Welcome to flobi.com
About flobi.com historically
Hello, I am Joshua Hatfield, once nicknamed flobi. This is my personal website. While the main purpose of this domain was, for a long time, for testing programs and scripts that I create, most of which is not available to the public because it is contracted by other parties, I am made this site to be a sort of repository for items I've created for free or for fun.
An updated About
You might notice that the site is currently pretty empty. There's a story behind that, and if you think it'll entertain you, please keep reading.
The Backstory
The change really began in 2013. I was laid off by PowerServe International (as it was known at the time). It's a good company, check them out. Tell them I send you with my regards. The reason I was laid off is actually a tad important to the story, so I'll divulge. I was told I was too qualified for the role I was in and deserved better but they didn't have a position that utilized my experience and versatility. They set me free, if you will.
It didn't seem like that at first, as job hunting is the worst job. The stress got to me a bit and I gifted ownership of my biggest leisure project, floAuction, to the owner of the Minecraft server which I frequented at the time. My other publicly facing projects, long having been completed, left me paying little attention to this website.
My new employer kept me on my toes with far more advanced projects integrating with more complicated interfaces which had long, incomplete, wrong or missing documentation. Rereading that sentence, it sounds like a complaint. It's not. Solving the mysteries has a psycological reward. A reward I wasn't getting at Powerserve. The layoff wasn't just about the money. I was genuinely satisfied.
The Problem Manifests
I was genuinely satisfied. The thing is, I love computer programming. I love especially when people love the things I make. floAuction was one of the best experiences of my life. But so was Adtech Global. Arriving home after a day of work, I felt satiated in both. I knew I had made my best work, and even though they didn't always understand what I did, they acknowledged they'd seen good things come from me. I'm still in contact with the vast majority of those guys. I love them like I love my Powerserve friends. They were bought by Verint, so I can't link to an Adtech website.
That's the beginning of the problem, I was genuinely satisfied. I didn't need this website to test scripts and programs anymore. Dave from IT gave me as many virtual machines as I wanted, in any flavor. My need for complex analysis was being fulfilled and people appreciated it. My website sat for years getting none of my attention. I kept the domain because I've had the email address since 2000, I hosted a Minecraft server on the same machine, and in general I like the idea of having a personal website.
The Critical Moment
Sometime in 2015 or 2016, my server was corrupted while wearing this general style. You can look it up on archive.org if you want. Their catalogue goes back to 2001. And yes, I'm aware that my website seemed to expire at one point. That was a billing issue. Not (entirely) my fault.
The Real Problem
This goes back to the past 2 chapters, if you want to call them that. I call them the last two <h3>'s. I wasn't paying attention to the website. It served no real function except as a placeholder. I wasn't playing Minecraft in my offtime, I was playing LEGO Dimentions. My email was the only thing flobi.com was really doing, and that's hosted on a third party (the same third party it is today).
"Sometime in 2015 or 2016" is the real problem. By the time I noticed my web server was down, my provider had expired the backups. I had a local backup to most of it. There were several computer migrations happening at the time on my personal computers. There's even a tiny possibility that the desktop PC near my ankle holding up my LEGO manual and seperator brick has a copy. But I'm pretty sure I checked that. The last known location of my local backups is on a laptop I gave to a former girlfriend, which was reformatted just before being gifted.
I specifically want this to indicate that I don't hold anything related to this in any negative inferrence to the parties referrenced, whether specifically or generally. It's just the story to here.
The Bigger Loss, a.k.a The Kicker
The contents of this website, including a functional stereoscopic image converter, a functional Windows icon file compiler and a list of my visible accompliements of the time, weren't the only things lost. I lost a decade of pet projects going on in the background and several other websites. And when it came time to face this fact, I searched every computer I could find. It's led me to the story that I've told. No records of my pet projects seem to remain.
Not a Complete Loss?
I have made a lot of the friends along the way. The most rewarding of this is that I have memories of children excited to meet me because I made Minecraft plugins their server used. I had tens of thousands of users on servers using my software. I had thousands of images being processed through my image processing pages on this site alone, and I've not even tried to calculate how many were done using my libraries on other sites. The images and code are gone now. The friends are still here.
Previously Featured on flobi.com
I previously had dedicated pages for each of these including highly functional implementations of the two PHP classes. I've replaced the links to those lost pages with links to the two PHP libraries and the Minecraft plugin, the latter of which is no longer maintained. If you're looking for a replacement for the Minecraft plugin, I recommend ObsidianAuctions. I have no involvement in ObsidianAuctions, but it was based on floAuctions at its inception.
floStereoImg
Winning PHP class on PHPClasses.org in Sept 2011, floStereoImg PHP class has tools for stereoscopic conversion. Too bad about that left eye cataract...
floAuction
floAuction facilitates auctions on your economy enabled Minecraft server (with Bukkit). A very popular and my most used Minecraft plugin.
floIcon
Perhaps my favorite PHP class I've made, floIcon is still in active use, though long since having needed an update since the Windows ICO class is basically obsolete.