Monthly Archives: May 2010

Broccoli, Tofu and Quinoa

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The wife busted this dish out a few nights ago. Tasty times!

Plip’s Vimeo JavaScript Embedder v.02

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OK, I just finished doing up version .02 of Plip’s Vimeo JavaScript Embedder v.02. I’d say it’s stealable, but that you’ll likely want to wait a bit for. There’s a couple of reasons:

  • It doesn’t work in IE8
  • It’s lot’s of code chunks instead of one tidy package
  • I’m not done with it

While doing research for this I found the Video for Everybody project which I love. You should definitely check it out and this may be where I try take this project:

Video for Everybody is simply a chunk of HTML code that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5 <video> element, falling back to Flash automatically, without the use of JavaScript or browser-sniffing. It therefore works in RSS readers (no JavaScript), on the iPhone / iPad (don’t support Flash) and on many, many browsers and platforms.
camendesign.com

My gut feeling is that this solution won’t work until Vimeo changes things a bit. Right now the main point of my work here is to fetch the large thumbnail which currently has to be done by JS. Using JS goes against everything Video for Everyone stands for. Still, super cool and possibly a worthy non-JS solution.

Stay tuned!

Smartphones + small screens = Phishing!

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I just read internet’s famous Cory Doctorow’s very interesting post about how he got phished (!). What struck me was not his whole parasite-perfect-timing-phone-reset scenario. The take away for me was that on a small screen you can’t see the entire URL of where you’re going. I can imagine a scenario where phishers look up your friends on facetwitt, send you a “personal” note with a perfectly crafted URL to fit you iphonedroid’s browser. Your phone would hide the fact that you’re not logging into the site you think you are. Yikes!

I’m currently abstaining from all social networking sites. They’re totally awesome and fun and a great way to keep in touch with friends far and near. However, my security hackles go up too high with them, so I’ll have to be happy with my blog and its 4 readers instead of an intensely well read facebook wall (that’s what the kids call it, right?).

Phishers often depend on super popular site like twittface to spam you with a note from a service you’ll likely be using. I laugh these off because I don’t use any them. But if I was a phisher, I’d programmatically crawl the feeds to figure who your friends are and who you actively communicate with. I’d then watch out for nouns and verbs you’d expect in a message based on the vernacular your lil’ group uses, and then I’d phish you like a bunch of mom’s on their iMacs (my mom and her iMac excluded, of course!).

This post largely written on WordPress for Android in casual carpool. Fun!

How to embed Vimeo Videos: The hard way

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I’ve been chatting with my friend about how to embed Vimeo videos on his site. He was trying to figure a way to do html5 and flash and auto-detect if you’re a desktop browser or a mobile browser (or an iPad). By using JavaScript he could show the user the right video. I’ve accepted this challenge and I introduce: Plip’s Vimeo JavaScript Embedder v.01. One thing I didn’t do was scour the Vimeo forums to see if this had been done. What I did set out to do was:

  • Learn Vimeo Simple API
  • Write code some one had requested
  • Have a programming goal that I could prove could be done in just one night

Arguably, I may not have achieved the last item as I actually haven’t tested it on a mobile device yet (yeah, I’m a lazy, lazy man), but I’m pretty sure it’ll work on a WebKit device.

It should be noted, I don’t think I’m a very good JavaScript coder and this is version .01. Even so, should I add a “JavaScript” category?!