Better fingering through Opera Fingertouch

By SCdF | Published: March 9, 2009

So, Opera is the best browser. Ever. Evar, even.

Firefox is too slow, and contains memory leaks. Only communist fools and / or Osama sympathisers use it.

Now we’ve got those ultimate truths out of the way, check this out:

You need to upgrade your Flash Player and/or enable JavaScript in your browser to view this tutorial.

For those of you who can’t view (or can’t be bothered viewing) the video, basically it’s some magic they have added to the already-fairly-magic mobile edition of their web browser which makes clicking links and filling out forms easier. If it detects that ’selectables’– being links, dropdowns, input fields etc– are so close together as to be difficult to select it brings them up in a lightbox-type thing that makes them larger and easier to select.

It looks like a pretty neat idea, and if I surfed the net on my phone I would be downloading this sucker and checking it out.

[via operalabs]

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$11.92 well spent — part 1 of 6

By SCdF | Published: March 7, 2009

By Way Of Explanation

This blog is not a diary, journal, logbook or chronicle. There are no musings about pretty girls, no flagellation over my hopes and dreams, no he-said she-said. There are no pictures of my cat, what I had for breakfast or what my cat had for breakfast.

And that’s not just because I don’t have a cat, pretty girls or hopes and dreams.

This blog is an outlet for me to write in a style that does not befit a technical document, email or any other self-effacing, stifled prose I am forced to churn out over the course of my work day. I don’t have the patience (or the blessing of a coherent story) to write a novel, so this will have to do.

Incidentally, I went to my local plastic coaster / frisbee vendor and purchased 4 DVDs for $2.98 each. And I intend to review each and every one.

The lineup is:

The discerning readers among you may have noticed that Cold Sweat is in there twice. There are good, valid, totally not stupid reasons for this. Some may accuse moi that I bought the thing twice by mistake. This is potentially untrue, and even so, they have different covers, it’s a mistake any one could have made. Regardless, one of them seems to be some kind of ‘remastering’ so obviously it is a (totally planned) exercise to see if remastering has any effect on the qualtiy of the end product.

You’re pretty excited right? I know I am. This could be painful. For both of us.

Get ready to pose as a team… cause shit is about to get real.

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Oh shit son, those tunes are *on point*.

By SCdF | Published: March 5, 2009

(I’m channeling Robert, can ya tell?)

I have a new friend. My brother introduced us (good job!). She’s not exactly pretty or intellegent, but she is stuck in the 80s. And that’s a good thing.

Say hello to the new old thing:

SIDPlay

This, is Sidplay2. If you’re in Ubuntu you can just sudo apt-get install sidplay2. If you’re on Windows or some other kind of Linux you can download various binaries from the site.

Basically, it lets you rock out to c64 chip tunes in the ’sid’ format.

Of course, you don’t have any of these lying around, do you?

You’re welcome.

That gives you an insane 36,081 chip-tunes to rock out to, all in 50mb or so. It’s astounding really, that pack has everything. And I mean everything:

oops

No, really. Everything.

ofortuna

The music is mostly a mix of game tunes, psygoa and crazy shit, such as random pop songs and the like. It’s sorted relatively well so it’s pretty browseable, although I’ve just imported it all and randomly clicked around.

The app is a little confusing to use at first, and it kinda sucks that you have to use a different music player from what you’re used to, but still. Chiptunes!

The linux version seems to have more options than the Windows one, including metadata (like you saw in the Britney pic), ‘hotlists’ and other bits and pieces.

I’ve haven’t moved away completely from the other hotness but with this along with random internet radio it’s certainly being used less. If the tubes weren’t so slow at home I think I would have competely moved away from mp3s at this point.

Hear that Slingshot? Give me mah ADSL2!

Edit: it looks like Audacious supports playing .sid files natively. It’s a Linux audio player a bit like winamp, except not XMMS, which is a linux player that is a lot like winamp.

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Say hello to the deeply stupid

By SCdF | Published: March 4, 2009

President Barack Obama’s tax proposal – which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more — has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay, even if it’s just by a doller.

A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.

Upper-Income Taxpayers Look for Ways to Sidestep Obama Tax-Hike Plan

If it’s not obvious from the quotes above, a reporter, either ignorant or stupid, managed to find people who believe (as the repoter does) that tax brackets work over your entire income. As in, because their new mus^H^H^H totally christian leader wants to raise taxes for people who make more than $250,000 / yr they can make more money by reducing their wage to under $249,000 / yr, thus avoiding the $250k+ tax bracket.

The New Republic does a better writeup than I ever could on how stupid this is.

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I steal ideas from Sam Ruby

By SCdF | Published: February 28, 2009

I’ve been making minor changes to the site recently (this will be the last theme change, honestly, I’m mostly happy with this one), the more interesting of them being a anti-spam feature I heard about a few years ago.

It’s a captcha, of sorts, except that none of y’all should ever notice it.

Take it away, Sam Ruby, from all the way back in 2007:

I’ve implemented an unusual captcha system. First, the images are not distorted. In fact, if you have posted to my weblog in the past 90 days, or have visited it within the past week (but more than an hour ago), and aren’t running afoul of the throttle, the display of the image will be entirely suppressed; furthermore, the input field will be pre-filled in for you and hidden. If you are not recognized, but have JavaScript turned on, DHTML will be used to fill in that input field for you, and that portion of the form will be set to display:none. In fact, even if you are new, have both JavaScript and images turned off, you will find that the alt attribute of the image will contain the necessary text.

Sounds great! It also sounds like a heck of a lot of work. I can’t be bothered generating an image, or working out when people have visited! I, being a lazy person, want to do this with the minimal amount of effort as possible. My only real goal here is to stop bots that are designed to understand WordPress forms. One possibility is that I could modify the form names to something other than their defaults, but that would involve actually learning how WordPress works, and seriously? Fuck that.

So, firstly I installed the simplist captcha plugin I could find. This guy involves configuring one static question and one static answer. It adds a text field to the comment submit form with your question written beside it, and the comment submission is only a success if that field contains your answer. Unmodified, it looks like this:

visiblecaptcha

Then, all I did was add some JavaScript of the caliber even a enterprise development Java monkey like myself can produce:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.getElementById("spamq").value = "<?php echo $this->spam_answer; ?>";
document.getElementById("aspamquestion").style.display = "none";
</script>

And viola, anyone with JavaScript turned on will be back to having the comment form look like this…

hiddencaptcha

… none the wiser to the seething churning machine of bot prevention raging in the background.

So, does it work? Well, I haven’t had any spam since I made the modifications, but I only had one instance before it, so maybe it’s to early to tell.

But I’m quietly confident. Jeff Atwood has (according to bloglines) the 104th most popular blog in existence. For as long as I’ve read his blog, his comment form has looked exactly like this:

Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror

Oranges all the way down. And if using one static word is enough to stop the rampant hoards of spammers, then by all accounts my blogs usage of two words is just overkill.

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Peter and the wtf

By SCdF | Published: February 27, 2009

Let me violate your childhood.

And now, let me violate your childhood and the early ninties (which may in fact be your childhood.

Peter and the Wolf and beatboxing? What’s next, Thomas the Tank Engine with drive-bys?

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Quake Live is now live

By SCdF | Published: February 25, 2009

About a month ago I got into the Quake Live beta which was sadly uneventful due to a lack of Linux support.

It’s now been released to the general public, although still without Linux support. But for you Windows kids, enjoy.

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If fark was in New Zealand the [florida] tag would be the [tauranga] tag

By SCdF | Published: February 25, 2009

This:

A banned Tauranga motorist today blamed his teenage son for being caught by police driving two-and-a-half times over the legal alcohol limit. Easton Shane Taikato, 40, beneficiary, told Tauranga District Court he got drunk because his 15-year-old son had not come home the night before. [Tauranga] Man blames son for drink driving

…coupled with this:

A Tauranga man has admitted encouraging his partner’s 12-year-old son to light a “small” early morning fire at a Greerton play centre. … Prosecutor Barry Woon said the defendant was drinking at home with his partner and her son on the evening of December 13. Mr Woon said Moore and the boy went for a walk in the early hours of the following morning. The defendant, who continued drinking along the way, knew the 12-year-old had a cigarette lighter. … Moore watched as the boy climbed a metal fence into the grounds … and set alight a thick plastic curtain surrounding the verandah. Making no attempt to put out the fire, the pair ran home and had something to eat. About 10 or 15 minutes later, Moore noticed a large amount of smoke coming from the play centre but did not call 111 Moore told police he knew the 12-year-old had wanted to cause damage to property by either throwing stones, tagging or lighting fires. He was going to allow the child to light “small fires” and offered encouragement when the boy walked off toward the play centre. [Tauranga] Man admits encouraging boy to light play centre fire

…makes me wonder what liquid fills the Bay of Plenty…

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To all Grammar Nazis: Help a brother out

By SCdF | Published: February 25, 2009

Check out the following conversation, specifically the bold section:

[15:57:39] Stefan du Fresne: Man, I want to be able to leave at 4pm :-( [15:57:58] Tony Ip: easy…just head out the door now :O [15:58:25] Dave McIntyre: or in 90 seconds’ time

Is that right? Why do you have an apostrophe there?

If you use the google theory of correctness you find most people don’t have the apostrophe, but that could just mean that everyone else is as ignorant as me.

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Well I’ll be…

By SCdF | Published: February 23, 2009

InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) welcomes the Government’s decision to defer the commencement of Section 92A of the Copyright Act until March 27 and to suspend the Section if no agreement can be reached.

…

“The highly visible blackout campaign organised by the Creative Freedom Foundation and its supporters has served to bring the issue into mainstream debates, and we applaud the efforts they have taken,” Davidson says.

via scoop.co.nz

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