Category: web development

All about building a website but the administrative/business stuff: that goes in “business and economics.”

Setting opacity in CSS

Last week, I wanted to create a translucent layer to grey out functionality on the site. To do this, create a div that covers the window and set the background color to black.

But how to make it translucent? This webpage on CSS opacity covers how to do this and many other useful things:

.grey_background {
	background: black;
	filter:alpha(opacity=25);
	-moz-opacity:.25;
	opacity:.25;
}

The “filter” rule is for IE (taking advantage of a very old feature that dates back at least 5 years) and the “-moz-opacity” rule is no longer needed for newer versions of Firefox and Mozilla which support the CSS3 spec. Safari also supports the spec.

Posted on by tychay 1

Interesting new scam

Caitlin points out a new scam job. The idea is to scrape various classified sites for services (like Craigslist) and then offer them money in return for a check (a la Nigerian 419 scam). The new ideas here are the fact that it is specifically targeting an interest (in this case, wedding photographers and videographers) and that I think the scam may operate along a variant of check fraud where one uses the routing number off of your check in order to drain the account.

These scams are getting increasingly more sophisticated. No wonder one person claims that internet crime may be more lucrative than drugs.

I was surprised that the two people I mentioned this to at work were unaware of how the check system works in regards to the magnetic ink at the bottom of their checks.

I’m curious how this stuff can be reported. I don’t think individual action, besides being a complete waste of time, would be of any use here—any initial funds provided by them for the con are probably funneled through previously compromised bank accounts. Any suggestions for her?

Posted on by tychay 0

Lorem ipsum

While working on a project at work, I used the Lorem Ipsum text for something and Trevor asked about my use of it. I learned it when I did desktop publishing as a kid. The wikipedia entry explains what Lorem ipsum is much better than I can.

In this case, Lorem ipsum had the opposite of its intended effect and I rewrote the whole thing to avoid using it. The lesson I learned is just as I shouldn’t bother with Hungarian notation in my programming, I should avoid greeking my web pages and text graphics.

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Posted on by tychay 4

Web 1.0

Saw that Cal has a badge tag from the Web 1.0 Summit today, which bills itself as a whole heck of a lot more fun than Web 2.0.

Flickr the Book

Web 1.0, from bees

I would have loved to give a talk on the value proposition of B2B applications of push technologies.

Too bad they didn’t have the facilities for projection. I could have made some kick ass slides using the single pixel gif trick.

I’m sorry I missed it.

Posted on by tychay 0

Building Liquid Websites with PHP

Okay because Apple upped my iDisk quotas, I’m putting up my OSCON talk there temporarily. Caitlin finished producing this talk last month, but I haven’t seen it because I can’t stand the sound of my own voice.

production Silver Keys Studio
video source HD and Keynote
size 104.8MB
run time 50 minutes, 32 seconds
format H.264 (Quicktime 7 required to play movie— free download)

You should: Right click-download this link or click on the image below.

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Posted on by tychay 21

A new Plaxo log-in

The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of Terry Chay. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo.

Today I signed into my Plaxo account and was met with a pleasant surprise:

Plaxo-AIM signin

Plaxo-AIM signin, originally uploaded by tychay.

The new thing that wasn’t here before is that you can theoretically use your AIM account to sign into Plaxo. (I say “theoretically” because you have to link your Plaxo account to your AIM account and this can’t be done yet.)

I know most of you are thinking, “Well he makes the damn website so of course he knew this,” but the reality is that I’m not involved with the Plaxo-AOL deal, have not coded this new log in screen, and had only given one suggestion for the log-in screen.

I bring this up because it is a really good page.

Update: The AOL/AIM binding/login stuff is now live to coincide with the beta 6 release of Triton. You can now bind your AIM account to your Plaxo one.

Also, Joseph and Huy have added more NLP madness in the Plaxo login. It’s now super smart.

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Posted on by tychay 3

Conference Gnomes

When I was generating the movies for my OSCON talk, I left in a little easter egg that was too hard to notice. Doing little things like this makes things a little fun when you are bored with the tedium of making hundreds of builds for your talk. I decided to get a screenshot in before all the task items get marked as overdue.

Conference Gnomes

Conference Gnomes, originally uploaded by tychay.

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Posted on by tychay 0

PHP Security, the oxymoron

Well now that some of you have met me from OSCON, you are probably thinking to yourself, “What’s the deal with your blog? There is no PHP in there, you poser.”

How true.

I better start writing some stuff, before they kick me out of the “all-star PHP line up”.1

I think that when most people hear “PHP” and “security” used in the same sentence, it seems about as out-of-place as, say, putting “Rasmus” and “Terry” in the same sentence. Basically this thread summarizes how most people view PHP security.

I suppose the first thing I need to do in order to defend the honor of PHP is say that these losers have their own agenda: foisting Java or dotNet as “real” and “enterprise”2, or perhaps they’re just sore because PHP book sales are going up at their expense.

Nothing works better than a good ad hominem, I always say.

Well I suppose for the three of you left unsatisfied with my deconstruction, I should go through the tedious task of addressing the actual complaint which boils down to:

  1. “PHP has the worst security history of any language.”
  2. “PHP shoves a mess of shit into the global namespace” (or other assorted digs on register globals).
  3. “PHP doesn’t have the concept of a prepared statement.”
  4. “PHP security cures (magic quotes, safe mode, stripslashes) are sometimes worse than the disease.”

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Posted on by tychay 37