Sunday, April 1, 2001

April Fools! Notice something different about CamWorld today?

Again, again! (loads in another random template)

Permalink: http://www.camworld.com/fool.html

Contact Cam: Email

How Did I Do This? It was pretty simple actually. CamWorld's content is stored in daily flat files that contain very basic amounts of HTML. Things like H2, and P tags. Using the existing HTML templates of each site, I simply used Apache's XSSI include system to execute the content, and used a slightly-modified CSS file for each template that approximated the look-and-feel of the borrowed site's design. I then found a simple Perl CGI script on the web that would randomly load an HTML file from a specified directory, in this case, every subdirectory within /fool. This also allows me to archive the April Fools joke without modifying my own index.html file at all.

Notes: Digging through the various code of some [unnamed, and not represented here] sites yesterday, I had to simply give up on trying to drop my content into their templates. Some of this code was really bad and overly-complex.

Thanks: to Dori, Robert, Dack, Dan, David, Rafe, Jason, and Zeldman whose code I borrowed without permission to do this April Fools joke.

P.S. All graphic design, HTML and CSS code is copyright their respective authors. Please forgive any broken links...

Latest Microsoft Security Flaw: It's not HTML-email that's the problem here, it's how Microsoft has implemented it. Tying email, the OS, and the HTML rendering engine together at this level is ripe for security flaws. Come to think of it, most Microsoft security problems seem to stem from their attempts to integrate software into the operating system.

Saturday, March 31, 2001

Doc Searls thinks that Google is going to be acquired by Sun. Hmmmm....

Wednesday, March 28, 2001

Apologies to those who have emailed me and are expecting a response. I am far behind on answering email. I will get around to emptying that inbox pretty soon. It currently has 1646 messages in it since January 15.

I've started up work again on the open source project called Scarab. It's a Java and XML based issue tracking system intended to replace Bugzilla. I'm working on the front-end GUI, which is entirely browser-based. Ultimately, the front-end will be XHTML-based as parsed by an XML parser like Xerces, which runs on top of Turbine. And because Scarab will have a solid DTD, it will be possible to import/export other bug databases into it. In short, it's going to be a very extensible issue tracking system with an open source back-end and a standards-compliant front-end. More...

I will be in Seattle next Monday evening to attend the CHI-WEB get-together. Unfortunately, I have to skip the conference because I am needed in San Francisco for the rest of the week.

Old buddy Michael Kimsal has uncovered yet another silly security hole in an online system that is supposedly secure. In this one, you can access Ameritech customer information that you normally shouldn't.

Tuesday, March 27, 2001

Just thought you'd like to know that I'm thinking about shaving my head. The Headblade looks useful. Spring is here.

IsGay.com: Funniest hatemail I have read in a long time.

TV's influence shows in high school life

A short description of a Distributed Application Framework.

The GUI Toolkit and Framework Page. Awesome comparison matrix.

W3C: Meta Content Framework Using XML

I've decided to wait a while before installing OS X as my main operating system. I fear that my productivity will nosedive due to the lack of native tools for OS X that I rely on regularly. This means that I'll be dropping OS X on my spare G3 as soon as I find some time to play around with it. Unfortunately, this may be a while as I've been pretty busy lately.

I'm sure I am not the only one who has stopped visiting sites that redirect users to the WaSP Browser Upgrade page. Especially for sites that are information-oriented, it simply doesn't make sense to penalize users who are using legacy browsers. If you're doing this, it's your loss. I'll just get my information and news elsewhere.

A BBEdit user's guide to choosing a Unix text editor. Very nice. [via Genehack]

Learning Unix and Choosing a Text Editor.

A friend pointed me to HabboHotel the other day. I was completely impressed by the iconic design of the site, but refused to try and load the Shockwave-based tool over my slow modem connection. But, what's even cooler than the design is the back-end of the site, which dynamically drives the Shockwave files with a "public source" Java-server with MySQL support called Fuselight. I wonder if Macromedia knows about this? I wonder if Macromedia knows that this kicks the pants off their expensive Macromedia Generator for Flash? Better yet, what is Macromedia going to do if Fuselight is extended to support SVG?

Spam: I'm starting to think about adding a filter to my email that treats all HTML-based email as spam. About 99% of the spam I've received in the past six months has been HTML-based. I'll bet my spam count drops to near zero if I do this.