4 ms·

Those sound like great reasons to me, as long as you have another job waiting. What was the rest of the story?

• gridspy 17y ago
  It forced me to confront my unquestioning love for creating computer games and made me realise that making games can be fun, but can also be as much as a drag and grind as programming anything else. There is always plenty of meat for the grinder (read shiny-eyed students) coming into the industry to justify low wages and many of my co-workers were burnt out. So I listened to my wife and moved backed home to New Zealand. I worked in a variety of other positions and decided that I'm not going to be satisfied in any particular 9-5 job for long. The next chapter is being written right now as I continue in my current 9-5 while spending all my free time working on Gridspy (http://gridspy.co.nz http://gridspy.co.nz) which is the startup that will eventually set me free. When I say free, I mean it will still be a lot of work, but I will be in control of my destiny. I'll decide what features to work on when, which technology to use and if we will have free lunches and soda. Hopefully I'll manage to democratise the process enough that everyone can enjoy themselves just as much as we grow.
  • netcan 17y ago
    I'm getting a malware warning with Chrome. The website at www.gridspy.co.nz contains elements from the site uimserv-net.dell.com.examiner-com.simpleworldhouse.ru, which appears to host malwar
    • staunch 17y ago
      So, his previous employer was well justified in forcing him to have an anti-virus program installed on his machine!
      • anthonyb 17y ago
        Seems like a false positive to me. I can't see any mention of uimserv or .ru in the source of his page.
        • netcan 17y ago
          Maybe. Obviously, still not good for the site.
        • Teulon 17y ago
          Or it's been changed since the original post.
      • gridspy 17y ago
        Thanks for the warning guys. There is a first time for everything I guess - somehow my FTP account was compromised and a script added to the end of the page that injected code into the page. The script has been removed and the FTP account blocked. The logs indicate that the work was done by a botnet, quite interesting. One IP logs in and gets a file, another (different IP) logs in and replaces that file. The static content that was compromised is stored on a separate server with separate passwords from the machine that hosts my actual application and associated data. What really concerns me is how that password got into the open (the logs do not indicate brute forcing). Virus checking here we come!
        • khafra 17y ago
          Perhaps some machine on the wire between the two servers is a member of the botnet? You might want to switch to SCP, HTTPS upload, ipsec tunnel, or something else that'll at least be a speedbump to attackers.
          • gridspy 17y ago
            Further info for those interested: My developer machine was infected with the Kryptik trojan. Using WireShark I could see that I had become the proud member of a botnet, it probably found a saved password for FTP on my machine and compromised my server that way. Makes me feel all dirty inside watching my computer send viagra emails and receive "sorry, you are blacklisted" responses. All the passwords have been changed and the relevant computer quarantined. I'm still working on removing the virus, seems to be using drivers to mask its presence from the virus checkers I am using. I've got some ideas based on using a scanner on a live-cd. What is really fun is that the virus definition for the trojan was added to NOD32 after I was infected, so I don't know how much help a virus checker would have been, if it was installed. That will learn me for leaving saved passwords on an otherwise secure machine.
            • netcan 17y ago
              Thanks for coming back with that.