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Category: News/Announcements

Wil
11/05/08

Code Highlighter v 0.3 Released

Link: http://blogs.crammerz-inc.net/thunk/2007/05/26/b2evolution_code_highlighter_plugin

The “Improved” Code highlighter plugin for b₂evolution has been released as a full plugin pacakage rather than a hack.

Wil
10/05/08

Footnotes plugin updated (v .3)

Link: http://blogs.crammerz-inc.net/thunk/2007/06/01/footnotes_plugin_for_b2evolution

I have just updated the footnotes plugin to version .3. Updates include the caching feature (though it breaks on Feeds) and some notes on Auto P fixes.

Quick Update

Updated the plugin to v.3b which fixes issues using the alternate (bbcode) syntax.

Wil
22/03/08

Code Snippet of the Moment: Assignment Flipper

To make the long story short, I have to write a ton on assignments (e.g. id.text = client.id) for our database project. And as it turns out, we also need code which does the assignments the other way around. Too lazy to do it manually, I wrote a short Perl script to do the job:

Perl:

	#!/usr/bin/perl
	use strict;

	my $input;

	while( chomp( $input = <STDIN> ) ) {
	$input =~ s/(.?)(\s)([^\s=]+?)(\s)=(\s)([^\s=;]+)(\s)(.?)/$1$2$6$4=$5$3$7$8/;
	print "$input\n";
	}

Wil
28/07/07

Targeted Turing Tests

A lot of Web Applications nowadays which has some form of a registration feature (like forums), employs some form of a turing test (or rather, a reverse turing test), like CAPTCHA, to subvert automated registration.
Though it’s a good measure, it’s not entirely bullet-proof as some registration bots can still manage to recognize to distorted image.

One interesting registration systems is the service registration for the Quantum Random Bit Generation System: http://random.irb.hr/ here’s a screenshot of their registration, pay attention to the bottom part:

Funky reverse turing test of random.irb.hr

It’s actually called a MAPTCHA (Math CAPTCHA). Though it’s complex, I think it’s proper since the ones who are going to be using their services are Mathematicians or Scientists or at least those with good math background. In other words, they targeted their turing test to the people who are likely to use their services… I won’t say that every registration system should use that though… unless they want to drive people away.

Wil
08/07/07

PDF, commenting and Adobe Reader (and DRM)

A lot of published academic papers, like the digital copies of the ACM transactions or the ones at jstor, are in PDF format.
Usually, what many of us do when reading academic literature is to generally comment it. Whether by simply highlighting it, attaching post-it notes or by writing directly to the medium. In this case it’s in pdf format so it makes sense to be able to annotate it using annotation features supported by the .pdf format right?

Well, I hunted for free PDF readers that can at least highlight some parts and well, the best thing that I can find is Skim which is for the mac: http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/. Others have the basic pdf reading functionality but I need to pay if I want to do commenting on them.

But wait, Adobe Reader supports commenting right out of the box! The problem is, PDFs are defaulted to no comment! In other words, unless you digitally sign the pdf (Using Adobe LiveCycle or any other PDF generation utility of Adobe) and mark it as “allow commenting", commenting would be disallowed – even if you generate it using a free pdf generation utility like PDFTeX or GhostScript and don’t care about document rights!
It follows that the PDFs from e-journals cannot be commented :!: