Hot Dorkage

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

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

This is just too cool, and true geeks will instantly . . . → Read More: Working Turing Machine

Here is my latest geeky plarn project. It’s been a long time in the making. I’m very proud of how long it took me to get enough bags to do this project, and I have to say I didn’t even get all of them myself. I fashioned the bag as a backpack . . . → Read More: PHP Elephant Plarn Geek Backpack

I have always had reservations about locking myself into a strict Object Relational Model scheme for the same reason I have been allergic to Windows. I was never able to articulate exactly why but my friend Juozas Kaziukėnas has brought it into sharp focus in his latest blog post on Doctrine.

Here’s the deal: I played with and studied Doctrine and I found it to be the most flexible and powerful of all the data mapping systems I have seen. Plus, Zend Framework is moving to it, so eventually I think it will be completely integrated with Zend Framework whether I like it or not. I had some concern due to alarming memory usage statistics reported when using Doctrine. But it seems that (as is often the case) the bad performance is the result of programmer ignorance, and not inefficiency of Doctrine itself.
Continue reading Lingering reservations about ORM

They couldn’t be too long in coming! The best thing about Twitter is its API. I was told by someone in the know that 90% of Twitter’s traffic comes through its API, not through people directly surfing it. Anyway, the new lists are GREAT. They should have been there from the get-go . . . → Read More: Twitter list apps

Here’s a little Twitter app for you while we all wait for some serious list apps: This one is called twibbon, and what it does is overlays a little icon over your twitter avatar to show you support something. First I placed the zend framework one, then I created my own for toonlet, of . . . → Read More: Twibbons for Toonlet

I just clipped each individual frame of one of my toonlets and put them in an open office presentation. Then I fired up Berio and ran the slideshow fullscreen while I read the lines. Then I imported the whole thing into IMovie, clipped the beginning and end, compressed it a little and uploaded it . . . → Read More: Toonlet with Audio

Paul Fenwick graced us with the following presentation at Barcamp Melbourne. Armed with only the documentation from Facebook’s API he proceded to submit queries to their query engine and it is amazing what he dug up on the volunteers who agreed to let him “hack” their accounts.

Bottom line: Facebook apps are scary because they . . . → Read More: Scary Facebook Hackage

I gave a 3 minute “Lightening Talk” on toonlet.com a couple weeks ago at the end of a LUV meeting. I wasn’t sure it was appropriate, because I think of these folks as really brilliant high-powered geek gurus, and toonlet is just a web app that really dumb people can use. It doesn’t even . . . → Read More: My Toonlet talk at Barcamp Melbourne