AKA I don’t want to see the inside of a bank for 2 years… or I might go postal 
For those of you familiar with my recent Bank of Amerika issues, you can skip to today’s (this week’s?) events.
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My Epic Bank Saga: Continues
July 24th, 2009
Color Picker App v2 update
July 16th, 2009I haven’t forgotten v2 of the Color Picker App & it’s something I’ve been wanting to work on. Unfortunately I have other projects that pay the bills taking priority. I wanted to share a couple of ideas I’ve been toying with and get some feedback.
I’m planning to completely drop reliance on the X Library. I had toyed with the idea of doing some sort of flash based thing, but I’m thinking of using jQuery, YUI, or both instead.
I’m keeping the server side code PHP based and thinking of using Symfony, the Zend Framework, or something with user handling already built in - like Drupal (unlikely). Part of the reason for user logins is so people can submit/maintain color schemes.
I’m thinking of making it open source so people can host their own server full of color schemes. I’ll pull out the Firewheel Design ColorBurn feed and make the color feed section pluggable so people could write their own plugins for other services or completely random color schemes.
I’m hoping to make the color schemes more dynamic, but I’m not quite sure how to go about wrapping color swatches. From what I remember v1 requires 4 colors (that’s how many is in the ColorBurn widget). Most of the code is dynamic and simply loops through the array of color swatches, but the current floating & such will more than likely break if it doesn’t have exactly 4 colors.
I’m wanting to set it up so that there will be more choices than just the 3 of default color order, light to dark, & dark to light. I’d like to set it up so that the color feed could specify which color belonged to which class category (i.e. page text, page background, etc) by default. Maybe even define a default reverse order. I will still have the light to dark & dark to light. I may include a default color order
based on the order the colors are first added to an array in order to have yet another possible way of viewing the colors.
I’m wanting to add drag & drop as well as color wheel / RGB / hex color selector for each class.
I’d like to make it a full page view with a draggable/clickable icon to pop open the color picker app.
That last brings me to something I was thinking about, but considering all of the various possibilities I’m not sure how viable it would be. Call me crazy, but I think it’d be cool if people could include the color app js file and whatever external js libs were needed to their own site page. It would then scan through all of the html elements; make a list of elements, classes, and id’s; and present them for possibly color changing/styling. The other possibility which might be better is for it to scan through the attached css files and only add the given css selectors to the list - thus giving the end user more control over what they were able to style.
This does cause problems with trying to automatically display color sets on a page. The end user would have to manually set all of the elements/classes/id’s or css selectors and their resulting color set may be near completely useless to somebody else who’s using different classes & id’s.
Annoying Failure to Auto-Complete
June 21st, 2009I’ve not bothered much with the adobe groups website… Partly because I don’t use adobe products, but also because Adobe is using the autocomplete=”off” attribute on the password input field… This means due to my already decreased interest in actually using the website this makes it even more of a pain to do things that *should* be very very *simple* like saying “Yes, I do want to go to <CFLunch/>”.
Considering all I do with my adobe groups account is RSVP for these & considering I only sign up for them on *my* computer… Does adobe really need to go to this annoying extent to chase me away?
Yay for greasemonkey.
I found a dreadfully simple greasemonkey script to do the trick, but it wouldn’t really handle a range of forms and didn’t have any validation checks (does the form really exist? does that form element really let you set an attribute?).
The way greasemonkey for firefox is set up it only works on the sites you specify anyways… So if you do want it on certain other sites (like your banking site), don’t add the URL to the list…
Please note that this will go through all forms on the given page & check to see if either the form or any of the form elements have the autocomplete attribute set - if so it should turn the attribute back on.
The name I gave this was Enable Login Forms
.
The namespace http://blog.whitelionsoft.com/
.
And currently the only page to include this script on is https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=ca&returnUrl=http://groups.adobe.com/groups/4b06154553/summary
.
for ( var i in document.forms ) {
var frm = document.forms[i];
if ( frm.autocomplete && frm.setAttribute ) {
frm.setAttribute( 'autocomplete', 'on' );
}
for ( var j in frm.elements ) {
var ele = frm.elements[j];
if ( ele.autocomplete && ele.setAttribute ) {
ele.setAttribute( 'autocomplete', 'on' );
}
}
}
PHP|tek ‘09
June 17th, 2009People keep asking me about Chicago
and if it was any good. It was good & I’ve been working on a blog post, but I’ve not had time to finish it… So for now I’ll just post a link to Terry Chay’s closing keynote speech.
http://lavalantern.org/wwfm_blog/?p=272
Also, Paul Reinheimer has video up from the Dutch PHP Conference at http://blog.preinheimer.com/.
Pirate Bay Proves Lawyers Wrong
May 6th, 2009For those that aren’t familiar with Pirate Bay, it provides links to lots and lots of torrents, both legal and illegal… Well, at least illegal in certain places in the world. Where Pirate Bay exists Copyright Law does not apply to software and is therefore operating legally according to it’s local laws.
Pirate Bay has recently been dealing with several lawyers (yet again). More details can be found in the blog post Pirate Bay IP Addresses Assigned to Prosecution Lawyers.
For those that don’t understand why this is so funny, let me try to explain. Every domain can be looked up in a ‘whois’ database that will provide information for the domain. Typically it’s contact information in order to contact the owner of the domain. However, information is not guaranteed to be accurate.
These lawyers presented information based on these ‘whois’ records as fact. As this information is unreliable you can’t possibly represent the ‘whois’ records alone as fact… Maybe, possibly, but probably not as supplemental to some other more accurate data. Definitely by no means as fact.
To show the court (and everybody else in the world) how little the prosecuting lawyers know, Pirate Bay changed their ‘whois’ records to state that they were owned by the prosecuting lawyers and listed the lawyers’ email addresses as contact information. So if the prosecuting lawyers were to continue to insist that these records are fact they would need to start prosecuting themselves. Oops.
Considering the prevalence of spam bots in this day and age I’m pretty sure they scrape email information from these ‘whois’ records as well…
I think with just this much people should understand the hilarity of the situation.
This is in no way an endorsement of using Pirate Bay for illegal distribution of software. Some people have used it to distribute home made video capture of online game tournaments that youtube would have turned into pixelated junk and other legal (as defined by US law) activities.
Cycles of Life
April 27th, 2009I’m sorry for waiting so long to type this up. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and something that happened this weekend prompted me to sit down and type.
Recently I was able to talk to an old high school friend of mine. We discussed what we’d been up to since the last time we’d talked and while it lasted longer than it should have (got to love questions for detail and then complaints about the discussion lasting too long ;)) we discovered that both of us had been going through some crap at about the same time. He thought my ordeal was worse, but on the flip side I wouldn’t want his troubles.
The question he asked of me though was, did you ask God why you were going through all of that
. As Phillipe [Matthew Broderick] said in Ladyhawke, …the truth is I talk to God all the time…
. On the other side of that I never asked about my ordeal - the part that bothered me wasn’t necessarily getting fired, it was that someone I trusted stabbed me in the back due to their insecurity about their job. Either it was my fault for being too trusting (this isn’t the first time something similar has happened) or God was simply reminding me that people are human.
However, I think what my friend was more worried about has been my erratic career
. I think the best thing my consulting career has taught me thus far is that no job is permanent
. And looking back to several times when my dad was worried about his own job, even government jobs are not secure
. Plus, I’m not sure that my goal has ever been to have a safe, secure, permanent job so it’s not been something I’ve worried about.
We should all be familiar with the basic principal of the circle of life. We’re born, we consume, we die, and are consumed. Everything in nature has it’s part to play in the circle of life.
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thus spake the Oracle: “all your MySQL are belong to us!”
April 21st, 2009If you’ve not seen the news yet, Oracle is buying Sun for 10 cents a share more than IBM’s final offer (Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems). And if you’re really lagging in tech news, MySQL was purchased by Sun a while ago.
Many people were worried about Sun’s purchase of MySQL and what that would mean. MySQL is an open source database and is in use all over the internet. I was somewhat worried about where they might decide to push the commercial product as that somewhat leads the open source project.
I’m thinking Oracle is primarily purchasing Sun for their hardware, not for MySQL - MySQL is just a bonus. However, as someone else pointed out, Oracle hasn’t really been making anything new. Oracle has been buying out companies that make great 3rd party apps for Oracle, repackaging it with the Oracle brand, and selling as is - bugs and all.
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VLC kicks even more butt - it streams!
March 4th, 2009I knew VLC was great for playing video files, especially those files I hadn’t been able to play using other players… & it’s even cross-platform! What I hadn’t paid attention to before was it’s ability to stream videos.
My friend, Craig Fowler (aka ToreadorVampire), recently ran me through the process rather quickly… I didn’t have much time and he didn’t have anything really written up… It was a last minute discussion over IM and I thought it could help to at least get people pointed in the right direction.
There is some documentation up at videolan.org (Streaming HowTo/VLM - VideoLAN Wiki) that shows how to set VLC up to do the streaming, talks about the HTTP interface, etc, but isn’t an instant answer.
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The Peoplehood of Mini Cooper Owners
March 1st, 2009I got my Mini Cooper last October (about 4 months ago). While I thought I realized before getting one that they were an enthusiast car, apparently I had no idea…
Sure, growing up we went through a couple of VW Vanagons and we’d get a wave every once in a while when we were out on vacation… In almost any car driving down back roads running into the occasional farmer will yield a wave or a hat off. The only other recognition I think I’ve gotten from other people as I’m driving down the road is when I had my really sad and pathetic ‘95 Saturn S-1 - people had a tendancy to give me the finger <sarcasm>telling me I was #1</sarcasm>.
I think about 80% of the other Mini Cooper drivers I’ve come across have waved or nodded at me… After realizing it wasn’t because they thought they knew me, I’ve started waving back. I’ve not waved at people since… well, as a kid in the back of the Vanagon when I’d also pump my arm at tractor trailer rigs to get them to blow their horns.
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Bohemian Rhapsody on Digg and Chad After Dentist
February 12th, 2009Some people just have way too much time on their hands…
Somebody posted a link in IRC to this very long screenshot of the Bohemian Rhapsody with each user posting a single line… Geeze, the things that take talent and social engineering these days…
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