Giant Robot

I've started using Slife to track my time on various projects. It's a pretty cool OSX time tracker and visualisation tool - a picture is worth a thousand words, they say:

Slife in month view - each dot represents a moment of activity in your day; hover for basic details, click to visit the relevant email, webpage, file etc.

On a current project, we have links to another online application. The login page of this app has javascript to ensure that should a site link to it using target='_blank' or any other method of window opening, then it will instead 'hijack' the parent window and close the blank one.

I'm sure that made sense to the developers at the time, but if you're trying to link in an action (eg confirming an event booking) from your own scheduling application, you don't want the event you're editing getting wiped out because some other website says so.

I have installed a few Debian Sarge (and 4.0) systems in the last week while building a web app for a customer, and they all came up with some (IMO) bad permissions in /dev/. In particular /dev/urandom, /dev/random, /dev/null and /dev/tty were being vexatious by persisting in being unwriteable for common users. This meant I got a few funky errors when trying to SSH as a Regular Guy, or use SSH, or do other 'normal' type things.

Captchas are great, but their time is done. And they are too easily defeated by smarter bots.

A generic captcha would look like the image above, along with a textfield labelled "Enter the text below". Boring.

So, here's what I propose: the Rorschach Captcha.

wow, this rocks ... dynamically load a remote JS file and have it be useable ... cool!

var s = document.createElement('script');
s.type = 'text/javascript';
s.src = '/scripts/library.js';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);

Been working with the Yahoo! User Interface JS library a lot lately, but it doesn't have a set of cookie functions baked in. Opted for the excellent functions that scored places #3, 2 and 1 (!!!) in Dustin Diaz's Top Ten JavaScript functions post. So far so delightful.

I found myself needing code folding in PHP5 again, and switched to TextMate for a few days. But it just doesn't handle things right ... nice UI, but it inserts a <% %> every time I press ^x which drove me nuts. So I worked out how to make code folding for PHP5 work in Aquamacs, and here it is (for your .emacs).

(defun show-onelevel ()
"show entry and children in outline mode"
(interactive)
(show-entry)
(show-children))
;;
(defun cjm-outline-bindings ()
"sets shortcut bindings for outline minor mode"
(interactive)