The famous large flat thing slightly more useful than a rock
Here at Konstellation, we just launched the PageGangster for mobile devices including iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and Android. I developed the clientside for this in JavaScript and we launched it with automatic user agent detection serverside. But this had some problems.
2 comments » | JavaScript, Konstellation, Regular Expressions, Trends
An idea per day was simply too much for me, I must admit now being almost a month behind after only two months. Thus I change the concept into a Month of Ideas and the first such was then January 2010.
The fifth idea for my 365 Social Ideas is a Twitter- and Wikipedia-mashup idea (and some maps): Find out who’s talking about what on Twitter through Wikipedia categories. There are many sites for tracking Twitter trends , but they all require that you know what you’re looking for (or where you’re looking for it geographically). But what if you simply wanted to know what movies people are tweeting about? Or what about bands, musicians, flowers, four-legged mammals, financial institutions, politicians from Guadelupe or any other arbitrarily broad or narrow category of items?
We got the XKCD book “volume 0″ here at work yesterday, and I have of course skimmed through it many times already. I quickly found the solution to the page numbering scheme, but wanted to see if I could find a simple conversion formula from real number to XKCD page number and vice versa.
I just saw a link on Facebook, that I somehow had to interact with – it featured a not-that-dressed girl and said “Wanna C Something Hot?”/”Want 2 C Something Hot?” or variations of this. Well, clicking the link sent to me to an external site featuring a single button and the same image urging me to click it. When clicked, I came to some porn site. But why would several of my friends post links to this site, which incidentally sent me to a porn site? Well, as I soon after saw on Facebook, I had just posted the same link on my wall for all my friends to see. How?
It is a “simple” case of “click-jacking” and the site tricks you to click a Facebook share button, but disguises this as some other button. Please read on for full description.
UPDATE 2009-12-2: “Press the button or dog dies”/”Push the button or this dog dies” (located at pressthebuttonordogdies.com, but don’t go there) is a new such site. The target website is “thisblogrules.com” and the measures used are a little different but all in all the same anyway.
Furthermore, I have used bit.ly for tracking how much these links have been used so far on Facebook – it is pretty inflicting: The “hot” girl has been shared almost 59,000 times and the poor dog has been shared 5,309 times as of this writing. You can see the direct stats from the Facebook link.getStats API here: Somthing Hot and Or Dog Dies
Being a set of talented web developers in a trendy, cutting-edge digital agency, we have wanted to create and thus pitched on many an iPhone application – as the iPhone is just the slickest, meanest, coolest, hottest and most alluring device on the market. It has been so for a long time and it will be so for some time to come (but not that long).
But that craving for getting hands on building something for the iPhone is gone – completely. I’m sorry Apple, you might not miss me, but as things stand right now, I won’t miss you either. And I am certainly not alone – there is a large front in the developer community building up resentment against the policy of the App Store review process. A veritable boycott is brewing.
My blog just turned a huge corner – Akismet has now protected me from 100,000 spam comments in total.
I’ve been reading up on the matter of the National Portrait Gallery in the United Kingdom and their threatening letters to the Wikimedia Foundation about the legal status of the digitised works created by said public institution.
After reading up on UK copyright law, my judgment is unclear – but mostly in favor of the NPG and thus against Wikimedia.
Just saw someone post a link to the new Silverlight Smooth Streaming site. Clicked my way to the site and the download of Silverlight for Firefox 3 for Mac 10.5 worked smoothly – so far so good.
When creating different online services, it can often be nice to have a good short domain name. And domain name hacks like del.icio.us (which though changed their primary name to delicious.com) might be a bit 2007-ish, but can still be used for a lot of services.
For this use, I was missing a good list of ccTLD‘s, that are available for direct second-level registration without local presence. Some countries don’t allow direct second-level registration like .uk (United Kingdom) or .tr (Turkey). All of the below-mentioned domain names are available for direct second-level registration and do not require local administrative contacts, trade licenses or similar restrictions. Most of them can be purchased online, but some require paper forms sent back and forth and might take some time to register.