off road.

I always thought that the sand past the giant “Four wheel drive vehicles only past this point” sign was 3 feet deep and full of some of the most nasty debris that you can imagine – I was wrong.. We saw MANY two wheel drive vehicles (Even some cars) well into 15 miles down the beach, which is about 10 miles past the sign. But after that the terrain gets nasty in some parts, we saw a bronco that was stuck and a few other trucks that were having some trouble. The goal of our trip was to reach the very end of the Padre Island National Sea Shore – 65 miles of sand and debris.

We made it to the end of the beach in about 1 ½ hours which is roughly 50% of the time it is suppose to take, I attribute the fast time to well packed sand and me speeding The speed limit past the 10 mile marker is 25, I would say that our average speed was in the 40’s. At first I was only doing 25 and then Jeep Cherokee whizzed by me doing about 60, after that I put the pedal to the floor.

By the time we reached the end of the island it was dark and we still had to setup camp, I had a new tent that I had never used before but it turned out to be a cinch to setup and camp was up in less than an hour, fire pit and all. I really wanted to fish and was only able to catch one huge mullet at night with the cast net so I used it for cut bait – I did not catch a damn thing all night.. We stayed up messing with the fire and chatting off and on with some drunk guy that was trying to get a signal on his cell phone and had lost his sister in law and sister somewhere on the beach. We went to bed at about 3am and at around 4:30 I woke up to the sound of a coyote eating the mullet I was using for bait outside out tent, he took off when I woke up and I realized that it had gotten really cold. The fire went out already so I just headed back to bed and got back up an hour later.

In the morning I caught some live bait and cast 2 lined into the Mansfield cut, before long I caught what would be my only catch – a Spanish Mackerel which I did not keep. We headed back to the city at about noon, ate some lunch and then came home.

All in all this was a great trip, I would have liked to use the 4X4 on the jeep more, and the fishing could have been better but I really had a great time..

Beach going tips:

Sand WILL get everywhere
Bring lots of food and water
Bring lots of Ice
Take Extra gas
Sand sucks when it’s in your pants, sleeping bag, and all over your pillow

Click here to see the all of the pictures I took

Ever since I have made this site public this has been my most popular file by far I get requests for it all of the time when the site is offline, so back by popular demand: The Tennis Ball Mortar

We made the mortar with the instructions in the book “Backyard Ballistics�, there are a ton of great projects that you can take on in this book, I highly recommend it for anyone that likes to see things explode.

Watch the video

Buy the book

It’s been about 3 months since I have changed the look of the site so I have been looking around at various templates and found this one. What do you think?

I had ear surgery on 9/22/04, my last one! I have some wicked stitches behind my left ear but other than that the operation was painless! Strange how they can cut my ear off and when I wake up I feel little to no pain..

I also got an invite into the World Of Warcraft closed Beta! Oh joy! After playing the stress test I just about could not live without the game.. Which is by FAR the best MMORPG game ever made – even in it’s beta state! I got my invite from the Nzone.com promo – they were giving away 1000 accounts and I got “Lucky”

I have some pics of my Jeep after a 4×4 excursion this weekend that I will post later!

Human innovation at it’s finest! This really is amazing.
Link

I took the Jeep out twice today – I only took the camera the second time, check out the shots.

Never mind Ian in the passenger side =)

Click the image for all of the pictures

While I was not really LOOKING all that long I have always wanted a Jeep Wrangler.. Well Now I have one =) I am going to post more on why I decided to get the Jeep so sudden and some of the specs on it, but for now check out the pictures I shot below, I took them very quickly and will post better ones later. It’s a fully loaded Rubicon, the best Wrangler that Jeep makes:

Album

I am not sure of the rules / stipulations, but I do know they are giving away 1,000 closed beta positions.. The site is SLAMMED at the moment (the part where you signup) so I have not been able to reach it… If anyone gets through please leave a comment here with the details of the offer!

Nzone site

Beta Signup page (down while I am typing this)

- Curtis

I am already having withdrawals.. What a game this is, I have over 1000 screen shots (550+ are posted below) and I even wrote a program to convert the default capture format to *.jpeg, feel free to download it at this link. I am working on a full write up of the game now which I will post in a few days. This game is going to be huge when it goes gold.

Andrea and I have been thinking about getting a work of art for the living room in the last few months, we never really put a whole lot of effort into looking but I figured it was just something you kind of have to wait and “Pop” out at you. Well our pop finally happened this evening on the corner of Fredericksburg and Medical drive!

There was a vendor selling oil paintings (hand painted) that has been on the corner off an on for about 3 weeks, we decided to stop and look at his wares on the way home from HEB and found this:

View all of the pictures of the new painting here