A while back, I reported a security problem to MySpace. Being a nice person, I thought I'd email them and wait for a reply before telling anyone else (I thought I was the only one to find this problem, but it appears a few others knew of it too. I didn't know this until later). I have reported a few problems to MySpace in the past, and they usually took around two weeks or so to reply. Sure, their reply was something generic, but it was a reply at least. Anyways, back to this story. So, after writing to them, I waited two weeks. Didn't hear anything back from them. A month, still didn't hear anything. So I thought that as a month had passed, I may as well report the security hole to a security site. I wrote to xssed.com, and after a small wait they published an article on it.

Today, I try to log in to my account, and it didn't work. Interesting, I was sure I was typing the correct password. I go to use the "Forgot your password?", and it says my email is invalid. So that's it, they've deleted my account. For me, MySpace was a way to keep in touch with old friends I otherwise wouldn't be able to talk to. And now they've deleted my account. So, they deleted my account for reporting a security issue and showing them a harmless example, yet people that actively try to attack MySpace accounts still have active accounts? This makes no sense, if anything they should be thanking me for finding the bug on their site, and being nice enough not to do anything evil with it. It's totally unfair. Just before deleting the account, I had 467 friends, 1991 comments, 2300 messages, and just over 19000 profile views. I have no clue what's going to happen to my Windows Live Messenger MySpace app, an application that now has around 51,000 users. Whatever, I'm done with MySpace now. I made a new account but don't really care about it any more. Add me on Facebook.

โ€”Daniel

Oh, and http://www.myspace.com/daniel_1515 was my old account. In case anyone searches for it in Google.

Update 9th February 2009: My MySpace account is back. Take a look at my blog post about it.

Update: I've found someone to take over. No more emails about this, please ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

Hey everyone,

I'm still looking for someone to take over development of my Facebook "Flash Embed" application. It allows you to embed animations, games, and videos (eg. YouTube videos) on your Facebook profile. I don't have time to develop it, and am looking for someone to take over development and make the app work properly with the "new" Facebook layout. The app is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.

Please contact me if you're interested.

Because I couldn't find the lyrics of this song anywhere, I typed it up myself. ๐Ÿ˜›

Here's the song:

Edit: imeem is gone ๐Ÿ˜ฆ. Find the song on YouTube instead.

[Verse 1]

Come and look into my heart

And you'll find me in your dreams

And soon you'll be my gift of love

It's just me and you

Reaching through your every thought

Is it always what it seems?

But I will never leave your side

It's just you and me

Read more ⇒

So, I haven't blogged for a while... Mainly due to real-life getting in the way. Yeah, real life gets like that sometimes, it's rather annoying ๐Ÿ˜› . That, and the fact that I'm lazy - I won't really do anything unless I'm forced to (or force myself to). Well actually, most people are like this, it's just very few seem to admit it. And realisation is the first step to admitting you have a problem, right? ๐Ÿ˜› . And I haven't really had anything to blog about either. Aaaand this blog has approximately 0 readers. I don't think anyone is even reading what I'm writing right now. If you're one of the 0 readers, then HELLOOOOOOOO TO YOOOOOOUUUUUU!!! I have a cookie for you, come and get it before I eat it.

Well anyways, enough of my stupid rambling... my first year of University is finally over, and geez did the time pass quickly ๐Ÿ˜ ! It was generally enjoyable, way way more so than high school was. University life is completely different to high school, in a sense it's a lot more relaxed. Some people take advantage of this and try to breeze through Uni without studying... And end up dropping out ๐Ÿ˜›. I tried concentrating in class (moreso than last year at high school), but in the end I just ended up not paying attention at all, and rushing all my last assignments (isn't this the case with everyone?). Results day is 13th December 2008, so I guess I'll be worrying about my results until then. There's one... no, wait, two things I really hated though:

1. Exams!

Okay, sure, everyone hates exams. Me moreso than most I reckon. I seriously HATE HATE HATE exams. On a scale from 1 to OMG I HATE THIS, it'd be on the very end. Seriously. They drive me crazy. Crazier than I normally am, and that's a LOT. ๐Ÿ˜ฎ I seem to often forget everything and have a whole heap of stuff rush back to me at the last minute. I hate it, haha. At least these exams aren't as bad as the Year 12 English Exam (or maybe Usability is that bad... I'll get to that in a bit)

And especially one of my subjects was a subject about website development using HTML. We had to write HTML (yes, by hand) in the exam. Seriously, what is that testing? Most (hell, all) normal web developers always have references handy (HTML for Dummies, Complete All-In-One Website Reference, Garfield comic strips out of their local news paper, whatever), they don't need to know all HTML stuff off the top of their head (and certainly don't need to write it on paper). But this subject was nowhere near as bad as everyone's enemy:

2. Usability

Falling over might be enjoyable. Jumping off a cliff could potentially be enjoyable. But this, usability, this subject is not enjoyable at all, it's literally the worst subject. Ever. Well maybe not really, but it's boring. Most of the class was common knowledge (you know, things like "red writing on a green background looks fugly", "make sure users find your software interface easy to use", and "don't stab people"). I'm hoping we don't get more subjects that are as annoying as this one was. If we do, I'm stabbing someone with a red and green paper. An easy-to-use one.

Go-karts? Did someone mention go-karts? Oh yeah, it was an idea I had when I was around 8 years old or so. I had this amazingly awesome (and by "amazingly awesome" I mean "it sounded good at the time") idea to build a go-kart that goes along the tram lines (anyone not living in Melbourne should look up "Melbourne Trams" on Wikipedia to see these mythical "tram" thingies I'm talking about). But basically, trams are a form of public transportation here, a form of light rail. The streets have tram lines in the middle of the street, kinda like a train line except it's on the road instead of being separate. Trams have overhead powerlines, which is what gave me this idea. Instead of the go-kart needing petrol or a battery, it could simply use the power the trams are using. Although now I realise several downfalls with this:

  • The go-kart would only be able to go down certain paths. Not all streets have tram lines (while a lot of the streets in the CBD have tram lines, not many suburban streets do). This would restricts its mobility
  • It'd need this giant stick thing coming off of it to reach the power. Kinda like a dodgem car
  • Legalities - Would it be legal to "steal" the tram's power? What if you hold up the trams? I can imagine my go-kart breaking down and screaming "GO AROUND!" at the trams ๐Ÿ˜›
  • Some fourth downfall that I've forgotten
  • I like turtles

So what else can I say? There's not much really, my life's pretty boring right now. Oh yes, my girlfriend and I broke up, I guess just things weren't working out. So yeah, I'm single again. And no I'm not looking for a girlfriend at the moment, so don't bother asking (unless you like the feeling of being rejected I guess) xD. I guess that made me realise a lot more about myself, who I am and exactly what I'm looking for. I made a special friend that I'm very similar and now extremely close to, it's like we're soulmates or something. She knows who she is, and I'm pretty certain she'd be reading this (maybe she's the one of the 0 readers ๐Ÿ˜ฎ ) ๐Ÿ˜ƒ. As a person I've changed pretty significantly over the past year or so (especially in the last few months), and it really seems like a pretty good thing. But I'll save all of this for another blog post, this one's getting rather long. I should try to blog more about life I guess, it's something I like writing about. If you look through the firsts posts to this blog, they were pretty geeky. Then again, I've become way less geeky (still do programming though), haha ๐Ÿ˜› . It all fits in to the whole "change" thing.

Oh, and for anyone from Australia, the NoCleanFeed protests are on the 13th December (same as Swinburne results day!). For more information take a look at NoCleanFeed.com. The protests in Melbourne are going to be at the state library, and I might be going, I'm not sure yet. Perhaps you want some No Clean Feed Posters, thanks to my friend Joseph. ๐Ÿ˜„

Well that's all for now...

Oh and btw, the cookie's all gone. Sorry about that.

Until next time ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

  • Daniel

TCP sockets in Pascal are generally hard to use; Free Pascal doesn't come with any high-level socket libraries by default, only a relatively low-level socket library. Some external libraries are available to make using sockets with Pascal easier, and one of these libraries is Synapse. Synapse is an easy-to-use socket library for Pascal, and in this blog post I'll try to show how to use Synapse to connect to a remote server and send/receive data from it.

Read more ⇒

Well, as you can see here, my blog has a new layout. The layout itself was written from scratch by me, although some parts of it were based off a nice two-column CSS layout tutorial I found whilst searching in Google. This layout is not yet complete, I'm still working on it. What do you think so far? ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

The only problem now is my lack of blog posts. I haven't really had time to blog, but I'll definitely try to write some more posts here soonish ๐Ÿ˜›

Today, I fixed the "transparency" issue on the Facebook Flash Embed application. Rather than using a transparent background for all Flash animations, it now allows you to set the background colour. Some animations that did not display correctly previously will now appear correctly.

Additionally, a few minor bugs with the Import a Flash "embed" code were fixed as well. FlashVars in tags should now work properly.

As usual, please report any bugs to me ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

A funny easter egg I recently came across in Windows XP, relating to files created in the future:

  1. Set your system clock to a date in the future (something far in the future; eg December 2030).
  2. Create a new file (anything, a blank text document will do).
  3. Set the system clock back to the real date.
  4. Open the directory containing the newly-created file.
  5. Choose the View โ†’ Arrange Icons By โ†’ Modified option.
  6. Tick View โ†’ Arrange Icons โ†’ Show in Groups.
  7. Look at the group heading of the newly-created file:
    Windows XP Easter Egg - โ€œSometime This Milleniaโ€

Of course, that should be "Millenium"... Millennia is plural ๐Ÿ˜›

Around 46,000 students did their English exam today, me being one of them. The English exam sucks; I'm so bad at writing essays ๐Ÿ˜ฆ . It was alright, but I screwed up a bit of it. Basically, we have to write four essays โ€” Two text response essays (essays based on texts we read in class), a language analysis piece (analyse the ways language is used in some articles), and a persuasive/opinionative piece. I spent too long on the analysis and persuasive pieces (as these are what I'm good at). I completed one of the text response essays and then noticed I only had like 25 minutes or so to do the last one. So it was horribly rushed and probably quite incoherent ๐Ÿ˜›

So yeah, I'm soooo glad that exam is now over; it was the one exam I was really dreading. The exams I have left are:

Monday 5th November

3:00 PMโ€“4:15 PM โ€” Specialist Maths Exam 1 (non-calculator)

Friday 9th November

9:00 AMโ€“10:15 AM โ€” Maths Methods Exam 1 (non-calculator)

Monday 12th November

11:45 AMโ€“2:00 PM โ€” Maths Methods Exam 2 (calculator)

Wednesday 14th November

11:45 AMโ€“1:30 PM โ€” Physics

Thursday 15th November

9:00 AMโ€“10:45 AM โ€” Chemistry (ewwww ๐Ÿ˜› )

Friday 16th November

3:00 PMโ€“5:15 PM โ€” Specialist Maths Exam 2 (calculator)

So yeah, after that, No more school! On to University next year. I'm hoping that I get an ENTER score above 87, that way I'll get into Computer Science at Melbourne University ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

*Edit: Some people were asking about the title of this post. It was referring to my MSN Messenger display name, which I had set to "It's Survivor: English Exam Edition. 46000 students, 4 hours, 3 essays. Who will survive?" for a while ๐Ÿ˜„ *

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