Disable Akismet = spike in visits

I recently migrated all my blogs to WordPress 3.0. One of the things you do is temporarily disable all plugins including Akismet spam filter. During the short period of time the spam filter was off I received, and had to later kill, more spam than I would normally receive in a week. And . . . → Read More: Disable Akismet = spike in visits

Please Excuse our mess

I upgraded from my own home brewed wordpress mu to 3.0 RC3 with multi. They implement multi in fundamentally differenent ways than I did, and I needed to also move some other non blog projects on the dorkage domain around. Needless to say, there will be a few glitches and I don’t have . . . → Read More: Please Excuse our mess

How my jQuery Drag’n'Drop Jigsaw works

AU-bg I had a kind of implied request to talk about the code in this jquery jigsaw puzzle. I sort of figured you can grab a copy if you like, but maybe a little expository prose will enable you to focus on the salient parts of the script.
Continue reading How my jQuery Drag’n’Drop Jigsaw works

jQuery jigsaw

The first time I googled “jquery jigsaw” I didn’t find too much. I found http://www.vladstudio.com/jigsawpuzzles/ and Fernando’s very simple one What I was wanting to do was bring some of my old Hypercard stacks from the 90′s back to life. Yeah, Hypercard had drag and drop way back then. Anyway, . . . → Read More: jQuery jigsaw

New Facebook “Like Button” Dorkage

FaceBook-LogoFacebook, as you may know, is attempting to own a greater share of the web by allowing you to put a facebook “like” button and other social widgets on any web page.   Think what you like about Facebook, their questionable privacy, and their evil plans, but the fact remains that it is the #4 most visited website today and growing.  I’ve just sort of accepted that if someone really wants to they can know pretty much everything I’ve ever done online.  Meanwhile, getting Likes in lots of people’s profiles could be some some potent leverage for me.

I’m not going to reiterate the details.  I’ll just link to them and/or quote them if necessary.  It boils down to this:  There are two ways to do a “Like” button, either insert an iframe in your site (with all the attendant ugliness of iframes), or actually enable your page and use the facebook SDK yourself.
Continue reading New Facebook “Like Button” Dorkage

ACH Fraud becoming ever more clever

Last week I saw Hal Pomeranz of the SANS institute give a talk on how ACH (Automated Clearing House)  fraud has become increasingly more sophisticated. It is a serious problem and it’s beginning to have a non negligible economic impact on business here in the USA. In this blog post I will summarize the takeaway points and suggest some counter strategies for people who are likely targets.

Continue reading ACH Fraud becoming ever more clever

Random Fiber Arts Dorkage

It’s funny how things confluence. A while back I did a post spreading the word about 2-D bar codes. Just recently I attended Beaver Bar Camp and went to an un-session titled Nerdlepoint by a woman from Portland OR named Julia (sorry, bar camps are so anarchistic that I couldn’t find . . . → Read More: Random Fiber Arts Dorkage

Adventures in Resource Mining

In my previous post in this series, I described some ancient software that I wrote years ago that I would like to recycle for the web. This post focuses on massaging the existing resources so that they are web-ready. Boring, but critical, and not so easy, as it turned out!

AU-bg
Preparing the graphical assets:
The most obvious way that suggests itself to implement the puzzles on the web is to create a JQuery UI draggable div with a background graphic. We have a conversion to do. In Hypercard, assets are resources embedded in the runnable file (which was always a huge source of problems.)

To make things worse, my resources were embedded in a proprietary format created by a third party extension. The backdrops are split out separately, in the old fashioned PICT format. Everything is exactly the right size to sync up but nothing is the correct format. Redrawing all this stuff is not an option; however, there are plenty format converters. Getting the resources ready to move to the web is a two-part process:

  • Extracting the resources
  • Converting the resources to an up to date format.

Continue reading Adventures in Resource Mining

Hypercard What has thou wrought?

This series of posts is planned to document of some my adventures trying to leverage an abandoned Hypercard opus I did a long time ago. It’s more of a narrative than a how to. A lot of different realms come into play here. So if you aren’t up for reading a long multi-part techno-novela, scamper along now and go look for clips of Megan Fox or something.

HyperCardTop

Continue reading Hypercard What has thou wrought?

Embed.ly: One API to rule them all

Something very very cool fell into my inbox today.

The back story
I had been researching OEmbed kind of as a background project to see if I could use it in my own stuff. Now what is OEmbed, you ask? It is a specification by which a simple link transforms itself into rich content. If . . . → Read More: Embed.ly: One API to rule them all