Only a geek would…
Only a geek would write an algorithm to determine if “A” or “An” was the correct article to use.
Archive for June, 2007
it’s called security
Let’s define 5 levels of security…
- What’s Security?
- Security? Yeah, I heard of that.
- This is serious, Mom.
- Paranoid (aka “it’s called security”)
- Insane
Level 1, “What’s Security”, is the opposite of level 5. People who live at this level of security are either completely ignorant, or have nothing to lose. They probably don’t lock the car, or perhaps they no longer have a car because it was stolen.
Life Stream
social media is everywhere. youTube, flickr, del.icio.us, mySpace, twitter , etc. you name it, it’s out there.
and they all export an RSS feed.
a while ago I was read Jeremy Keith’s blog when he was talking about life streams. the idea is simple. grab all the feeds from all those social, 2.0 sites. mash them all together, and out pops a life stream!
it’s a chronological stream of everything i’ve been doing. at least, everything with a timestamp that can be acquired from an RSS feed 
i even set up my own twitter account just so i’d have something else to pull a feed from.
yes, it’s narcissistic, but i’m finding it very cool from a geeky point of view.
but the best thing so far was how damn easy it was to create my life stream (available via the tabs at the top of this blog) in Yahoo pipes. i just dragged an RSS pipe, pasted all the urls from my various accounts, ran it through a filter pipe, and that was it. then i grabbed the RSS feed from that and ran it through feed2js, and pasted the appropriate javascript into a new page in this blog and i was done. it’s taken me longer to write this post that it took to create the damn thing.
some days, i just love technology 
printable web pages
I was looking into how best to create CSS style sheets for print.
media=print is quite well supported by web browsers, and I’d happily created a style sheet which applied only to print (I just wish CSS2 & 3 were better supported. There’s so much more they can do for print).
The Obfuscator!
Once upon a time, somebody decided to obfuscate every single email address on the ADS web site using the Hivemind Enkoder (which I can’t find a URL for right now.
This is a good idea because it help stop spammers.
This is a bad idea because the way it hides things is by hashing the email address with a javascript function that un-hashes itself client side. Nice and readable for browser users, but impossible for me to maintain. There are hundreds of addresses obfuscated this way in the ADS site which dreamweaver simply cant find. When a staff member leaves, or changes role, or something, It’s just about impossible for me to find all the references to that address.
And not, find and replace don’t work that well since the encoder has changed over time and the hash it produced a year ago is not the same hash it would produce today, so the same address could be represented by *different* hashes!
I got tired of this and started replacing everything with a home grown obfuscator. The Web Managers use the swin.edu.au part of the address written in the appropriate unicode chars, including the @ symbol. I don’t know what level of security this offers, but it’s got to be better than plain text email addresses.
I wrote up a quick php script which generates this for me, and the fruits of this labour, “The Obfuscator”, can be found at /ads/tool/obfuscator.
Hmm, I think it will need a logo….
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meTube
I just uploaded my first movie to youTube.
I’ve been playing around with Vue 6 Easel, and it’s been a blast. The only drawback is how long it takes to render everything. That little movie took 4+ hours to render last night, and I’m still not happy with it. And that’s at 320 by (whatever). It’s tiny and low quality.
Some of the single images I’ve been rendering at 800*600 have taken several hours to render as well. And that’s just for one single non animated image.
My machine is a Windows XP box with 1gig RAM and 2.3 Ghz (single core) intel processor.
While we are waiting for the video to become available, here’s a still shot…
This is an 600*(something) version, with 80% compression in jpeg. File size is about 5% of the original bit map.
If only I could get teh shark to animate