Gibson’s Blog

A few days ago, I received an email from Google with the title “Removal from Google’s index” where I was informed that a few of my posts have been hacked and some spam has been inserted into them and 1 particular line of text “newwww”. The email contained a link which listed all the offending pages. Click on the link shows a list of my posts and on 1st look, my posts look no different and nothing seems to have changed. But when I clicked on View->Page Source, that was when I saw the truly offending spam. I scrolled down all the way and found literally dozens of spam links inserted into my posts. Now that I have found the culprit, step #2 is to neutralize the culprit.

I fired up Filezilla and copied all my Wordpress php files over to my laptop and used Agent Ransack to look through all the files for any trace of the spam, but no dice. Next, I logged into my web hosting control panel and went through all the mySQL tables which stored information on my blog. Inside the table “wp_options”, I found a suspicious entry “wp_links” which has the text of the awful spam. Next, I proceeded to edit the entry and remove the text from the “wp_links” entry. After I saved the updated entry, I checked on my posts again and viewed the source, and voila, the spam has been removed.

As a final touch up, I updated my version of Wordpress to 2.5.1 to close any security vulnerabilities present in my old version of Wordpress.

It has been a long time and I know that this blog has not been updated in ages. But this has been a pretty whirlwind month for me as I have 2 projects due to kick off soon in May. Preproduction work is not pretty, but it is absolutely necessary in order to have a project that completes successfully.

And that is exactly what I have been doing for the past few weeks. Preproduction and more preproduction. So without further ado, here is a brief description of the 2 projects I am going to be busy on.

Casual game for PC - Remember that casual PC game prototype that I mentioned which was going to be showcased at GDC 2008? Well, it turns out that my game prototype was the only one out of 7 entries which MDA has showcased that has garnered considerable publisher and portal interest. With this high level of interest, I have decided to go head on into full bloom production for this game with some generous help supplied by MDA and bring it to completion.

iPhone game - With the not too recent release of the iPhone SDK. I have also decided to embark on developing an iPhone game that utilises the the acceleronometer and the touchscreen extensively. I can’t say too much about this game, but the design has been influenced by months of playing casual games and I have been checking out the iPhone developer website quite a fair bit lately. So far, the iPhone developer website has been great except that I can’t seem to find the forum button for me to post any queries on iPhone development.

The preproduction on these 2 projects are coming along quite well and although it has taken up more time that I expected. It is still a necessary requirement which I insist on for every project which I have control over. Ignore preproduction at your own peril.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from uCertify asking if I would like to help them review their certification software that covers a wide range of Sun and Microsoft technologies such as Java, MCSE etc. As an adjunct lecturer at Temasek and Nanyang Polytechnic and teaching a wide variety of programming subjects. I am intrigued by how do these software stack up against the traditional bricks and mortar style of classes that I conduct, so I spent a few hours with uCertify’s software and I came away feeling quite pleased with the software.

This is not my first time trying out such software and my previous experiences have not been pleasant as I felt that those software lack comprehensiveness. But thankfully, uCertify was a pleasant surprise. The particular module that I covered is the uCertify’s Sun certification for the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0.

The main page has a whole lot of options that I didn’t know where to start from. There were Interactive Quizzes, Articles, Study Notes, Practice Tests etc. Since I did not know where to start, so I decided to just start from the Practice Test.

Most practice tests that I have tried were piss poor, but this is different. A few questions were relatively easy, but most of the questions require a great deal of thinking and did not just test me on how well I memorized and regurgitated obscure definition. The questions that uCertify’s practice test ask required you to actually know your stuff before taking the test. Kudos to that.

uCertify’s software also has a module that states clearly what are the exam objectives so that you won’t go away without knowing what the hell did you just studied for. The objectives clearly state the things that you will learn and apply after taking the exam. This is very useful for people who want to get certified for a programming language, but do not know what they will learn after getting the certification.

Ever had that nagging feeling where before you sit for an exam, you have no idea what are the areas you need to cover in order for you to ace that exam? Well, uCertify has taken care of that. They have a module where it comprehensively lists out all the areas that you need to know before sitting for the exam. So if you find yourself reading that and not understanding half of it. Then, uCertify just saved you time and money by warning you against sitting for an exam where you are mostly like to come out with a bruised ego.

Now that you have done all your homework, and want to be Sun certified, but you don’t know how. Well, uCertify has even thought of that. They have a module where all the common questions about certification are answered. Questions ranging from cost of exam fees to how to register for the exams. All these and more are covered and basically, all your certification needs are covered to.

In conclusion, uCertify is the best certification software that I have tried over the years. I give them top marks for comprehensiveness and quality of exam questions. But somehow, I kept getting a weird error as seen below.

I am running Win XP SP 2 on a Macbook with Boot Camp loading and using Firefox browser and everytime I start up the uCertify software, I keep getting that error show above which says “Firefox doesn’t know how to open this address, because the protocol (res) isn’t associated with any program”. Minor error as clicking on that button will close the window and nothing got lost or corruption, but this is just a minor irritation. So for those who are contemplating on getting some form of IT certification, get uCertify’s software and prep yourself properly first.

I have just updated my portfolio with a Blackberry game that I did for Enigma Games a few months ago. There is a review on gamesinfo.net where quoting the reviewer “This is a great game for football fans who want a quick game on a mobile device.“. The designer and I are pretty happy with how this Blackberry game has turned out and we still communicate on MSN ocasionally to discuss about the latest happenings in the game development industry. This is what quality work produces.

EFL Preseason is a Blackberry game which i did for Enigma Games over a 6 week period. This game is actually the sequel to the original EFL game. The 6 weeks that I spent included time familiarising myself with the existing code base and reading up a lot on American football as the only football that I know involves 22 men running all the way to a ball and then kicking it away. Countless hours were spent on Youtube looking at videos regarding the rules of American Football and figuring out how to translate those rules into the new features of EFL Preseason. I did all the development and coding for this sequel while another artist did the artwork. Check out the favorable reviews of EFL Preseason here.

The 5th project is a PC RTS(Real Time Strategy) game titled “Deep Quest” and this game is targeted towards the casual audience. As RTS games tend to be pretty hardcore and casual gamers are anything, but hardcore. The team had to strip the game down to its bare basic fun elements and polish it. This RTS will be rendered in 3D using Ogre which does all the 3D rendering and provides a layer of abstraction away from the low level DirectX calls when it comes to rendering the 3D objects. So this enabled the development team to focus less on the 3D programming engine and more on the design aspect. Was heavily involved in the mission scripting using LUA and some engine development using C++ and STL.

The game can be found here at Yahoo! Games portal and the initial reviews have been fantastic.

“Elven Legends” is a multiplayer real time mobile game. My role was system architect and sole J2ME developer. Involved in R&D and developing the client and server code.

Here are some links to publicity material for this game and some screenshots
- From star-techcentral.com
- From MNC
- From theedgedaily.com

Acted as technical consultant regarding J2ME issues and instituted a system of weekly tests to detect bugs and to determine game playability.

Involved in project management, production, game design and some J2ME development. Completed project 1 week ahead of schedule for a 10% saving on time and got the game QA approved after 5 days of rigorous QA testing by an external QA company.

BEHIND THE LINES mobile game




Responsible for developing the entire code base and engine. Liased with external QA company for quality assurance and introduced the usage of tools to reduce the final file size.

Click here to get information about “Behind The Lines” at 3GSM 2006 and here to get some information about the quality of “Behind The Lines” according to Selatra, an Irish mobile content provider.