Blog

  • Thwarting Image Linking

    October 11, 2004

    A friend of mine has a problem with his images getting linked by bulletin board groupies looking for cool avatar images. Rather than provide their own bandwidth, they deep-link into his site and use his bandwidth. Punks!

    He now has his web server restrict images from being served unless they’re referred to from a local page, but I never knew how to set it up. I just happened to come across the how-to here. The .htaccess changes look like:

        SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://my.host.com/" local_ref=1
        <filesMatch ".(gif|jpg)">
            Order Allow,Deny
            Allow from env=local_ref
        </filesMatch>
    

    Haven’t tried it myself yet, but made a note.

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    DSri Seah
  • Mmm, Curry

    October 11, 2004

    Mmm, CurryI love curry, especially the mild Japanese-style curry. Curry is possibly my favorite food even over dark chocolate. Mmm. And I do enjoy my dark chocolate.

    I decided that it would be a good idea to save some money by cooking at home, by preparing huge simmering pots of curry to be eaten over a few days. The cost per prep is about 10 bucks, making 12 servings. The savings would be staggering!

    Curry, MmmOf course, the problem is that I love curry, and end up eating most of it before the day is out. I need to make something disgusting like cold cabbage soup with pickled pigs feet and leeks if this is really going to work.

    On the plus side, I was able to make a banner for the davidocracy section finally. I’m limited somewhat by needing to have whitespace at the top of the image so it fades nicely into the category selector.

    So here are a couple of pictures from the shoot. Yes, I see the smudge on the chopsticks, and it’s driving me nuts; I’m trying not to go back to touch it out ( om mani padme om, etc). I did three different sets with different bowls, shooting about a hundred pics total. Ended up with about 10 to work with. As a bonus, I got to eat each set after I was done shooting it! I’m feeling a little queasy right now.

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    DSri Seah
  • The Dark Underbelly of PCI

    October 11, 2004

    Computer Hardware Alert! This is a somewhat technical article about the device manager in Windows XP and (gasp!) BIOS settings and how they impacted installing an Adaptec Firewire interface. You have been warned!

    I had some hardware conflicts installing the card (sleepy yet?) into my (yawn) Athlon 2000+ rig. If you’re still awake…

    (more…)

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    DSri Seah
  • Return of MovieClip “Duh”

    October 11, 2004

    I was drifting in and out of sleep, it being 520AM and as such was an appropriate time for such drifting, and I was dreaming of MovieClips and Events. I was thinking how MovieClips were kind of ungainly affairs, and like a lot of old Flash objects were of the dynamic nature…that is, they don’t require explicit declaration of properties, and in the process of referencing a non-existant property you will bring it into being. This is the sort of behavior that makes debugging Flash somewhat trick, causing experienced programmers to roll their eyes at the laxness of the environment. But then it hit me: the technique I outlined earlier to re-establish object-context for a callback method was completely unnecessary…I could just store the object context right in the MovieClip itself! This would eliminate the hashing array and lookup!

    (more…)

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    DSri Seah
  • Fresh Electronic Delivery

    October 10, 2004

    My buddy Jeff over at Scintus has been busy as always, but had time to point me towards Fresh Electronic Delivery. It’s a design-oriented e-newsletter that serves up examples of great online design. It’s similar in scope to portals like linked up and gecko9, but it feels more focused in the editorial sense. I like! Not to mention that the design is clean and lovely.

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    DSri Seah