Browsing for Christmas presents over on eBay I noticed another scam in progress. It seems there are groups of usernames that buy each others low-priced items in order to build positive feedback for everyone in the group. Since multiple positives from the same user only result in +1 anyway, there needs to be X number of usernames in the group in order to achieve a rating of X-1.

One such group includes the users kwq41, nrt6y5ew, ybnm85, nrty7rwe, mjuv92, fkcmz, dkvmx8, vfttyryv, uyvr35, cndx24, ybgzp0, xcqeoiqd, hvn38, gjxzn15, lozp69, efefefyu, dszb48, pzxdhowb, gwerc51 and many, many more if the feedback for 139391391 is anything to go by.

Each member in the group has one feedback from each other member in the group, so it’s fairly easy to see how many names there are in the group, and by extension it’s easy enough to find all of the usernames in the group, since they are listed in each other’s feedback – do a little feedback hopping and you eventually go through most of the usernames.

The major giveaway – which you will have noticed if you clicked on one or two of the links above – is that the pool of feedback comments appears to be even smaller than the pool of members, with the same comments appearing multiple times for the same user as well as across different users within the group. Another giveaway (as if you need one) is the items for which the group members have bid. They sell for stupidly low prices (£0.72) within hours of being listed and the titles consist of rows of question marks, occasionally divided by random numbers. Like this. And this.

The items that they purport to sell to legit members are the typical high-value items du jour – we found them while looking for a cheap SatNav system for example, but you can expect to see them flogging In-Car DVD players as well. PayPal is never accepted since it leaves a money trail and offers some protection for the buyer, Bank/Western Union Transfers are favoured instead and the items are always located in Beijing, China.

What better way to spend a Sunday than to install MySQL, eh? OK sure there probably are better things to do, but right now I’m pressed to think of one if I want to be able to continue developing the Lotto site.

The problem I have is that I am using the MySQL databases located on the webserver. I have the necessary permissions set up so there’s no problem there, but for whatever reason the server keeps lockingme out for a few minutes at a time if I do too much with a connection to it. For example, if I check my email, do a large MySQL query and FTP something all within the space of a few minutes, I get blocked.

I’ve checked the scan protection on the server and even put my IP address in the ‘Never block this address’ list but all to no avail – I guess it could be the router, but I also reasoned that I really sholdn’t be working with live data anyway, hence the install.

Another reason for the local install is that every query has to go over the Internet. While it’s OK with one or two, I have one script that checks all the days in a month for due draws and included results, so there’s a lotta lotto queries flying. When querying localhost (ie online, when I’ve uploaded it) it postively flies, but when every query has to go over the net it crawls like a dirty low-down dawg.

Edit:
What’s most frustrating is that HTTP isn’t blocked, but HTTP to the server admin is, so I can’t even see what hte hell’s going on while I’m blocked out. Gah.

Edit 2
Well that was a non-event! Seems the installation of MySQL 5 has greatly improved, and it’s now as easy as any other program. Excellent stuff. The only problem I had was with the passwords being in the old format, giving me the old ‘Client does not support authentication protocol’ error, promptly fixed with:

SET PASSWORD FOR ‘user’@'host’ = OLD_PASSWORD(‘pass’);

It’s still not ready – of course! – but I’ve been putting a little more time into the Lottery site today and one of the things I was working was some serious number crunching using the Super-Enhanced-Random-umber-Generator I mentioned a while ago. There are two parts to it – a server-updating side and a display-the-results side.

As expected, simply plucking results from the database and bunging them into a table is the easiest bit, but it’s taken me weeks to even bother looking at it. The server-update part is the fun bit, but even that’s come on nicely. I’ve also uploaded my partial administration area, tweaked the update scripts and done some more tidying up, and I’m pretty sure that the site is ready to launch. Obviously I want a fully-working admin site before I do that, however, so there’s lots to do there.

Oh, and Camelot have updated the Lotto Hotpicks game so that you can pick 1-5 numbers, as opposed to 2-4 previously. Thankfully this is a non-event as far as my website goes.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been tweaking and expanding a large Wholesale and Retail Silver Jewellery website that I built in December of last year. It’s basically a full-on e-commerce thing that I wrote completely from scratch in about four weeks and then spend time fiddling with in order to stamp out niggling little buglets. It was four weeks over Christmas as well – talk about complete and utter chaos.

Just recently I’ve added performance-enhancing extras like the ability to retrieve shopping baskets that you’ve abandoned previously, changes that allow items to be listed in either wholesale, retail or both and more tweaking for a Google Adwords campaign. The whole thing is still clean modular despite being patched more than one of my socks.

We’ve had lots of positive feedback on the site, which is great. It’s a showcase site for me which, along with the soon-to-be-completed-honest Lottery Results website, shows off my l33t d3s1gn sk1llz.

Received this message from M:

Hi sweets lisa got up bread. Please

donut buy flowers or choco an

spending £70 on credit car and I

donut want you to spend anymore.

For some time now I’ve been developing on a 15in Apple G4 Powerbook using Safari as the browser of choice (since IE on the Mac is an ugly piece of shite), and for the majority of that time I’ve had one gripe above all others – the fact that you cannot use the Tab key to move into a SELECT list opn a web form.

This most frequently crops up while I’m creating a new database table in phpMyAdmin – I enter the field name in the first column and hit Tab to move to the Field Type column and… the focus ignores it altogether, placing my cursor in the Length/Values column instead.

I mentioned this to our print designer today and he claimed that it never happened to him on his G5. Naturally I called bullshit, since we use the exact same browser version with default settings, but a quick test determined that – yes indeed – the cursor stops where expected on the G5. As a further test we tried the same form on another Powerbook, and once again the column was skipped.

We can’t even blame the browser version, since the G5 and my Powerbook both use 2.0, and the other Powerbook uses 2.0.1. There seems to be some bizarre hidden ‘feature’ in Safari that prevents Powerbook users tabbing onto these elements, and for the life of us we can’t figure out why.

At least I know I’m not going mad now.. XD