February 2004
Feb. 6, 2004
Popen5: useful! Obviously 4 popen functions isn’t enough.
Firebird Spell Checker. Slightly convoluted install procedure, but it’s a start.
Hacking Friendster, Part I (via) Cross site scripting attacks in social networks
Feb. 9, 2004
That’s nothing, here they call fruit salad ’Macedonia’. ’Bosnia’ slang explained.
AlltheWeb.com: URL Investigator (via) Useful tool.
Feb. 10, 2004
Bravo l’artiste (via) Ruper Murdoch, reviewed.
width = str(len(str(len(lines))))
The above monstrosity came up today while writing a function to add zero padded line numbers to a chunk of text:
[... 78 words]Internet erosion of TV viewing habits deepens (via) Of the 11.8 hours the average Internet user spends online weekly, more than half is coming from TV viewing and almost none from sleep or socialization
More unfortunate PageRank. I’m third on Google for “hotmail inbox”
Seven Steps to Better Presentationss (via) Advice from Jeffrey Veen
Flagging issues on craigslist (via) Moderation in a high traffic environment.
NanoBlogger. A blogging system written in bash.
Why Questions go Unanswered (via) "I’m a lazy asshole and I can’t be bothered to learn to program myself, but I know if I post here you’ll give me something for free.’’
World’s First HCI Rap: “We Got It”. HCI hip-hop from OK/Cancel. Sweet Jesus no!
Clueless office workers help spread computer viruses (via) “55% of those quizzed base their passwords on people’s names”
Lawrence.com blogging gem. “... I just decked him and broke his nose.”
The Fishbowl: Pronunciation of SQL. Because they’re cute.
Feb. 11, 2004
AskTog: Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On Line (via) Usability advice for e-commerce sites.
Rands In Repose: Agenda Detection (via) An almost painfully cynical guide to getting out of meetings as soon as possible.
Code generation vs data driven programming
Via Ned Batchelder, this interview with pragmatic Dave Thomas on code generation closely reflects my own nascent thoughts on the issue:
[... 369 words]Optimizing Mozilla Firebird. Hacking prefs.js
Compilers. Not, it turns out, a difficult thing. Dan says they’re easy. But then he did write most of Parrot...
Feb. 12, 2004
Scary-cool: Decompression bombs. How to crash a mail scanner with a 7 KB attachment.
foxs_view_of_the_bbc_player.swf (via) This one left me speechless.
Photoshop a Google logo for a ficticious holiday (via) Fark fun.
Webmonkey R.I.P. The site responsible for my unofficial job title is no more.
document.getElementsByWhatever() (via) Like getElementsBySelector() but... different.
Feb. 16, 2004
WaveBlog. So that’s what Russell’s been up to...
Feb. 17, 2004
Automatic line ending conversions in IE
I’ve just updated my SitePoint blog with a tale of Javascript debugging woe. To cut a long story short, Internet Explorer for both Mac and Windows automatically converts sane line endings in to the platform specific alternatives whenever you assign a Javascript string to the value attribute of a text area. It’s the kind of quirk that can take up a whole morning’s worth of debugging.