technology – Page 17

Things Bots Shouldn’t Learn

This afternoon, I’ve taught Iggy, the robot who looks after the RockMonkey ChatRoom:

How to play The Game. Damn – I’m out. He’s not very good at it, and, by proxy, neither am I.
Comprehension of facts expressed as “concept ARE fact”, rather than “concept IS fact”, and about knowing “who” people are (ask “Iggy, who is Ava_Work”, for example, or teach him who other people are…).

The by-product of this is that I’ve been learning to program in Tcl. And as a result, discovering why nobody writes in Tcl. Here’s a quote from bash.org, which I found in the bMotion source code:

<Procyan> is there like 1 person on earth that knows tcl/tk and is writing all of the apps?
<unSlider> procyan: no, there are a bunch of people who dont know tcl/tk but are writing apps for it anyway

Opera 8’s Solution To IDN Exploit

I’m sure you’ve all seen the recent Internationalized Domain Name exploit, which affects most web browsers (except for Internet Explorer – shocker! – because it doesn’t yet have the power to support internationalized domain names): if you haven’t, why not visit paypal.com – looks just like the real thing; doesn’t it: the browser bar says you’re at PayPal’s real site, but you’re not. That first ‘a’ in the name is an international character (actually the letter ‘a’ from the Cyrillic character set, which is just slightly different from a Western ‘a’, if you look closely. Of course, this leads to potentially thousands of dangerous phishing exploits, tricking users into exposing their bank account details to random Nigerians.

Opera, makers of a stunning web browser that I’m not quite sure I should be abandoning yet, have announced their solution to this problem (which isn’t actually a web browser problem at all, but a specification problem): IDN domain names from outside of places which are expected to need then (e.g. dot-jp, etc.) will be displayed longhand, and secure sites (https) will display their certificate holder’s name – longhand – alongside the domain name in the address bar.

Of course, unless you’re using Opera 8 beta, the only way to be sure you’re safe from this exploit is to manually type in every link you follow.

This Has GOT To Be Anti-Trust/FUD

This screenshot taken from Microsoft Anti-Spyware:

[screenshot removed – later turned out to be a fake]

MEng Dissertation – Hamster Music

No, I’m not talking about that god-awful de-da-de-da-de-do-do-do de-da-de-do do thingy: I’m talking about this ingenious MEng dissertation project, in which the student hooked up six hamsters to a MIDI device and, with some clever hardware and software, used their movements to compose music. If you look at the site, be sure to download the video clip or at least a sample of the music produced!

Now That’s Customer Service

Do you remember in the middle of last week I finally discovered that I could make Firefox have all the features I loved in Opera, using plugins? Well; I’m honoured to report that my comments haven’t gone un-noticed: I’ve recieved a comment on that post from Jonny Axelsson, dude who does standards-related stuff for Opera. To save you going back there, he writes:

In the meantime we’re getting out Opera 8, so it would be even harder to compete…

Not much to say on the matter, but hey. I tried Opera 8 beta, and it’s fab, but it’ll need to improve on the web developer and adblocking things if I’m to re-adopt it as my browser of choice. That said, I’m still using Opera at home, because I haven’t been bothered yet to download all those Firefox extensions that make it “as good as ” Opera for the things I need in a browser.

Right – Shrink is here – time to break the internet again.

Igneous bMotion

I’ve set up a chatbot called Igneous on the RockMonkey ChatRoom. I installed bMotion 0.09: emotions for bots, and some conversation topics (based on the RockMonkey site itself)… and it’s coming up with some classic lines. I lifted this exchange between Sian and Igneous from the log:

<chocorifi> Are you accusing me of sexual harassment Iggy?
<Igneous> only because my toaster ran off
<chocorifi> wtf?
<Igneous> what?
<chocorifi> why did your toaster run off Iggy?
<Igneous> entropy
<chocorifi> i don’t even know what that means, waa
<chocorifi> what does entropy mean iggy?
<Igneous> cycling

It’s good to see that it learns, though. Say anything enough times and it will take it as fact. For example:

<DanHuntle> iggy, what is Bryn_S?
<Igneous> a ginger welshman i guess

More quotes on the RockMonkey ChatRoomQuotes page.

Paul – Prepare To Drool

Back in 1979, Atari came up with a design for a next-generation console called the “Cosmos” (you’ll find it on this list of handheld games consoles. This remarkable device, planned for release in the early 80’s, would have used holographic games in order to give an illusion of 3D, all in a hand-held unit.

In any case; only five prototypes were ever built (and only two of those ever had their electronics put in)… but one of “the three” has come up for sale on eBay on Buy It Now. I kid you not. Price is just short of £10,000. Don’t you just want one?

AtariMuseum’s page on the Atari Cosmos – with piccies; fab!

There Goes Your Data Now…

Is it just me, or does this dialog box, which appears when using a particular part of Microsoft SQL Server 2000, present a very bad metaphor? One that says, “this arrow represents your data, and here it is being minced by some cogs”. Or maybe it’s just me that thinks that, and winces a little every time another animated grey arrow goes through the mangle.

Just a thought.

Firefox Finally Appeals

As you may all know, I’m a die-hard supporter of the Opera web browser, despite many of my friends now claiming that Firefox is superior. I’ve been following the Mozilla project for a long while (haven’t we all), and on the many occasions I’ve tried Firefox (and it’s grandparents) I’ve always been unimpressed. It’s always been the little things that Opera did that kept me coming back to it, time and time again.

With the full release of Firefox 1.0 (download Firefox here), there’s been an explosion in the number of Firefox extensions that have become available, so I decided to try to find a combination of extensions that would at long last give Firefox the capabilities that always kept me coming back to Opera. The theory is – if I can find enough extensions to give me the functionality I need in a web browser (which Opera very-nearly perfectly provides) in Firefox, it’ll make a convert out of me. Here goes –

- Mouse Gestures 1.0 – One of the great things about Opera is that it really pioneered mouse gestures (waving your cursor in strange patterns in order to facilitate shortcuts), and led the way for years thereafter. Mouse gestures are infectious – once you’ve used them and you get the hang of “doing things faster” (particularly mouse-intensive activities like web browsing), you end up trying to do it elsewhere – I’ve frequently used friends computers (with Internet Exploder, or similar) and tried to do a gesture before remembering that I can’t.The Mouse Gestures extension for Firefox is fully-featured and highly-configurable. I found the original settings a little unresponsive, and had to increase the “diagonal tolerance” (slippage permitted in a non-cardinal direction) to bring it back in line with the speed at which I execute gestures, and of course I’ve customised some of my own gestures. Apart from that, it’s wonderful.

Firefox Downloads Window In Sidebar

- Download Manager Tweak 0.6.3 – One thing I loved about my customised Opera configuration was that pretty much everything not directly related to browsing – my RSS-feed subscriptions (that let me keep an eye on all my friends’ weblogs in realtime), my downloads, etc. – were set up to all appear in the wonderful “sidebar”: a non-invasive way of keeping information “to hand”. Firefox’s download windows are chunky and ugly, only a little better than the hideous ones provided by Internet Exploder. This plugin allows you to move the download window to the sidebar – a far more sensible place for it – and manage all your transfers from there.
- Web Developer 0.8 and Nuke Anything 0.2 – As a web developer, I love the web developer tools in Opera. The ability to switch stylesheets, emulate other browsers, change and test content on the fly, and manipulate cookies is invaluable when debugging large, complex web projects. Combining these two excellent extensions gives me all of this, and more. The Web Developer tools can do things like manipulate form data on the fly, edit offline HTML and CSS on-the-fly, simulate different screen resolutions, and validate source code – it’s fantastic. Nuke Anything allows content to be ‘removed’ from the page: a great way of digging through complicated source code to find how a particular trick is being achieved.

Sage Extension For Firefox

Sage 1.3 – Now here’s a stunning piece of software. Thanks to Jon for suggesting this one.A great feature of Opera is it’s use as an RSS reader. RSS is a wonderful way to “subscribe” to news sources, weblogs, and the like, and be notified when they’re updated or even have the new content delivered directly to your desktop. It’s so good, that I rarely use Abnib or my friends page any more. Opera makes it easy to set up and manage your subscriptions, and delivers them in the way that suits you best.Now Firefox does natively support syndication, but it doesn’t do a very good job of it. It’s system – “Active Bookmarks”, relies on use of it’s bookmarks list, lots of scrolling, etc. Plus – and here’s the big problem – it doesn’t pass your browser cookies when picking up the feeds – this means that you can’t have it, for example, pick up restricted “friends only” feeds from your friends’ weblogs. Without this feature, there was no way I’d be leaving Opera behind.But Sage pulls it off. It pulls in the feeds and presents them in a brilliant way. It’s default options are a little weird, and it doesn’t support automatic “timed” feed collection, but it still does a great job of this newsfeed lark. I think everybody with Firefox should install Sage.
Session Saver – Simply put, this allows Firefox to remember what tabs you had open when it was last closed (even if it crashed or there was a power cut), and re-open them when you run it again, in a very Opera-esque way.
MiniT 0.4 – A pet annoyance, but one that would have really annoyed me, is the inability to re-order the tabs while using Firefox’s tabbed browsing. I mean: why wasn’t this included with the program? Most other programs that use the dynamic “document” tab metaphor allow the user to click-drag-reorder them, including my beloved Opera. But no, you need a plug-in like MiniT to do this. It’s good: not as “fluid” as Opera, but quite satisfactory.
TabBrowser Preferences 1.1.1 – It didn’t take long of playing with Firefox, particularly on the EasyNews web site, to find another thing which, to me, is a big problem. When people (very rudely) make hyperlinks that request to be opened in “a new window”, Firefox does exactly that: opens them in a new window, rather than in a new tab in the current window (fitting with the tabbed browsing metaphor). I tried a couple of plug-ins to prevent this from happening, but none of them worked consistently (for example, catching JavaScript pop-up windows and tabbing them, for example), as Opera does, until I found this lovely little extension. TabBrowser Preferences has all kind of options I don’t use, but for this one, which I do, it’s wonderful.
LastTab 1.1 – By this point, I had very few quirks left unsatisfied on my “web browser wish list”. One was that, in Opera, pressing CTRL-TAB takes you first to your most-recently used other tab, and then (if you keep pressing tab) through the others you have open. This makes sense to me, because you can then use CTRL-TAB as a two-tab “flicker” (like the “last channel” button on a TV remote): perfect for use as a “boss key” (if you don’t know, you don’t need to know). Satisfied.

This only leave one “big” niggle that still pisses me off – I can’t find a plug-in that will allow me to hold down a particular key (e.g. shift) and click on a tab, to close it (really useful for closing multiple tabs at once, after running and completing a multi-tab information seek). If anybody can suggest an extension that does this, let me know!

So; I guess I’m a Firefox convert. I knew it would happen someday, but I’m just surprised it happened so soon.

Card Protector

Feel free to put this ad banner on your own web site or weblog. And make sure you take advantage of this great service, yourself, too. (by the way, you can’t see this post on Abnib, you’ll have to click here to see it).

The content of this post depended upon Flash, a now-obsolete technology. The joke was that it was a “banner ad” style form advertising a service that checked if your credit card details had been stolen online; all you have to do is enter your card details into this strange suspicious form and it’ll tell you whether your card details have been stolen!

50 GMail Invites!!!

This is just silly. I have 50 – yes, count ’em – 50 GMail invites. Nope; 49, now. If you want one, shout. And yes; Becky, I’ll sort one for you as soon as you tell me where to e-mail it to.

Sam’s Spam

I just got swamped by about 150 bits of trackback spam. Not a problem – I know how to deal with it and I was able to get rid of it all in line of SQL code… and it was also interesting to see that I rank highly enough in common searches to find ‘open’ blogs that I was swamped by so much of it, so quickly.

I’ve been spam-free for months, since I implemented my solution to blog spam, which (as you’ve probably seen) involves answering simple (to a human) questions when you place a comment. But this most recent horde of spam worked by using trackback, a system whereby weblogs tell each other if people write relevant “follow-up” content. And, unlike the comments-spam, which I was able to easily prevent, trackback spam is more difficult, and I’m yet to devise a suitable solution (although I have a clever idea).

I wonder if it was the man interviewed by The Register yesterday who was responsible for this attack?

Flash MX 2004 Data Integration/XML Features

Geeky post.

I’ve just been playing with the data integration and XML-parsing features offered by the new version of Macromedia Flash (traditionally used for animation on the web, but nowadays used for all kinds of things, like those silly games at Shockwave.com). They’re actually quite impressive – here’s the result of my fiddling this evening (requires Flash Player 7 – not worth downloading just to see it, though):

It’s an RSS reader, connecting to the Scatmania web site – or, more simply – it connects to this web site and picks up the summaries of the most recent posts and provides them in a compact browser (with a little ‘Go…’ button to take you to the full article).

Why’ve I posted it here? Because it impressed me to see what Flash is capable of these days. Apologies to the non-geeks who are by now going “La la, la la…”

Freedom Sport And Surf

There’s a lesson here for any business with a web site:

I’m sure that you may be familiar with Freedom Sport & Surf, the sports goods shop on Alexandra Road (opposite the carpet shop formerly known as Rumbletums Cafe). Well; they had a website – FreedomSportAndSurf.com. But they let the domain name expire, and it’s been picked up by a porn site: take a look.

In any case, the owners of the store aren’t internet-savvy, and had completely forgotten they had a web site. Similarly, most of the staff weren’t aware of it, either, until a lady came in, recently, and informed the staff member at the counter they she thought it was “disgraceful” that the shop had “things like that” on it’s website, where “children could view it”.

Today, staff at the shop are frantically scrubbing the web address from their carrier bags. Hilarity.

Geeky Humour – The Concatenator

String c = a.concat(b); has never been so violent.