Flash Earth …satellite and aerial imagery of the Earth in Flash

I think I saw this briefly before and simply forgot to note it down. Flash Earth is a nice Flash based implementation of the various AJAXy maps we’ve come to know, love and expect. It gives a full-window view of the area, with panning and scrolling controls and a little search box. The images are sourced from a variety of tile providers, and the user can choose from Google, Microsoft, NASA, and others. Interestingly, I never knew that Ask is also in on the mapping game, and their images (of Gosport at least) appear far more recent than the other offerings.

Ian Ozsvald has just published his second article in a series (first one here) about his experiences as a freelance programmer, moving from a full-time software position into his own one-man company focusing on applications of AI.

Ian’s articles are a valuable and interesting read, useful for anybody starting up as a freelance consultant.

http://dev.svenlatham.com/friendcal/

Finally, I’ve found a use for Facebook This little tool will take all your friends’ birthdays and create an iCal file from them. The resultant URL can then be put into your favourite calendar program (I use Google Calendar), so you can see all your friends’ birthdays in one place.

This is very basic at the moment and I can’t guarantee it’ll be up and running for long (but I’ll try). It’s also very hacky, so expect nasty errors if something goes wrong!

Please give it a go if you have a Facebook account, and let me know if it works.

After this, FOAF extraction….

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• Google to Open up Its Social Platform [from Google Operating System]

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• Live from Corporate Blogging Summit [from The lost outpost]

Filling out a car insurance quote recently: ‘Is your car left- or right-hand drive?’

This question always stumps me. We drive on the left here in Blighty, my car is designed for UK driving, so surely it’s a left-hand drive? Nope. apparently it’s where the driver sits (as viewed from behind); it’s a right-hand drive car.

I also tend to get confused by ‘the inside lane’ on a motorway. Surely the inside lane is the one nearest the central reservation (aka median)… It is, after all, on the ‘inside’ of the road. Turns out though, that this is the outside lane; the inside is the one on the left.

Please comfort me by confirming I’m not the only one perpetually confused by definitions like these!

I’m currently managing a friend’s WordPress blog while they bugger off on a round-the-world trip. Goodness me they get a lot of spam.

Within a minute or so of turning off Spam Karma (it causes problems with the comment count, apparently) I/he had 15 new comments, all spam. So, without FTP access I quickly put in a hack to the comments page thusly:

<textarea name="quack" id="comments"></textarea>

<script type="text/javascript">

document.getElementById('comments').name = 'comments';
</script>

Nice and simple - a bit of Javascript that renames the comments field so it can be submitted correctly (if you fail to run the script, the comment fails). I know there are accessibility issues and all the smartarses who turn off their Javascript are stopped from commenting, but desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s quick & dirty, and for most people (this guy doesn’t get a massive amount of traffic) it works OK.

Anyway, I went to bed last night feeling smug that I’d robbed a load of spammers of their precious links. This morning I took a look: 38 new comments. They’ve already made their way around it.

This suggests one of three things:

1. The spammers caught the error and changed their behaviour to suit. Doubt it, it’d be easier for them to move onto other blogs.
2. They execute Javascript (maybe it’s a full-on Firefox session with a plugin script?. Likely, and rather smart!
3. My code is rubbish and never worked in the first place. Never impossible.

Anyway, kudos to those guys for not being thwarted by a simple script! Now, let’s see what happens when I get Spam Karma re-enabled or I activate Akismet…

Update 22 Sept: Ignore the above. My code is rubbish. If the spammers do a simple POST to the server they will succeed, since I’d never updated the server-side code to match the client. Best bet for this hack would’ve been to rename the field both on the form and in the server code to something unpredictable (’quack’ is just fine…) and not bother with the Javascript, Spammers would ignorantly continue to assume the field is ‘comments’ and their posts would fail. Thanks Brian and Neil T

A while ago I wrote a blog host service which included a more sophisticated spam filter. It would scramble all the fields client-side, include a couple of hashes and would only accept the comment as-is if all the hashes matched the server’s own records. It stopped blind POSTs and bots that did not use Javascript. It also cleverly spotted genuine users who might not have been able to run the Javascript (since there was a larger platform accessibility was a concern), and used timing information to identify real users (who take their time) versus bots (who tend to write/post immediately or in a regular pattern).

It worked for nearly 2 years without a single automated spam comment getting through (many tens of thousands were stopped; no false positives either). Manual spam got in, but was minimal. Finally the spammers changed their ways and (I guess) began using full browser sessions to post their spam - once they do that you need to start looking at content analysis or other methods.

Latest shared items from my Google Reader account:

• Microsoft have just given Windows users concerned about [from Tom Morris]
• Two kinds of ‘don’t know’ [from Seth's Blog]

Google Reader has officially escaped its test tube and gone into the big wild world. It’s taken nearly two and a half years to do that, but the teary-eyed announcement yesterday officially moved Google Reader from its ‘Labs project’ status into prime time. Many would argue it did that a long time ago with or without the label. The system is already reported to carry 10TB of data, crawls some 8 million documents and grows by 4% weekly.

With the announcement localised versions of Google Reader were introduced on their respective TLDs, including reader.google.fr and reader.google.co.jp. Let’s hope for many more enhancements to this already excellent application in the future.

I’ve been pointed to this new project coming from Rob Ennals at Intel’s Research Labs in Berkeley, CA. Looks very cool indeed. Described as ‘Mashups for the Masses’, MashMaker sits on the Firefox toolbar and uses a set of web page scrapers to aggregate data from multiple sources on a single page, all ultimately controlled by the user. The user interface is slick, quite uncomplicated and rather well made. Scraping is also editable - you can add new sites using regexes and XPath - and this is managed as a community so contributions are available to other users too. The idea is that the more technically adept users can contribute the backend ‘glue’, which is then available for all users.

The videos on the site (the IDF one in particular) are worth watching. I’ve signed up for a beta test so I’ll hopefully be able to review more once I get my grubby hands on it.