what i did while i was not sleeping like a sane man

i fiddled with plugins on my blog. 2 huge upgrades today.

1st, I installed ImageScaler Modded . This automatically resizes any images when they are larger than a specified maximum. This helped me simplify a long-standing problem I had with image inserts. Granted, i have not done much research into extending the toolset that comes with WordPress, but this is huge. By default, each image upload had to have width and height specified, which was a royal pain in the ass to do over and over and over again. I fixed this when I started the blog with a simple css addition below:

img {width: 640px; height: 480px;border: double black 3px;}

This worked for about 75% of my images. but anything that was vertically oriented at 480×640, anything i wanted to customize smaller, or any smilies had to have a manual style override in the code like so:

style=”width: 400px; height: 300px”

this got really fucking cumbersome. and because the default image editor in WordPress’ WYSIWYG panel specified image properties but not using the style tag, it did not override my css and was basically useless.

The plugin will autoscale both my horizontal and vertical images to the same defaults I was using, and allow smilies to be their native size. I had to comment out the above css for img, and instead add a command to put border on my photos only, which are always hyperlinked.

a img {border: double black 3px;}

the only thing i will still have to manually specify is atypically-sized images, which represent like 2% of my images. and for that i can use the built-in image editor. if I get sick of the plugin (other than stripping out all the code it adds to each post), I can at least use css and specify hyperlinked images only, which will again break the editor for vertical and atypical images, but at least let smilies be their native size. i’m so happy, here’s a smiley:
Wink

The next upgrade was an emoticon plugin. I tried 4:

  • custom-smilies – this let you add your own gifs, but still required keyboard shortcuts that you had to configure. TOO COMPLICATED.
  • TinyMCE Advanced – a series of plugins to the WYSIWYG editor, one of which was an emoticon panel comparable to most message boards. i had high hopes, but it was a buggy piece of shit and it was all or nothing with its plugins. JUST SAY NO TO BUG-FILLED CODE!
  • Smilies Themer – this let you select from about 10 different smilies themes. but still no customizations, and still had to used keyboard shortcuts. NEXT!
  • WP Super Edit – this was similar to TinyMCE Advanced and used the same emoticon plugin, but it was much more stable and allowed individual plugins to be disabled. THIS WAS JUST RIGHT.

The plugin itself does not do anything for customizing your smilies, it just presents a UI panel, but with a little hacking I was able to make it work:

  1. upload my smilies files to /wp-includes/images/smilies
  2. edit the file /superedit/tinymce_plugins/superemotion/emotions.php. in the table cells, change the code to include my gifs, their sizes, and newly-defined names using the existing format
    • OLD – icon_cool.gif: <td><a href=”javascript:insertEmotion(‘icon_cool.gif’,’lang_superemotions_cool’, ‘<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>/wp-includes/images/smilies/’);”><img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_cool.gif” width=”15″ height=”15″ border=”0″ alt=”{$lang_superemotions_cool}” title=”{$lang_superemotions_cool}” /></a></td>
    • NEW – yikes_gif: <td><a href=”javascript:insertEmotion(‘yikes.gif’,’lang_superemotions_wink’, ‘<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>/wp-includes/images/smilies/’);”><img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>/wp-includes/images/smilies/yikes.gif” width=”19″ height=”25″ border=”0″ alt=”{$lang_superemotions_yikes}” title=”{$lang_superemotions_yikes}” /></a></td>
  3. edit the file /superedit/tinymce_plugins/superemotion/js/en.js to include names for my new gifs
    • OLD: cool : ‘Cool’,
    • NEW: yikes : ‘Yikes’,
  4. edit the file /superedit/tinymce_plugins/superemotion/editor_plugin.js to have the popup-menu be whatever size i liked, to support my vast and expansive array of smileys: template[‘width’]=360;template[‘height’]=360

I have to still actually make all the edits for my 30 or so smilies, not to mention re-save about 100 posts to have the new image settings take effect, but that should make posting a ton easier and more emotive.

Wink

Ticket Exchange

typically i do not write about work. this is for several reasons – when i am at work, i am packaging my words and personality in order to present an image of a good employee and teammate. Its not dishonest, but it is a role i play, and role-playing is not why i have the blog. publishing my completely honest thoughts about work, when some of my co-workers have read this blog, is just stupid. Finally, i just don’t wanna think about work when i’m not there — it obsesses my thoughts plenty enough.

but one of the fun things of working for a big-name company is when what we do is all the buzz. Our upcoming Kiosk project, the Olympics, even the Access ManagerPalm scanning product that is difficult to work on but cool to see in action…this is some seriously cool shit and I’ve had an important hand in all of it. 2 years ago i worked significantly on the Ticket Exchange project – a secure, reliable, authorized forum for ticket resale on the secondary market. For all the work the Dev team did on this, it seemed to me that we never got the big splash for it i was expecting. You constantly hear of StubHub and Ebay (which owns StubHub), but rarely heard of our program. I never understood it — completely trustworthy, delivery is a non-issue since we can issue electronic tickets, and guaranteed tickets — seems like we should be a huge hit. The program has grown, albeit slowly and more notably, quietly. A lot of the users — pro teams — don’t loudly announce that their fan resale sites are in fact our site.

Last week, Greg Easterbrook wrote in Tuesday Morning Quarterback that the acceptability of ticket reselling would lead to NFL teams using auctions as a tool on the primary market. Again we were overshadowed by StubHub and Razor Gator. I thought the line he drew from “scalping on the internet is ok” to “we will let market forces determine ticket prices” was too direct. The ability to use auctions on the primary market is another tool we offer customers (and one I also worked on), but you are still talking about primary vs. secondary sales and all the other considerations therein: public perception, guaranteeing income irregardless of upcoming performance, getting your revenu all upfront, etc. Embracing the legitimacy of a secondary market does not come at the expense of the primary market, it only proves that the market will support a higher average ticket price. Easterbrook failed to acknowledge, however, that tickets available on the secondary market in part derive their prices from scarcity. If all tickets are priced higher, demand would fall and many would not fetch the secondary prices that they do.

Meanwhile it was announced today that we have inked a deal with the NFL to become their official secondary market. Woohoo! have to check back next year to see how much biz we take from StubHub!

Netflix outage: not hacking, just stupid business

last week Netflix was down for like a day, and i was bored and suspicious, and paranoid, and wrote this rabblerouser. and who wouldn’t be, how can this possibly be a planned outage. there was scuttlebutt on the net about it being related to a power outage at a hosting site in SF that took down a bunch of other big sites, and also talk of Netflix introducing a new pricing plan and the outage being related to its roll out. yet again, i thought, no no no, a big shop like Netflix can’t possibly fuck up a rollout this badly. EEKSTER! Blue Frown

eeeerr, i was wrong. and paranoid.

This story here says otherwise. I just wish i knew what it possibly could be…it could have been some sort of transactional financial thing that went through, and then they changed the db, so they couldnt roll em both back or something. Which can happen, with incredibly piss-poor planning sure. or maybe it was just something stupid like they didn’t back up.

wish i knew!!!

hacking and business?

Last night I tried to update my Netflix queue, cause right now I got “Elizabethtown” and “The Good Shepherd”, and if my next delivery is another chick flick or ponderous John Le Carre-like yawnfest, I’m gonna puke. Though I should note that additional chick flicks may, however, help me make a ride on Sunday.

Site’s down, it was almost midnight, so no worries probably a maintenance window.

This morning, still down and a note saying its expected down for a few more hours! So I troll a bit online, and sure enough the net is humming w. rumors of the site being hacked. What is the most interesting is the immediate and profound reaction this is having on Netflix shares. I never thought of hacking being big-business like that!!! This article give a good early summary

A couple months ago in Wired magazine there was a detailed description of how a well-known hacker bought an entire ISP down with a coordinated dns ping attack first on the site, then on elements of their backbone. The gist of the article was that it was totally mercenary and done for extortion. The hack itself was made up of millions of computers infected with a very benign virus just overwhelming the capacity of the target site — pretty simple virus that would not raise a lot of alarms on its own.

Email scams and spam are well-known stepping-stone tools for big hacks, and have been for profit for some time. F’ing scary that a few guys can come up with something where the effects are so devastation, since I know firsthand how easy it is to write a little nasty virus if you have it as a core piece in a bigger more diabolical plan. Its the equivalent of one man getting hold of some plutonium. As our society has gotten bigger and more complex, the destructive power of the individual has grown exponentially beyond the club or the handgun. Be afraid.