ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Comment Spam Begone!

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    Oddly enough I’ve been seeing a lot of comment spam in the past few weeks. By “a lot” I mean more than zero. I may have been getting comment spam since the beginning, I didn’t really look into it. But I only started noticing after I added code that emails me new comments. So I just added http referer checking to the comment module. Hopefully that stops the spam. I have no idea how well spam bots are typically written. Any reasonably experienced developer should think to fake the referer. If this method is ineffective I’ll have to come up with something else – i’m thinking along the lines of ajax fired by the text field’s onChange method, I’ll have to think about that further.

    That’s all for now.

  • IM, OS and Pirates, Oh My

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    Google Talk

    If you haven’t already heard Google released Google Talk Beta on Wednesday, Google’s answer to AIM and MSN. As a nerd I feel it’s somehow my duty to talk about google even though I’m sure this has already been “blogged” about 10,000 times since Wednesday. Wired has already written a review. My two cents: the classic google simplistic design is sheer brilliance as always, I couldn’t be happier with Google’s choice to to use the jabber protocol – open protocols are where it’s at – fo shizzle, voice sound quality is superb – the use of cellphone style connect quality bars is brilliant, i hope they implement file transfers soon, multi-chat is overrated – i hope they don’t include it, tabbed chats would be nice. That’s a quick rundown of my thoughts on gTalk. Next up, windows Vista…

    Asta la Vista

    I installed Windows Vista Beta 1 (legally obtained, I assure you) the other day. I am definitely unimpressed. Granted I didn’t take a super close look at it. I’m convinced that Vista is going to be to XP what ME was to 98, especially at the rate they’re removing features. The main features I noticed where silly GUI ‘improvements.’ I suppose GUIs are what desktop OSes are all about. But the Vista GUIs features fall into to categories 1) ripping off Mac OS X, 2) stupid/pointless. blah….i can’t talk about this any longer

    Pirates of the Spanish Main

    I recently moved in close proximity to a Geek Games Store. While waiting for my bus the other day I noticed an interesting looking game in the window, Pirates of the Spanish Main. The publisher is calling it “world’s first constructible strategy game.” It’s essentially a miniatures game, wrapped in the facade of a collectable card game. You purchase the game in packs of cards which punch out like paper dolls. The cards consist of ship pieces, crew members, islands and treasure. The empty cards can then be used for in game measurement, all measurements are in S or L (short or long side of the card), pretty brilliant. The rules are dead simple and the ships are fun to build. So in conclusion, add me to your gtalk list and buy yourself some Pirates! cards i need someone to play with. (cards are water and wine proof btw)

    PS. Check out A List Apart 4.0, interesting layout.

  • Winnipeg Web Firms

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    Earlier this week I sent my resume to a bunch of Web Design, etc based in Winnipeg, in hopes they would be looking for an awesome hip web developer to give a bunch of money to. Unfortunately, none of them were. I consider myself quite good at googling, but I had quite a hard time finding Winnipeg firms the first time I looked. Such a hard time in fact, that I compiled a list and saved it to a txt file. So, in hope that this list gets picked up by google or something here it is, all Winnipeg Web Design firms I’m aware of:

    Cocoon Branding Inc.
    IdleWorks Inc.
    Mars Hill Group
    Meterx Systems
    Okina Consulting
    Planisphere Communications
    Smokehouse A Design Company
    spacecadet design
    Transcension Media
    ViewSource Media
    Visual Lizards Inc.
    WebMomentum
    Web Slingers Inc.
    Web Wizards Inc.