Bespin – Cool editor project from Mozilla
Saw this come across the news feed today and thought it was pretty neat.
Pretty cool concept that I hope the flesh out.
Cool tool
Today while reading a cool nice article about someone researching a bunch of domains he found for some marketing campaign, he mentioned this cool tool.
http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/
I’d used similar services before but what was so cool about this one was you could get an entire list of the domains hosted at a specific IP range. Would be really easy to see all the clients a specific hosting company has with this. On top of that you can get tons more info about a specific domain which for this example I’ll a BBQ blog that I started and haven’t done much with, BBQ and the Works. Their whois tool gives you the standard stuff that most other similar services do but there is also so much more.
Looking at this run on my site you can see they find other domains registered by me, other domains on the same nameserver, and even some SEO stuff. Overall this is a great little tool you can play with and really learn some great stuff about a site.
Never underestimate the power of VB
Updated Link because the previous one was removed.
It must be .Net that gave it the killer tracking power.
With Silverlight they could even bring this super powerful app to the web.
Got to love Hollywood 
Though I figure most people who program in a Microsoft language sound like this. I kid, I kid.
Code highlighting in blog posts
Added a new plugin to do syntax highlighting for code.
Here is a test for some php code.
$echo "test"; $theArray = json_decode($theData);
If you want to find out more about the plugin you can go to
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-syntax/
Or you can find more out about GeSHi (the php script that actually does the highlighting that powers this plugin) by going to
http://qbnz.com/highlighter/index.php
***UPDATE***
Of interest, don’t include the <? in the code or all your PHP code gets removed.
Google gets owned, though I would have to :)
TechCrunch has an interesting story up about Google here. It has profanity in it but it’s upside down so it must have the opposite effect.
˙looɔ ʎʇʇǝɹd ʇɐɥʇ ʇ,usı
What this is a perfect example of is that you can never trust the data given to you by the client, EVER! Unfortunately most people don’t know that this was even possible (including myself until I saw this.) Now while being able to put in upside down text may not seem like a huge issue this can allow things to get around filters that were setup (say for profanity) or possibly allow for injection type attacks.
So this is just something good to know is out there as a possibility, cause we all know “knowing is half the battle!”
What’s been keeping me away
Well realized I hadn’t posted anything lately so I figured I should do an update.
Been playing a lot with Flex and can’t wait to get some real work done with it. Played around and got it talking to a Database through PHP and that was cool. Been looking at how to skin the apps so we can make some nice looking ones.
Started writing a Groupwise Flex Chat client and hit a pretty big road block. The issue is when making the login request to the server they want you to identify the local port you assigned to talk to it (which is stupid since the server already knows this information because I’m talking to it from that port) which unfortunately it seems I can’t get that information from the socket. Still poking around trying to find somewhere to get it but no luck so far. This doesn’t stop the project but changes how it would work. Now it would have to talk to a middle man that handles all this stuff which makes it not as “flex”able as I had intended because I was wanting to convert it to an AIR app that people could use from their desktop to connect. Now we could open up the middleman to the outside world to handle this but I really wished for a way around it.
Lately a big thing that’s been taking up a bunch of my time is that we are moving our CMS from Solaris to Linux. This is a big annoyance because the software provider says they support Solaris but it’s pretty obvious they don’t after having them attempt to troubleshot our “Going Live” issue. They said they couldn’t duplicate the issue on an OSX machine????????? We are now looking to move to a Suse machine and the test server I setup on a past dump of the database (running on the same MySQL server on the same Solaris box) and have had no issues. Should be a simple move once we have our live server up and going and the longest part will be waiting on the dns change for the name.
Still trying to figure out what I want to give presentations on next semester. Probably talk about RIA’s and hopefully I hear something that others might want to hear about so we can have talks on it.
Other then that hopefully I’ll catch some tutorials that really peak my interest and I’ll share but been kind of stale lately out there with things.
Have a good holidays if I don’t post before then.
One Small Step for man
On giant leap for integrating with the worst documented POS messaging service ever, Groupwise Messenger.
After much research and finally just breaking down and fumbling through the Kopete Source (which was 100 times easier to read then the GAIM source) I finally figured out that all they were doing was using HTTP to send things. Not very complex at all but really a waste.
So I now have officially logged in through PHP (which I could tell cause it logged me off GAIM) which made me very happy. After doing that I tested if it was using TLS or not which it isn’t which gives me a reasonable shot at actually integrating it straight with Flex instead of needing PHP as a middleman. Not saying there couldn’t be some cool uses for bot and running fake users through PHP, or even just using that for a simple AJAX chat script. Next is the step of actually creating functions out of what I did to make it a lot simpler to create.
But seeing it work makes me a VERY happy person. If anyone has a want to play with a GW Messenger client let me know and I’ll share with you what I have. And once I have it actually all nice and functionalized I’ll let it out there for others to play with.
Resizable Textarea by Javascript
Resizable Textarea by Javascript
This is a pretty nice system to look at for a great use of Javascript that can be very practical.
The code is very clean and an excellent example of what you should look to achieve.
PDT Webinar / Tools for the future
We are going to be pushing PDT as the php ide to use when working for us. Mainly because it’s free and because it’s a plugin to eclipse it will also act as the base for adding in Subclipse for subversion access and flex builder for doing flex apps.
There is a webinar about pdt from Zend which you can watch and get an overview of the system.
I currently have this setup on my Ubuntu install on my laptop and it works great. I need to play with the subversion side to see how that works but the PHP and Flex parts work great. We will get more into this later but this is a good preview of a great tool you can use for development.
Mix this with XAMPP and you can turn your local machine into a great development environment.
Also once I work more with Flex we will also look at adding Adobe Air to the mix for application development.
Flex Builder free for education
Here’s the press release ***Updated link***. This is going to be great for us since now it makes it have no cost to develop flex apps.
This will definitely be one of the things in the suite of applications we put together for students to use. I’ll get more in detail on that once we have completely set that in stone.