W-Shadow.com

This is an example of how you can use CURL to “log in” and retrieve some protected info. I’ve showed the somewhat extreme case where you need to maintain cookies, spoof HTTP referer and use SSL. The example page used here is ClickBank – one of the largest digital product retailers. I’ve tried to comment [...]

No response from Squidoo about my countdown module yet, so I’m going to write about some problems I encoutered with the Module Development Kit. This is going to be technical and Squidoo-specific, so beware. A bit of background : Squidoo offers a SDK for module development. This SDK (or MDK as it’s called) comes with [...]

Recently I decided to take a look at Squidoo and almost immediately I noticed they offered a Module Development Kit. After checking out the list of “Most Wanted” modules it seems a countdown module is a fairly popular idea and should be easy enough to do. A countdown module would basically “count down” to a [...]

(Another obscure topic here… yay!) One day not too long ago I remembered the “website heatmap” buzz (not so popular anymore now) and wondered whether I could/should create a software that could generate heatmaps for any particular website. Note that originally the phrase “website heatmap” was used to refer to an overlay image showing where [...]

…because that’s what I tend to do. You know how it is – while browsing the web you come across some component library, API spec. or similar, and it looks so cool you wish you could immediately put it to use. I usually download those, store them somewhere, maybe read the docs/watch the demos… and [...]

This project has been going for a while, so I’ve decided to write a short overview of the results seen so far. If you don’t know what’s it about – The Living Image project is a website where anyone can vote for one or more digitally generated images. Those pictures are created by artificial neural [...]

This little tip might be usefull for people who have recently started learning PHP and have some experience in other languages (like me). Recently I needed to write a PHP script that would process a binary file I had created in my Delphi program. However, it turned out that fread() doesn’t work as expected – [...]

Genetic algorithms are used for evolving various things – from bot behaviour in games to digital art. They can be used for solving nearly any problem/field that allows you to construct a well-defined genome and a fitness function. Defining a genome for a website is doable, and probably quite simple, too. Many websites consist of [...]

Some words have a tendency to appear in certain contexts. For example, “jumps” is likely to be followed by “over”, but “cabagge” is probably not going to appear there. It is possible to analyze a text and determine how often words appear in specific contexts. These statistics can then be used for various purposes.

This method is useful for various tasks in natural language processing, but the fun part is you can use it to generate a random text that appears to be meaningful, and that’s what I’m going to do :)