PHP - musc@> $daniele.rant

Ca(p)tching Cats and Dogs

Daniele Muscetta Cross Platform, Microsoft, Security March 9, 2008May 4, 2019Asirra, Blogs, CAPTCHA, Choice, Cross Post, Funny, Integration, Interop, PHP, Plugin, SPAM, Tools, WebSite, Wordpress

I read on Jeff Atwood’s blog about most strong Captcha having been defeated. Also, on top of visitors getting annoyed by it, the Captcha plugin I am using has gone unmantained lately. And, one way or another, I am getting comment spam again. Which is something I really hate as you know what I would love to do to spammers…

I am seriously considering giving Asirra a try. It is an interesting project from Microsoft Research for an HIP (Human Interaction Proof) that uses info from petfinder.com to let users set apart pictures of dogs from those of cats. There is also a WordPress plugin, in the best and newest “we want to interoperate” fashion that we are finally getting at Microsoft (this has always been the way to go, IMHO, and BTW).

Anyway, what do you think ?

Test from WordPress 2.3

Daniele Muscetta Coding, Cross Platform September 26, 2007September 21, 2008Blogs, C#, PHP, test, Tools, WebSite

Blog works, all the plugin work too. I will *only* have to re-write a whole bunch on SQL queries for my .Net frontend that is now broken. I’ll do that at one stage, now I can’t be asked.

New Photo Category Visualization

Daniele Muscetta Coding, Personal August 26, 2007July 23, 2019Blogs, Cross Post, Flickr, PHP, Places, WebSite

Copying the advice by Small Potato, I made a different page for the ‘Photos’ category/tag on this blog. It has been a bit trickier than I first thought, because he keeps his picture uploaded into wordpress itself, while I had to write a small plugin using a regular expression to extract the “IMG SRC” portion of the post content. This way I also experimented with WordPress templates, plugins and structure a bit more than I had done before… and I am even more convinced than before that it can easily be used as a CMS rather than *just* a bloging software.

My lost Facebook Appz! doh!

Daniele Muscetta Coding, Cross Platform, Personal August 25, 2007July 23, 201943places, 43things, Cross Post, Facebook, PHP, Social Networking

I am just figuring out that on this post of the 26th of July I mentioned I was trying to write a simple facebook application. I am not realizing I never wrote anything about it anymore. I did not spend a lot of time figuring out all the possibilities, and indeed I have not looked into it anymore since then, but that very night I did write something. Not just one application, but TWO (copycat) very simple applications: my43places and my43things, that pull into your profile the data about the things you want to do you entered in 43things.com and the places you want to visit you entered in 43places.com, respectively.

They are very simple: you enter your user name and they connect to their REST web service, extract the information about your places and/or goals, and show them as a list in a box in your profile.

I don’t know why I did not blog about them before… maybe I thought they were too simple ? Well, they are, but, seriously: who cares? 🙂

Facebook API and WinForm experiment

Daniele Muscetta Coding, Cross Platform August 2, 2007August 29, 2019Blogs, C#, Choice, Cross Post, dotNet, Facebook, Integration, Interop, PHP, Social Networking

While testing with the Facebook API, I started creating a WinForm using the Facebook Toolkit.

What I had in mind was a simple program that would run on my PC, maybe minimized in the system tray, that would let me update my status in a click, thorugh the day, without having to log on to the website. Most of the day I am busy working, and I don’t really have time to go surf and check Facebook… but I like the possibility for people to hear how I am doing. Changing the status would keep them up to date, and would keep my profile current.

As I figured out afterwards, their API does not yet let you change your status yet.

There are other people asking for this possibility… but then I went further searching on the Internet, and I found this blog: http://www.nexdot.net/blog/2007/04/20/updating-facebook-status-using-php/.

I just hacked together a small WinForm written in C# that reimplements this idea.

I indeed would like to thank Christian for the idea, and my friend and colleague Pierluigi for his precious help with the regular expressions 🙂

At the moment it has terrible things such as hardcoded passwords in it, but as soon as I will have time to polish the code a bit, I will post it.

One more thing I would like to do with it is turning it from a standalone application into a Live Messenger Add-In, so that it synchronizes my messenger status with the one of Facebook. When I will have time for that.

b2 hacks

Daniele Muscetta Coding April 25, 2005July 22, 2019b2, Blogs, Choice, PHP, Tools, WebSite

This blog is based on b2 (cafelog.com).
Since b2 is basically not mantained anymore, I really should be planning a move to its spinoff: wordpress (wordpress.org).

But I can’t be asked for now, so I’ve only hacked a couple of fixes to the code to save myself from comment spam mainly, and fix some other security vulnerabilities here and there.

Sure, there might be more, but which software does not have those ?
After all, this is a rather old thing…

Annoying spammer and lame defacers – part three

Daniele Muscetta Coding, Personal, Rant, Security October 11, 2004May 5, 2007b2, Choice, Google, PHP, SPAM, WebSite

I am sorry but, since they did it again, I have removed the possibility to post HTML tags into a comment – this way, if the reason of their idiotic comments was that of increasing their ranking in Google, this won’t at least be accomplished.

I prefer to leave anonymus posting capabilities to my visitors, but I don’t like helping spammers doing their crap.