Random Hacks

linuxcommand

Posted by Eric Mon, 05 Aug 2002 00:00:00 GMT

A command-line tutorial for Linux Users. A helpful resource for Windows and Macintosh users who have to do some of their work on Linux, and want to learn their way around.

Accessibility Statement for Random Hacks

Posted by Eric Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

This website is designed to work well for a wide range of users--users with hearing or vision problems, users with mouse problems, and users with text-only browsers.

Internet Explorer still broken

Posted by Eric Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows still has tons of standards-compliance problems. Internet Explorer for the Macintosh is better, but the prize for best behavior goes to Mozilla--in cases where the browsers disagree, Mozilla generally turns out to be obeying the letter of the law. And Internet Explorer 5.5 still can't display transparent PNGs correctly.

Wayback

Posted by Eric Mon, 22 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine allows you to look up old versions of web pages. Sweet!

Personal RSS

Posted by Eric Mon, 22 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

If you'd like to read all your favorite news sites on one page, you probably want a Personal RSS Aggregator. If you're a Linux user, it looks like the best choice is Peerkat.

Panopticon

Posted by Eric Mon, 22 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon. Why the NSA probably has a search engine problem: Without a tool like Google's PageRank algorithm, they're going to spend an eternity digging through search results.

Common RSS Bugs

Posted by Eric Mon, 22 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

According to the discussion on Ben Hammersley's site, many RSS feeds have trouble with such characters as &, < and >. I've just hacked on my own scripts to make sure I'm getting this correct.

If you run a news aggregator, and you're unable to process this feed, please let me know about it.

Yet Another PHP Security Hole

Posted by Eric Mon, 22 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

A new security problem has been discovered in PHP 4.2.x. This is not the first major hole in PHP, and it probably won't be the last.

Even if your PHP runtime is secure, it's really hard to write secure PHP scripts. There's so many things that can go wrong--malicious users setting "internal" global variables, SQL injection attacks, ".inc" files containing passwords, and a whole host of other all-to-common bugs.

Just say no.

Tags Security

On the Air

Posted by Eric Mon, 22 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

After several months of part-time hacking, I've finally gotten this site on the air. As described in my original site design document, everything is based on XML, Emacs and Perl. The RSS feeds, cross-references and archive system all appear to be working properly.

If you're interested in automating your news site with these tools, please let me know--if there's enough demand, I'll refactor the code a bit and package it up for distribution.

Ogg Theora link

Posted by Eric Sun, 21 Jul 2002 00:00:00 GMT

Ogg Theora is an open source project hoping to create a free, unencumbered video playback system based on the Ogg Vorbis audio codec and the VP3 video codec. This is probably our best hope for a royalty- and patent-free alternative to MPEG4 in the immediate future.