HX-20

I was walking through Squirrel Hill today with Robin and my Dad. There was a house with some junk on their porch and a sign saying, For sale. $1 each.” I looked through the stuff and found an !

Oh. My. Gawd!

When I was in High School a guy named Randy had a portable computer (made in 1983). It was the coolest thing. I got him to loan it to me so I could write a small text adventure (only like 6 rooms, but a huge deal at the time).

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Mashups and JavaScript Security

I found this excellent video of Douglas Crockford (discoverer of ) talking about the security problems inherent in and of JavaScript as a whole.

He proposes a solution involving what he calls vats; a self contained JavaScript interpreter with limited communication to the page. The JavaScript in the page would be the only trusted code running and the code in the various vats would not be trusted.

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Wordpress User-Agent

Well, I just got a nasty shock!

I got in at the tail end of a thread about the new update notification feature in WordPress 2.3.

One of the comments I read kept ricocheting around in my head. Matt Mullenweg said something about the dashboard RSS feeds transmitting my blog URL. I thought, initially, that he meant the IP address was revealed. But the more I thought about it, the weirder it seemed.

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Site Redesign

I have redesigned my whole site. While a lot changes are visual, there are even more changes in the way the unseen back-end parts have changed.

Previously, I had a modified copy of the default WP 2.x theme (which is based on Kubric theme). It was reasonable markup, but I spent a lot of time modifying the classes and adding containers to hang my CSS off of. In addition, tracking the changes to the default theme was a pain.

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