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When the Internet was young, or even before the Internet, when computers were young, most of the games you could play on the computer were text-only RPGs. Soon, simple ASCII graphics took over. Then when the Internet was young, it was MUDs all over. Multi-player textbased RPGs. Of course, soon, graphics got better, computer got more powerful, and everyone was aiming for graphics.

Now, a new game is on the horizon, using a recent technology: Wiki’s. Here’s the description of Lexicon: An RPG. It sounds like lots of fun. If anyone is interested in playing, I can easily set up a game and we can think of a theme to do this with.

Here’s 10 CSS tricks you may not know about. I didn’t know about some of them, and some might actually be useful.

However, I am having a slight problem with trick #4. In my humble opinion, that’s more of a bug in IE. Though it might be useful in some cases, using it might break your layout might the IE developers decide to fix this in either the next minor upgrade of IE or in the next major upgrade of IE. So calling that a trick is maybe not good.

OK, I ran into this problem today and luckily Googling answered my question. I thought it would be nice to share 🙂

I was working on a system where I had to open a new window, where the user would select a certain item from a list, and when clicking on that item, the item would be selected in the original window. Problem: I got an error message:

Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property Window.miloform

Now, thanks to the Gecko DOM reference I found the answer to my problem:

I can not access the properties of the new secondary window. I always get a javascript error in the console saying “Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property <property_name or method_name>”. Why is that? It is because of the cross-domain script security restriction (also referred as the “Same Origin Policy”). A script loaded in a window (or frame) from a distinct origin (domain name) cannot get nor set properties of another window (or frame) or the properties of any of its HTML objects coming from another distinct origin (domain name). Before executing a script, the browser in the main window verifies that the secondary window has the same domain name.

It turns out that the client I am building this for has two domain names, and the new window was opened from a different domain. Yes, that would be a problem, knowing the above.

Wonderful. These new intelligent SPAM bots that only SPAM sites that can be found when searching for certain keywords. For instance. Take this Mercedes-related site. I just got this e-mail:

Hi, I took a look at your site a couple of hours ago… and I want to tell you that I’d really love to trade links with you. I think your site has some really good stuff related to my site’s topic of Mercedes Benz and would be a great resource for my visitors as it deals with some great aspects of Mercedes Bbenz that I’d like to give my visitors more information about. In fact, I went ahead and added your site to my Mercedes Benz HQ Resource Directory at [SPAMmed URL] Is that OK with you? Can I ask a favor? Will you give me a link back on your site? I’d really appreciate you returning the favor. Thanks and feel free to drop me an email if you’d like to chat more about this. Best wishes, Mark

I got this on the e-mailaccount for my website FantasyLibrary.net. Why, would you think? Well, probably because there is an entry for an author called Mercedes Lackey.

Oh the joys of supposed targetted SPAM.

Last year, I won a license for Zend Studio at the PHP Conference in Amsterdam. I was quite happy, I never really used an IDE before and thought it was all bloat. Zend Studio definately did proof the opposite.

Today I found out that version 4 of Zend Studio was released recently. It has quite an extensive list of new features. Interesting. So I checked if I could also download this new version with the license I had, expecting I’d have to buy some kind of upgrade package. But no, I could just generate a license key for Zend Studio 4.

They’ve decided to split Zend Studio up into two different versions. The $99 Standard version and the $299 Professional version. And the license I had gave me access to the Professional version!

So yeah, I must say I’m really charmed, once again, by Zend and their Zend Studio IDE.

I’ve yet to start using the new features, but I’m sure they’re just as good as the IDE that I used with version 3.5.

Every once in a while, I am shocked by the lack of responsibility of some hosting providers. A lot of hosting providers offer their clients free phpBB installations, either through a control panel or as an added service of their support. However, a lot of these hosting providers do not tell their clients that installation is not all. That phpBB should be regularly updated when new versions are released. Of course, this does not limit itself to phpBB, but really to any web application.

We’re currently at phpBB 2.0.13. And today, someone comes to the phpBB support forum because his forum, phpBB 2.0.4, was hacked. I quote:

My hosting service provided that version of phpBB and I never really saw it necessary to upgrade (until today!!)

Hosting providers should really tell their clients who want to use free software installations that they should be on the lookout for updates. It’s also in their own interest, because sometimes, whole servers can be taken down by malicious hackers.

This can not be happening. Unbelievable. Even though there was massive resistance, the European council has accepted the Softwarepatents proposal.

By accepting this proposal, they have signed the death penalty for many small software companies, who may need to start paying high amounts of license money for using certain techniques or even work methods that are patented by big corporations.

I just made up my mind on what to vote when the elections are held here in the Netherlands on whether to accept or reject the European constitution…

Well, I finally did it. I ordered this book. Plone really looks interesting, and I should finally widen my focus. PHP is great, of course, but having more choice than just PHP is even better.

When you rip most of your cd collection, you may walk against some trouble with xmms or other music players trying to generate a long playlist of all your music, especially when the music files are located on a network share. In my case, access to this networkshare is pretty slow as well due to the supposedly bad combination of NFS and wireless. Still, you’ll want to generate playlists and the easiest way then is to simply load an existing m3u file.

zeroK came to the rescue for me. It’s quite easy to create those files on linux. You need a single, simple command:

find /mp3 -type f > playlist.m3u

Of course, you need to replace /mp3 with the path to your mp3’s. But then you’re done. A great and easy way to generate a playlist file of your music.