Geek Stuff « Hot Dorkage

Give me GOOD HTML snippets please!

By Colleen, on March 15th, 2011%

Like many blog owners I have a few HTML snippets linking to other sites. For example, everyone and their dog seems to have their own EC drop page nowadays, and in order to be included on it, they want you to paste up a little banner. Topsites and bloglists also have little banners. . . . → Read More: Give me GOOD HTML snippets please!

fb_xd_fragment Facebook Bugfix

By Colleen, on January 18th, 2011%

My server suddenly logged a rash of weird requests with something like ?fb_xd_fragment= in the URL. This is not good, because if you try this manually it renders a blank page, and blank pages are BAAAAAAAD! So upon googling I found it’s a bug with new Facebook API and (you guessed it) . . . → Read More: fb_xd_fragment Facebook Bugfix

Tech Support (if only)

By Colleen, on October 15th, 2010%

This XKCD was too good not to holler about. He just keeps crankin’ em out! And best of all, she’s a girl! . . . → Read More: Tech Support (if only)

Google Voice “Call Me” Widget

By Colleen, on September 17th, 2010%

One number to rule them all
I have just enabled Google Voice. So now you can call me without knowing my phone number. Now the benefits of being anonymous and invisible will truly come home to roost. Were I Scoble or somebody important, I could not post this widget in public because it would . . . → Read More: Google Voice “Call Me” Widget

Ms. Burrows’ Mapworks WordPress Plugin

By Colleen, on September 16th, 2010%

My friend Jillian Burrows just released a MapWorks plugin for wordpress and this is just me trying it out. I think it is just a question of shortcode and perhaps it installs a graphic in the public page to enable you to get more information. You can read the README just as well as . . . → Read More: Ms. Burrows’ Mapworks WordPress Plugin

Please Excuse our mess

By Colleen, on June 15th, 2010%

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

By Colleen, on June 6th, 2010%

I had a kind of implied request to talk about the code in this jquery jigsaw puzzle. I sort of figured you can Firebug it from hereif you like, but maybe a little expository prose will enable you to focus on the salient parts of the script. (Sorry the old link got broken when I restructured this blog.)
Continue reading How my jQuery Drag’n’Drop Jigsaw works

ACH Fraud becoming ever more clever

By Colleen, on April 27th, 2010%

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

By Colleen, on April 21st, 2010%

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

By Colleen, on April 19th, 2010%

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

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