Technology

A few weeks ago I said I no longer needed the Wufoo embedding code that I’d put into bSuite. I was wrong. So I’ve taken another look, fixed the code from my old post, and coded it up into a stand-alone plugin. I’ve added installation and usage instructions to the bottom of the original post.

I spent some time looking for panorama-related apps for the iPhone and came up with the following:

• Panorama by Airshed
• Panoramas by Helix Interactive
• TripStitch by Byteslice Software
• Pano by Debacle Software
• Panoramascope by Phil Endicott
• PanoLab and PanoLab Pro by Originate Lab

I’ve actually played with PanoLab a bit (landscape, portrait) after seeing p0ps Harlow using it.

I’m a fan of Batcache, the Memcached-based WordPress full-page cache solution, but I’ve discovered that it ignores the content-type header set when the page is initially generated and re-sends all content with content-type: text/html. I posted a note about this at the WordPress support forums, but then I realized what the problem was: apache_response_headers() doesn’t return the content type, but headers_list() does.

The solution is to replace apache_response_headers() with headers_list() in the code, though headers_list() is PHP 5+ only, so it might be a while before we see a change like this committed. Still, I’ll shamelessly tag Andy Skelton (Batcache’s author) on it.

[Facebook’s guide to sharing][1] details some meta tags to make that sharing work better:

In order to make sure that the preview is always correctly populated, you should add the tags shown below to your html. An example news story could have the following:

> 
> As shown, title contains the preview title, description contains the preview summary and image_src contains the preview image. Please make sure that none of the content fields contain any html markup because it will be stripped out. For consistency’s sake, please use the 
> 
> <meta />
> tag to provide text data for the preview, and the 
> 
> <link />
> tag for any source urls.
> 
> The title and summary tags are the minimum requirements for any preview, so make sure to include these two.

 [1]: http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php "Facebook | Share Partners"

VoIP Now offers a few tips, Hackszine discusses VoIPong, and Mac VoIP mentions Cain & Abel and describes ARP poisoning to make a man-in-the-middle intercept.

The BuddyPress forums have a number of threads about handling invitations (two worth looking at: one, two), but no real solution has emerged. At the same time, there’s also a need for some means of confirming other actions such as password resets, email changes (both of those are already handled by WPMU, I know), cell phone numbers to receive SMS messages, and other actions that need to be confirmed later.

So I’m proposing a generic API to handle things like this. The built-in WordPress cron and ajax functions seem to offer a clear pattern for creating such an API: Simply, plugins and core code could register an action and a function to be called when that action is executed. The API could also store data to be sent to that function when it is executed.

Among the things I’d do with this?

• Confirm email addresses
• Confirm cell phone numbers via text message
• Confirm IM accounts
• Confirm Twitter accounts
• Confirm password reset requests
• Confirm invitations in BuddyPress

Anybody else interested?

There’s a WordPress has-patch marathon going on now and I’m hoping one of my recent patches gets some attention. I’m hoping to fix the user meta functions to allow them to accept multiple values per key, per user.

It’s listed there among the other has-patch tickets in Trac, and there’s been some discussion in WP-Hackers. Why not take a look?

A study sponsored by the WiFi alliance reveals the following:

WiFi and college choice

• 90% of college students say Wi-Fi access is as essential to education as classrooms and computers
• 57% say they wouldn’t go to a college that doesn’t have free Wi-Fi
• 79% say that without Wi-Fi access, college would be a lot harder
• 60% agree that widely available Wi-Fi on campus is an indication that a school cares about its students

WiFi and where they use it

• 55% have connected from coffee shops and restaurants
• 47% from parks
• 24% from in their cars

WiFi in the classroom

• 55% have checked Facebook™ or MySpace™ and sent or received e-mail while using their laptop in class
• 47% have sent instant messages to a friend during class
• 44% used Wi-Fi to get a head start on an assignment before a class was finished

WiFi and linkbaiting statistics

• If forced to choose, 48% would give up beer before giving up Wi-Fi

Survey methodology: “In conjunction with the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wakefield Research surveyed 501 U.S. college students in September 2008. The sampling variation in this survey is plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.”

Mac OS X doesn’t ship with unrar, the common Linux utility, but you can easily get it bundled in UnRarX, a convenient Mac OS X utility. Dig around and you’ll find it in UnRarX.app/Contents/Resources.

Adam had to remind me of this:

sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 port 80

Of course tcpdump can only tell us what other machines the computer is talking to, not what the conversation is. That requires a sniffer like Wireshark.

For some reason two CDNs, BitGravity and Castfire, are being blocked on campus. You might think firewall, but the problem even seems to appear outside the firewall.

PHP iCalendar can parse and render iCal formatted files. Apple’s developer docs, amusingly enough, offer a few more hints along those lines.

I tossed this together a while ago, and it even made it in to bSuite for a time, but I don’t have a need for it anymore, and I’m cleaning house.

function shortcode_wufoo( $arg ){
 // [wufoo id=z7x4m0 domain=place.wufoo.com]

 $arg = shortcode_atts( array(
 'id' => FALSE,
 'domain' => FALSE,
 'height' => 500,
 ), $arg );

 if( !$arg['id'] || !$arg['domain'] )
 return( FALSE );

 return( str_replace( array( '%%id%%','%%domain%%','%%height%%' ), array( $arg['id'], $arg['domain'], $arg['height'] ), '<iframe height="%%height%%" allowTransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="width:100%; border:none" src="https://%%domain%%/embed/%%id%%/"><a href="http://%%domain%%/forms/%%id%%/">Fill out my Wufoo form!</a></iframe>' ));
}
add_shortcode( 'wufoo', 'shortcode_wufoo' );

Download the simple plugin here: wufoo_shortcode.php. Save it as wufoo_shortcode.php, upload it to your WordPress’ wp-content/plugins/ directory, then activate it.

To use it you’ll have to have a Wufoo account and forms. Then simple put in a shortcode like this [wufoo id=z7x4m0 domain=place.wufoo.com] in one of your posts or pages. The result will look like this.

From The Economist in 2006: Open-source business: Open, but not as usual.

I’m cleaning house in [bSuite][1], and I’ve decided that this shortcode function for embedding Slideshare items in WordPress needs to go. Rather than totally toss it away, however, I’m posting it here in case somebody else finds it useful.

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 [1]: http://maisonbisson.com/bsuite/