I've recently taken up the hobby of lockpicking. I've ordered a set yesterday, so they should arrive in the next couple weeks. I'm sure these will be much easier than a paperclip and a screwdriver. Here's a mini guide who those curious one.

Anyway, I found that either two paperclips or a paperclip + flathead screwdriver work as a makeshift lockpick set. Bend the paper clip straight out, but leaving one end bend to have some kind of leverage. Bend the tip of the paperclip to a 20-35 degree angle. That's the pick.

I've also made a rake, by bending a paperclip in a mountain-valley formation.

As for a tension wrench, a flathead screw driver or another paperclip works. Simply bend the paperclip at a 90 degree angle so you have an L shape. It also depends on the size of the key hole and how much room you have to work with. There are numerous ways to bend a paperclip to work as a tool (in this fashion), so use what works for you.

Now, to pick it.

^{Photo taken by me!}

I've been using PHP for a bit over a year and half. It's come to my conclusion, that I've never used MySQL in any of my applications. I think I'm scared of reliance.

I tend to use either a simple flat file (like WorkSimple) or pjjTextBase (Torrentino for example) because they're quite easy to manipulate. I'm not sure why I don't use MySQL, being PHP's soul. Everything you see nowadays for PHP uses MySQL.

None of my applications use MySQL (or anything that is 'modern'). Hell, Sysode, Torrentino and Ticketo (my larger projects) all use PTB. Plus, flat file is faster. Skip the middleman, and write directly to the file system. Additionally, I tend to keep my projects/scripts small.

^{Photo by * Cati Kaoe *}

After virtually no offers on Torrentino,Torrentino is back up and running. (Might be slow at the moment). Now, to fit in a niche, it's a electronic music tracker + search engine. Enough to satisfy my needs ;) I'm a psytrance addict and sometimes it's hard to find the albums I want. Anyway, it has new categories (numerical system now, used to be by keyword) and most of the code has been looked over and over...and over.

Edit: I no longer own Torrentino.net

I read this way back when, and thought it was a pretty cool project. Now, I've sorta invented my own take on it. Here's how it works:

I've taken up the challenge of learning Russian with RosettaStone. Russian isn't one of those languages that you can learn in a month (IMO). RosettaStone is actually pretty cool software, though, what makes me mad is it doesn't give you the direct meaning. Sure, it'll show you a picture of a man and you match it up, but some of the pictures it's up to the users judgement.

_{Photo by Sam Takes Photos'}

It's official, I'm selling Torrentino. I've had no time to maintain it at all, it's a great site though. Hand coded from scratch, which I'm quite proud of. Anyway, selling it for $30, but I'll take anything else (use the Contact page if you have an offer).

Scary that I post less and less these days. I have been doing nothing the last couple weeks. I 'have' seasons one through 6 of The Sopranos which I've been watching non-stop. Bruno (movie) was quite disapointing, not as funny as I thought.

 For the last week or so, my server(s) externally have been slow as hell. Now, me being not so investigative didn't check my routers logs. Well, let's just say someone was DDoS'ing me. Oh no, not the web servers. Just the tracker (Torrentino's tracker). Not someone, but a crapload of IP's. Still, making it virtually impossible to access the webserver. So naturally, me being a dumbass didn't have iptables configured....at all. Long story short, fixed it up with some iptables rules and blocking the offending IP's. The router is reporting that it's dropping the [bad!] packets, but I'm not so sure on that.

So you wanna get rock hard abs eh? Follow these 5 steps, and you'll get those washboard abs in a week!

I've been profoundly confused on what to do with two new servers. At the moment, I have a total of three servers; a BitTorrent tracker, web server and NAS (NFS server). Now, what I was thinking was setting up a load balancing scheme using VS via NAT. Essentially, build one of the servers as a load balancer and turn the other one into a http node. The only problem with that is redundancy. Say if the load balancer fails for whatever reason, I'm screwed.

Same as my NAS, no RAID so if the HDD fails, I'm screwed again. Still, it would be a cool journey on getting a load balancing scheme set up...and working. That, and I just want to use all the ports on my 24 port switch. Then, depending on the load on the NFS server, I could run MySQL/Postgres on it for use with the web servers.

 I'm starting to freelance now, so I'm up for any work and make an attempt to build my portfolio. I'm available to do any work, small to medium sized projects. Stuff I can do:

• Code PHP
• Remote adminstration of Linux boxen
• Some MySQL stuff (though I hate it)
• Installl scripts (Wordpress, Drupal, WHMCS, etc..)
• Help with hosters (I know my way around WHM, cPanel, WHM and so forth)
• And probably a lot more useless stuff.

Portfolio here. My prices are cheap (say, min $3 CAD) so I'm available to hire. If you have any offers, deals etc, post a comment or use the contact page.