I learned yesterday that someone had made the Firefox logo available as a SVG file for the purposes of putting onto T-Shirts, etc. I decided I'd use this opportunity to gauge the state of SVG renderers available to me, the average lay-person. Read the rest of this entry ...
I wrote about rolling your own server logs awhile back, but it only occurred to me while at the GDC that by updating the .htaccess file I can redirect 404 errors to my own PHP document that will display the 404 error and also log when misdirections occur at my site (since the requested document is in the GET request). Read the rest of this entry ...
It may seem that Scalable Vector Graphics for the masses is stalling on the web, but I did find this interesting site which has some recent promising news about SVG's rising popularity on the mobile phone front. Mobile vendors Panasonic and Sony have announced models that support SVG.
I've ranted before about XML, but despite my ill feelings, it's obvious that XML is at the root of some very promising technologies. SVG is one of those and it's really a shame that it hasn't yet taken off. This older article from Slashdot hints that March 2005 we'll start to see Mozilla include native support of SVG (the masses will see this in Firefox 1.1, I think)...that will be VERY exciting indeed! Maybe we'll start to see something interesting happening on the web for SVG very soon. As far as I know this will be the first major web browser to have native SVG support.
If you're interested in learning more about SVG, check out http://www.svgbasics.com for an overview of some of its capabilities. If you haven't installed Adobe's SVG Plug-In, don't worry you can turn off "SVG" examples on this site and just see what they would like if you had the plugin. Or you could follow the intructions at svgbasics.com and install the Plug-In.
Let's say you're cheap or you can't afford a fixed IP address and let's say you also want to be able to access your Linux box from the internet but you don't want to have to constantly know the IP address of that box.
Well, if you have your own website (that supports PHP scripting), you can still get around this. Check out this article that I just wrote on how to work around this using some PHP, some Apache mod-rewrite and a simple cronjob.
After getting bombed with some comment spam yesterday (over 15 of them in various blog entries), I decided I wanted some extra security, but I didn't want to have to approve every comment (especially when the majority of them were spam). So I thought I'd dig into some PHP again and design my own Captcha.
This little project proved to be more challenging than I thought it would be, the easiest part was generating the unique and random image every time, the hardest part was figuring out how to make sure the image was not reused again (even if the user clicks the "Back" button on his browser). While I won't get into the details right here and now, suffice to say that it works completely now and I can now work on making the image even more difficult for a computer to read in the future...if anyone wants it let me know (leave a comment, heh) and I'll post a subsequent entry about some of the details and put the source up.
Anyway, I hope it's not too annoying to those who wish to leave comments...