One look at my logs shows why I hate myspace and opendirviewer.

Take a peek at the referer list for my site. EVERY SINGLE ONE from myspace or opendirviewer is a hotlink to an image on my site.

Hotlinking to images sucks up bandwidth. With over 25% of the refer list being myspace alone, you can see why I get cranky.

So… I’ve done a little something to discourage it.

If you attempt to hotlink any of my images to your myspace page, my server replaces the requested image with the following one:

Of course, that image is what you’re seeing in the chart above. Before I started replacing images from myspace, the amount of bandwidth lost was much, MUCH worse!

As those Brazilian script kiddies have a thing about h4Z0r1nG my server on a routine basis, I’ve decided that I’m going to shut the damn thing down.

Running my own hosting server was a fun hobby, but it’s slowly become my second job. It’s official… I quit.

I did some looking around, and dreamhost had the deal for me.

It’s only $7.95 per month (if you buy 2 years at once) and gives me the following:
* 1TB (yes… terabyte!) of bandwidth per month to start (they add 8 GB per week to that)
* 20 GB of drive space to start (they add 160MB to it every week)
* Unlimited domains to share the disk and bandwidth
* Unlimited sub-domains
* 3,000 email accounts
* Unlimited email aliases
* 75 shell/ftp accounts
* Unlimited mySQL databases
* lots more

For $7.95 a month… you cant’ go wrong! And since I was paying $180 a year for my static IP’s, $190.80 for 2 years of webhosting is a bargain (yay… I save money!). I also don’t have to deal with the server aspect any more. No more backups, dealing with intrusions, etc. They also give you a 97 day money back guarantee… so if you hate it, you haven’t lost anything.

One more thing… if you choose to move to them, do so by clicking this link. If you sign up after clicking thus said link, and stay past the 97 days… I get a $97 credit as a referral fee.

Everybody wins!

The only downside to the move is that my sites will be offline for around 3 days while the DNS propagates across the web. I can live with that.

I posted last week about the joys of being a programmer when the scope creep becomes scope sprint and no matter how exactly you follow the design spec they provided, that’s not what they wanted at all.

Today announces the release of the same application, 80% re-written, with all the new requested functionality.

Of course, I’m fully expecting to get beaten up again, because they’ve had a whole week to think about it and the new features will spark even more ideas.

This thing started as a simple data storage project. Enter the data, look at the data, perhaps modify the data. I was told point blank that it was not to be used for reporting.

It now generates reports-o-plenty, does email notifications, and is so user friendly, a 6 year old can use it.

I’m sure that I’ll be re-writing it again by the end of the day.

Microsoft released a patch for the WMF exploit yesterday.

If you use Windows and you haven’t done live update yet… do it now (or click here to get the update directly).

Do not delay, do it now, damn it!

Or not… but then I don’t want you to bitch to me about how you got SpyAxe (or something else equally as nasty) on your PC later (and no…. I will not fix your computer).

As I posted a few weeks ago, my box became infected an “extortion ware” spyware program that attempted to get me to purchase SpyAxe by constantly warning me that my computer was infected. The only way I was able to get rid of it was to scrub my box and start over.

Today, Microsoft announced that there is a big ol’ honkin’ security hole in Windows that allows this to happen.

According to the article, it doesn’t matter what browser you use (IE, Firefox, Opera), if you have a Windows machine, you’re vulnerable. It also states that there are hundreds of reported websites that are exploiting this problem and also possible to get attacked by viewing infected WMF files.

As of this writing, Microsoft hasn’t found a solution to the problem.

So… be careful where you go, what you click on, and for the love of all that’s good and pure, update your anti-virus, firewall, and spyware detection programs!