Random Ramblings
Brought to you by Chewie
By Chewie
With all the shouting that goes about whether Google really do stick to their “Do no evil” slogan its nice to see that the power house is teaming up with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to utilise the technology it created in filtering copyright material on YouTube to help catch scumbags who create child porn and exploit children.
The program uses pattern recognition to enable analysts to sort and identify files containing child sex abuse.
“The program uses pattern recognition and will work even if the pattern has been modified,” explained technology analyst Larry Magid.
“So if police can identify a pattern such as a calendar on the wall or a t-shirt logo, they have a much better chance of finding the exploited child and catching the suspect.”
Google engineers and scientists were able to work on the project on what the company calls “20% time”, which allows all employees to dedicate that amount of time to projects they initiate.
This is a great step forward in trying to protect children from exploitation on the Internet and hopefully the technology can be further developed to be even more effective.
By Chewie
This is just so awesome it defies belief, some guy called CupBoy has managed to create world 1-1 of the original super mario brothers in Javascript.
If that wasnt impressive enough he has also managed to squeeze it all down into an ity bity 14kb javascript file.
The sprites are stored in custom encoded strings in a format that only allows 4 colors for each sprite but in turn only takes up around 40-60 bytes per sprite.
We also have MIDI music embedded as base64-encoded data: URI’s. No music for IE, though, and it seems all the other browsers each have different, minor problems with it, but it sort of works.
Go check it out now!
By Chewie
I am not gonna make a massive post about this, but i came across this browser this morning which looks pretty cool.
Basically some guy over at My DebugBar has created a little browser which allows you to switch rendering engines between all versions of IE from 5.5 up to IE8 Beta.
I am fully aware that there are other programmes out their that allow you to install multiple copies of IE, but this little beauty lets you change the rendering engine by just hitting a drop down box so you have everything in one place.
Of course it only works on XP and Vista, but should save people some time. I however long for a OSX version of this software as running IE6 in an emulator to test pages really sucks.
Download from My DebugBar
By Chewie
It’s election time to find a new mayor for London soon, and what better way to get people to vote than by providing all the information about if you are eligible, how to register, or where you can vote by commissioning a nice shiny website that is available in nearly every language imaginable?
The answers is there isn’t :o)
Now imagine that you have a tv campaign to promote the existence of this website running across various local channels in London, you would have thought that some one, somewhere would notice that if you do not include the www. in http://www.londonelects.co.uk then you get a 400 - Bad Request http header.
If you are like me then you would probably cursor focus your address bar, then hit cmd + A to select the current url and just type in londonelects.co.uk, the browser would then add the http:// and send you onto http://londonelects.co.uk
As i already stated when you get there you will get a Bad Request error which seems pretty silly to me since i can imagine that a hell of a lot of people wont be typing the www. when typing in the domain.
Shouldn’t it be obvious to websites that are trying to promote themselves, to at least check if the non www version actually resolves to the website? Well you would of thought so.
It amazes me that these official websites can’t even get the basics down, so what should they do to fix it?
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.londonelects.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.londonelects.co.uk/$1 [QSA,L,R=301]
That simple piece of code can be placed in a .htaccess file and will redirect anyone who types the url without www to the url that includes the www, easy peasy :o)
By Chewie
On what marks a surely glorious day in the web developer world, Microsoft have done a complete U-Turn on their decision to force developers to use tags which make IE8 render in standards mode. Apparently the browser will now render in standards mode via default.
Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of Internet Explorer stated…
“We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously. Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behaviour with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.”
So from this we can see that Microsoft are actually starting to take standards seriously which is good news for everyone since IE has been a pain to develop for.
You can find out more on the official Microsoft blog
By Chewie
I am not sure how long Facebook have been doing this but today i finally realised that Facebook are letting users permanently block application requests from those damn annoying applications such as owned or lil green patch.
This is especially welcome to me as having the name Dean Chew means that i frequently appear at the top of the friends list when apps ask you to send to a friend.
Below is screen shot of the joyous occasion…
Images altered to protect the innocent :o)
By Chewie
Ahhh, good old Yahoo, first they are getting bought out by the Microsoft ogre, then they are not, maybe thats why it is taking them so damn long to change a domain name in the SERPS listing even though i placed a 301 redirect on it about 3 months ago.
I have a fashion website which sells high end clothes, mainly aimed at the rich housewife market, hopefully some of them are MILFS but obviously i haven’t actually seen any of the customers. Anyway, i bought the domain name www.boden-mini-sale.co.uk, not surprisingly Boden weren’t to happy about that so they kindly asked me to change my domain or i’ll get kicked off the affiliate program. I agreed and immediately placed a 301 redirect from the domain to www.fashionable-clothing.co.uk/boden.
The big G picked up on the 301 and changed the listing in the SERPS in about 2 days, Yahoo on the other hand flat out refuses to update their SERPS and still shows the domain as the old one.
Below is an uber advanced photoshop’d image showing Yahoo’s defiance…
So there you have it, (for what ever reason i can’t work out Yahoo) will not update the SERPS to show the new domain and has no other pages from the new site indexed. When i search for the domain, Yahoo tells me…
We did not find results for: www.fashionable-clothing.co.uk/boden. Try the suggestions below or type a new query above.
Damn you Yahoo! Damn you.
By Chewie
I was hanging around on Facebook over the weekend when i noticed a couple of strange wall posts from two of my friends. Both of them included url’s to “ringers” which in English means ring tones. I was quite fascinated by this because i have been playing with FB apps for a while and have been looking to see if something like this could be done.
I know that about 6 months ago there was a way to post to users walls by injecting some code on the canvas page but FB plugged the hole, i am now looking into how people have managed to do it this time.
I’ll update this blog post when i have more info…
By Chewie
The porn industry has always been pretty clever when it comes to creating links and marketing their sites. Obviously it is such a competitive vertical that they are always trying to get one up on each other (No pun intended). Unlike the rest of the SEO world that can game sites like digg.com and reddit.com it is very hard for the porn industry to infiltrate the masses so when they do it is in a very clever way.
Let me introduce to you Professor John Bukkake, what a strange name you ask. Well for anyone who knows what joys Bukkake is all about you will find it even stranger that he is a facial dermatologist at the University of Calcutta. Finding this a little hard to believe i decided to click through the links of the site to eventually find myself transported to an actual Bukkake movie download site.
You see, what those clever porn seo’s have done is to create a page which is so unbelievable that it is funny, the masses over at digg and reddit can’t beleive that something so funny would exist so they digg/vote it up without looking over any of the external links on the site. This generates a great buzz, and some seriously good links in to the John Bukkake page which then links out to the porn sites.
I wouldn’t be suprised if they 301 the domain to the porn site after a couple of days either.
So in closing this is a by the book method of gaming social network sites, you need to be extremely creative but it will pay off.
Edited to add:
I have seen this kind of idea before on a lawyer site. Basically they had the lawyer in question pull a stupid face for his profile picture on his site. After the crowds started linking at such a silly picture being shown on a very professional site they switched it back to his normal profile pic. They generated a ton of back links from authority sites such as digg’s front page.
Edit 2:
Looks like they are cloaking the J Bukkake page so that if your not a human then you 3o1 straight through to the actual err proper content.
By Chewie
I am rather suprised at how quickly MS have managed to get IE8 beta out the door, but i received news today that it is available to download now. I am currently on my MacBook so can’t test the beta just yet, but intend to get home this evening and give it a whirl.
You may or may not know this but to get IE8 to actually render pages correctly developers will have to do a whole hosts of user-agent sniffing or style sheet selectors, you can find example code of this below…
function getInternetExplorerVersion()
// Returns the version of Internet Explorer or a -1
// (indicating the use of another browser)
{
var rv = -1; // Return value assumes failure
if (navigator.appName == 'Microsoft Internet Explorer')
{
var ua = navigator.userAgent;
var re = new RegExp("MSIE ([0-9]{1,}[\.0-9]{0,})”);
if (re.exec(ua) != null)
rv = parseFloat( RegExp.$1 );
}
return rv;
}
function checkVersion()
{
var msg = “You’re not using Internet Explorer.”;
var ver = getInternetExplorerVersion();
if ( ver > -1 )
{
if ( ver >= 7.0 )
msg = “You’re using Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8.
I should send a quirks or strict mode document.”
else
msg = “You should upgrade your copy of Internet Explorer.”;
}
alert( msg );
}
It seems to me that every time MS do something good they end up shooting themselves in the foot by insisting that every page on the net needs to be supported to IE6 standards. I see it like this, make users upgrade so us developers don’t have to code for ie6, 7, 8 and then proper standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari.
You can get the beta from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm
