2009 January » Karl Katzke | PHP, Puppies, and other Geekery

Entries written in January 2009

Version 0.5 of LÖVE – a 2d game engine for Lua – has dropped. Lua is a lightweight open-source scripting language that’s embeddable in other products and devices. I first encountered Lua using the MySQL Proxy.

LÖVE looks interesting, kind of like a relatively polished PyGame without …

Beating Captchas with Javascript

Written January 24, 2009 in webdev

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This is really cool, but also kinda scary. Beating a Captcha with Javascript, OCR, and a Neural Network. Before you “tl;dr”, there’s some very interesting coding techniques in there like the shortcut points that feed the neural network and the rudimentary edge detection.

Subversion Power Tip: –parents

Written January 23, 2009 in howto

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Let’s say you want to keep your logwatch configuration, which has a lot of files deep in directory trees, in subversion to track changes you make over time and ease rollouts between machines.

When you want to check in /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf. Your working directory is /etc, but /logwatch and /logwatch.conf are …

Kitchen Gadget Pitchmen

Written January 19, 2009 in punditry

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The guys who sell kitchen gadgets on street corners in New York and the boardwalks of New Jersey are the ultimate salespeople. I’ve run across several excellent profiles that study exactly how they sell and why they’re so successful.

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Kottke Redesign

Written January 17, 2009 in webdev

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I’ll go one step further than John Gruber and say that the Kottke.org redesign is like seeing an old friend with a new haircut — and hoping that it isn’t permanent and doesn’t signal a new trend.

Reading List, 13Jan09

Written January 13, 2009 in reading list, webdev

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The first reading list of 2009. Can you tell I’m working on a design or two?

A few posts from Jason Santa Maria – A New Day, and the five month later Progress Report. Jason just broke things off after four and a half years with Happy Cog,

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MySQL Temporal Handling

Written January 12, 2009 in mysql

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Wow, this post by Jay Pipes on how MySQL handles time/date-related issues couldn’t come at a better time… more on that in another week or two.

Update: Jay posted his sample code.

Fascinating Fact for FASA Fans

Written January 4, 2009 in punditry

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Looks like someone has licensed FASA’s old catalog of intellectual property from Microsoft… should be interesting to see what comes out of this.

console.app and MAMP

Written January 2, 2009 in apple

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One of the things I genuinely love about Apple OSX is that there’s some hidden gems in the Applications/Utilities folder. One of those hidden gems is console.app, which acts like a GUI window that follows (aka `tail -f`) a particular log file. It’s great because you can insert markers and …