for keeping track of my digital experiments

Over the past day or so, I have been doing some update/maintenance work on the I Am Super Rich MySpace application for Solitech GmbH. (You can also find its Facebook counterpart under the name I Am Rich.) I’ve done work on these application before, and have had success in picking up the code really quick, but I now have to transition the MySpace edition over the OpenSocial 0.8 to get the application to post on users’ event feeds. The (now old) 0.8 OpenSocial spec was released sometime in January 2009 on MySpace, and update from the really old 0.7 OpenSocail spec. Along with the 0.8 release on MySpace came the opening of Activity Feed functionality to 3rd party developers.

Here is what is required to get Applications posting to users’ event feeds:

1. your MySpace app must be running in the 0.8 OpenSocial framework
2. MySpace app must make use of the templating engine for Activies
3. MySpace app must not be using old/deprecated 0.7 OpenSocial Javascript. This was a real problem for the IMSR app … had to hunt through several hundred lines of Javascript. Check out this seriously helpful MySpace developer wiki entry on transitioning your app to 0.8.

I have been working on this order system over the weekend, and the one piece of it that was the most difficult to get to work, should have been the easiest. I needed a popup or inline date selector. I figured there would be a quick cut and paste way of doing this, but after trying three different (allegedly) cut and paste solution, I was still getting glitches. One of them would have worked just fine, but Internet Explorer can’t render web pages properly AT ALL! Dang you Trident rendering engine! Thankfully I finally found Matt Kruse’s Calendar Popup. Just download and include the four javascript files in your HTML document, and you are good to go. And initialize the calendar class in the header section.

<script src="PopupWindow.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="AnchorPosition.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="date.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="CalendarPopup.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var cal = new CalendarPopup();
</script>

And then to use the calendar popup selector for a certain text input:
<form>
<input name="date" type="text" />
<a id="anchor1" onclick="cal.select(document.forms['testform'].date,'anchor1','MM/dd/yyyy'); return false;" name="anchor1" href="#">Show Calendar</a>
</form>

I logged into my blog today and found the usual players in the blog spam market, filling up my Akismet quarentine area. For the past couple of days now, it seems like the same guys have been hanging out on my blog. If they really wanted to make some money, they should post legitamate comments with one website link, or just contact me directly and make some money doing different things … but that’s another story.

So anyway, I’ve gotten so sick and tired of these same folks posting on my blog that I decided to investigate. Low and behold, it appeared that the spammers are no longer cracking into unix/linux machines much, but are instead brute-forcing their ways into Windows machines. Why someone would want to run a Windows box as a dedicated server is beyond me.

I decided to investigate the Windows Server brute-forcing methedology for myself. And thankfully one of the first hits I got was this helpful video about tsgrinder, tscrack, and rdesktop. In the video they don’t show where to get the first two programs, roboclient or probets. You can find more information and the downloads on the Hammer of God website (downloads).

Well hope things work out for the best. ;-P