W-Shadow.com

Meta : A snowstorm has killed my Internet access, so I couldn’t answer emails and comments – sorry! Should get my uplink working in 4-5 days. In the meantime, here’s some delicious filler delivered via an unreliable GPRS hack… In this post you will find a small collection of potentially interesting or useful links. I [...]

Normally you can’t send cross-domain requests in JavaScript due to restrictions imposed by the same-origin security policy. There are many clever hacks that circumvent this by using remote script includes (even CSS includes) or proxy scripts, but so far I haven’t seen anything useful for client-side, cross-domain POST requests. However, it turns out you can [...]

Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Even if the name doesn’t ring any bells you’re probably familiar with the basic idea : stupid people tend to overestimate their competence and underestimate the competence of others. The effect was famously demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by two researchers (Justin Kruger and David Dunning) in [...]

Listing recent posts on a WordPress page is easy – there are various widgets and theme functions available just for that purpose. But what about a non-WP page, or even a different site? That’s not that hard either – simply grab some posts from the blog’s RSS feed and output them on your page. In [...]

I’ve been trying to write a review ever since the first beta, but all I could come up can be summarized as “Meh. It’s okay.” WP 2.7 includes a lot of long-awaited features, which is great, but their implementation sometimes inflicts the aforementioned “meh” feeling. For example, there’s the dashboard menu – finally, a dynamic [...]

A .torrent file contains assorted metadata that is stored in a “bencoded dictionary” format. Bencoding is a relatively simple cross-platform encoding used by BitTorrent and a dictionary is basically an associative array. You can find a high-level overview of the file structure here. To open or edit a .torrent file in PHP you can either [...]

In the last few months I’ve spent about $100 on PC games and about $40 on sci-fi books. In the same period, I’ve spent exactly $0 on research that could actually bring about the future envisioned by those games and books. What about you? In a recent article, IO9 paints a bleak picture of our [...]

This plugin lets you specify IP addresses or hosts that users are allowed to login from. You can either use full IPs (e.g. “12.34.56.7″) or partial IPs (e.g. “12.34″), which lets you specify a range of addresses. More advanced configuration is also possible – you can specify allowed subnet(s) via network/netmask and use IPv6 addresses, [...]

Indeed, my inescapable tendency for invention procrastination has given us yet another piece of useless but potentially amusing statistics. The idea is simple : take 5000 recent comments from both Digg and Reddit and create two tag clouds using Wordle. In theory this should provide a bird’s-eye overview of the topics discussed by users of [...]