...more recent posts
List of common passwords that the Conficker worm tries as one method of spreading itself. Not sure these are scientifically the "most used" passwords, but it must be fairly representative since the Conficker worm does pretty well. If you have a password like these you need a new system. I recommend using the first letter of every word in a phrase you know well (like maybe a song lyric.) Take Me Home Country Roads would yield 'tmhcrttpib'. Not perfect (would be much better to have some letters and punctuation in there,) but very easy to remember and won't fall to a dictionary attack or something like the Conficker list.
What would you call something that was sort of like a blog, except the order of posts was author defined instead of being reverse chronological?
This comes up because I've made a little plug-in for my new software that lets you keep a FAQ. Each entry is a question and an answer, and the order of entries on the page can be rearranged by the author. But now it strikes me that a FAQ is just one particular use of this plug-in since I think there are probably lots of situations where this would be useful (in the sense that it's like a re-orderable blog where each entry has a title and the body of the post instead of the FAQ specific 'question' and 'answer' nomenclature.)
But what would the whole thing be called? Not terribly important, but I can't think of what to name it.
Xargs tutorial I need to look at some day.
(I make no claims that this blog is interesting to anyone else, as this post and almost all others show!)
The Golden Grid is another CSS framework (like the popular Blueprint and 960 grid.) I've yet to use one of these for anything, but I keep watching with hope. At this point my intuition is that these projects can save you a lot of time and headache, until you need to do something that a particular framework can't handle. And there's always some demand that breaks the grid. But I guess that's why I have a job so I shouldn't complain. Still, if I ever have time to update one of my personal project pages (like this one from the dark ages of the web) maybe I'll play around with one of these.
Some insane people have developed a text editor that runs in the browser. It uses javascript to draw everything into a canvas tag.
Bespin builds on this API to recreate a text editor from scratch. That’s right; rather than use the native facilities of every modern operating system that give you word processing features for free, Bespin rolls them from scratch, including such basic constructs as a blinking cursor and text selection.I mean, seriously, that's insane. But if they could make it work well it would be really cool. It's a text editor, but the goal is to focus on code editing and to deliver not just a usable product, but something you might choose over your current desktop code editor. It's like javascript's coming of age party in the sense that programmers are somehow magically drawn to writing code editors in whatever their language of choice is - but no one has had that urge until now with javascript.
Runs in FireFox as well as WebKit and Chrome nightlies. Project home page.
Falai website launches. Sometimes you disagree with a client about something (like having a front page with no information on it,) but you have to do it anyway. Still, all together, I think it's a pretty nice site. Little bits of jquery made some slightly tricky stuff very easy to do.
(Just started resolving for me, so it's possible you might see the old "site under construction" version of the site still.)
Eric Meyer on the deficiencies of CSS for layout. I've linked to a bunch of similar posts from others, and again I couldn't agree more. I'm linking again here because Meyer is the man; he explains the issue very well; and it's kind of funny how frustrated he is (in a "thank god someone else is this frustrated too" sort of way.)
Very good presentation (audio with slides): An Intensive Exploration Of jQuery. Assuming you know a little something about javascript and the DOM this is a great place to start.
Wow. Very cool. Google introduces canonical URLs. This solves the problem of losing google juice due to identical (or largely identical) pages being accessible through different URLs. You decide which URL is canonnical, and then put a special <link> tag on the other pages pointing to the cannonical URL. Now google knows to return the cannonical page in search results rather than any of the similar ones, and all your google juice flows to that one page.
The big example would be http://www.example.com and http://example.com. If your site is reachable at both addresses, and both are linked to from external sites, then your rank in google until now has been split between the two (this is simplified a bit, but still.) Now you can decide that you want http://example.com to be the "main" (or canonical) URL, so you just put a <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/"> tag in the <head> section of the www.example.com page.
But this is useful in tons of other situations since we're slicing our data up so much these days. Take blogs for instance. A certain post might be accessible from the front page of a blog, from a permalink, from a comment page, from a trackback page, from a search page, from a tag or category page, etc. In the past all of these different views of the "same thing" would be seen as separate by google; now you can pick one view to be canonical. This just really makes sense to me. Thanks google.