A friend of mine wrote a screenplay for the Samsung Mobile Fresh Films contest.  He’s been telling everyone to vote for his screenplay (it’s called “Out with the Trash”, in the comedies section, go vote for it!)  And, after voting a couple times and realizing that you could vote an unlimited number of times, I was able to find a huge hole in their voting system.

Normally, you go to their website, go to the comedies section, click a link that gives you a popup, choose which screenplay to vote for, enter five numbers/letters, click vote, close the window, open it again, …  It’s a long process to just vote twice.  I wanted to vote a bunch of times for him.  So I made a script to do it for me.  Of course, I didn’t crack their CAPTCHA, but I did find an interesting flaw in it.

When their CAPTCHA is loaded, it’s loaded from a PHP script with a couple parameters passed to the script: width, height, and number of characters.  The script takes that input and generates an image and a session ID (so they can make sure you put in the right characters).  After a couple tries, I figured out that the minimum number of characters the script would generate was two.  After that, it was a simple matter of writing two scripts: One to grab the CAPTCHA image, and set a session variable to the session id they assign you, and another to have you input the two characters and send the required POST data back to their website.  Anyone good with PHP can write this in about 10-15 minutes (or less, even). Read more

Many of you have probably heard of DropBox, a program created by some MIT students to make file synchronization between computers easier.  When I heard about it on digg, I signed up for a beta invitation, and finally got one a couple days ago.  What better way to try out a new beta than to blog about my experience.

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On the ongoing fight of grammar nazis for better grammar:

We recently purchased a new car.  (New being relative… it’s new to us, a ‘95 Corolla)  The other day, we got a letter in the mail telling us our license plates were ready.  This letter helped us by telling us what hours the dealership is open:

We are open Monday through Friday 8:30 am to 7:30 pm and 9:30 am to 4:00 pm.

Now, it took me a couple reads, but I’m pretty sure they meant to say “Monday through Friday 8:30 am to 7:30 pm and Saturday 9:30 am to 4:00 pm.”  From what I could tell, this was printed with a copy machine.  So, the dealership made a bunch of copies of a letter that doesn’t even make sense.  One would think that a dealership would hire someone to proof-read things like this.

In programming, a lot of writing code isn’t actually writing code.  A lot of programming is either finding code and using it as a reference, or finding code and just copying it to your program with slight modifications.  This saves programmers time and effort.  Why rewrite code?  However, sometimes code needs to be written because no reference can be found.  For large projects, this is often done in groups.  Which brings about an interesting problem: debugging other people’s code.

Ask any programmer what they hate most about programming and the answer will most likely be debugging.  Finding what’s wrong with code you wrote is the worst.  Because, in your mind, nothing’s wrong with it.  Why would you write code wrong the first time?  Often, the easiest way to debug is to wait a little while between coding and debugging, and taking a fresh look over your code.  So, this would mean that debugging other people’s code is easier. Read more

As a small followup to my post on Fildropper, I recently needed to upload a larger (about 180 MB) file somewhere for hosting.  Not wanting to kill my bandwidth, filedropper was my first choice.  Instead of sitting and waiting for the file to upload, I decided to leave it overnight.

I checked my computer in the morning to be greeted with an error.  A really weird one.  Firefox could not find the page, because there was HTML in the URL.  Somehow, the entire source code for the filedropper main page had been put in the address bar after http://www.filedropper.com/.  So, I figured it was just a one time thing.  I’ll just upload it again, I figured.

By now, I have tried uploading at least seven times!  Sometimes the upload freezes in the middle, and other times I just keep getting the HTML in the URL.  Naturally, my next move was to e-mail Filedropper.  I went to their support form on their website, filled it out, and I haven’t heard a thing back in almost a week.  I realize that this is a free serivce, but for a company making such vast claims as filedropper has, this is simply unacceptable.  They do offer a paid service, and if they ever want to get my money they have a lot to fix.

First, for those who don’t know, filedropper is an awesome file hosting website. It allows anyone to upoad files of up to 5 GB in size, and it will simply host them. That being said, it is not without its faults.

However, I’d like to start off on a more positive note: filedropper is a great service. Being able to easily share any file up to 5 GB in size? AWESOME! Being able to create a free account (there was a promotion for digg, reddit, and other social news sites) that allows me to store and manage 250 GB of files? SWEET! And, of course, there are the features like being able to password protect your files, e-mail them to other people, etc.

Now that I’ve gotten through that, filedropper could use some major improvements. Read more

What if Michael Jackson hosted “Kids say the darndest things”?

Technorati Tags: thoughts

Well, the day came when the URL for the XKCD comic should have been http://xkcd.com/404, however, today’s comic is http://xkcd.com/405.  They just skipped 404.  Goes from 403 to 405.  Quite disappointing.  I was looking forward to seeing a 404-based comic, but XKCD has let me down…

It was abour rime for another post… With a screenshot. Hope this shows up right… Blogging from n800!

I know the first day of Spring was a little while ago, but it still seems like winter here. Why? The second day of Spring (good Friday), it snowed. Yesterday, it snowed. Even some accumulation, too! Luckily, I was able to capture what I believe to be a highly ironic moment: flowers blooming with snow on them.

Here’s some pictures:

In other news, I have a tracking number for my N800 and it should be arriving sometime today!