Archive for February, 2008

A special nightly build of Firefox 3.0 has been released that greatly improves JavaScript performance. The build was run against the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, and the results are really surprising. From the article:

1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms

This optimized build is nearly 4 times faster than the current release of Firefox, and 10 times faster than IE 7; pretty cool!

I have yet to switch to Firefox 3, mostly because lots of my favorite extensions don’t yet work (including the ones I’ve written). There are a handful of changes that have to be made in order for extensions to work in the new environment, some of which aren’t exactly trivial. As we get closer to an actual release, I’ll do my best to update my extensions.

As if we needed any more proof that CAPTCHAs don’t always work, it seems that spammers have now successfully cracked the GMail CAPTCHA. A one-in-five success rate is being reported, and it appears that there are multiple bot-nets taking a tag-team approach in hacking the sign up process. This is particularly dangerous, since Google’s domains are highly unlikely to be blocked by any website or ISP.

I don’t know what the solution to this problem is (if I did I’d be rich), but hopefully Google will figure out a way to prevent this kind of nefarious activity from continuing to happen.

Slashdot is running a story on RoadRunner intercepting domain typos. My dad noticed this ‘feature’ a few weeks ago, and opted out via their preferences page. In addition to the Slashdot story, Ryan Govostes has an interesting article (written back in December) on the security holes lurking in this opt-out program. According to his post, one could wreak all kinds of havoc with TWC’s poorly written page, enabling or disabling the service for essentially all RoadRunner customers. SQL injections also appear to be a possible line of exploits.

I’m in the process of tweaking the theme at this site. Specifically, I’ve made a number of changes to the comments portion of each page; it seemed a little too cluttered to me. I have also removed the post navigation portion on each individual post page. Does anyone use that? If so, I’ll put it back.

A little over a year ago, I inherited a productivity tool at work that allows users to enter weekly status reports for various products in our division. The tool is web-based and is written entirely in Perl. One of the mangers who uses this tool recently suggested a new feature, and I decided to implement it using cookies. Having never implemented cookies from a programming perspective, I was new to the subject and had to do some research on how to do it in Perl. It turns out to be quite easy, so I figured I would share my newfound knowledge:

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I’ve posted a new photo album: a Valentine’s Snowfall. We had nearly three inches of snow last night, which was completely unexpected (to my knowledge, no snow was forecast). The scene was too beautiful to pass up photographing, so I took some time this morning to snap some pictures. Enjoy!

The long awaited Team Fortress 2 update arrives today! A new gameplay type, gold rush, is headlining this new release. A new control-point map, named “Badlands,” has been released for Team Fortress 2, along with a slew of other new updates. A complete change log details what’s new. In addition to the new map and game type, several other maps have been fixed, most importantly cp_dustbowl (which is still ridiculously hard to win as the BLU team). As always, if you’re into TF2 and want to look out for me, my nickname is ‘jgbCodeMonkey.’ I’ll be on later tonight; hope to see you there!

Update: I was wrong about the game type. It looks like the new badlands map is simply a new control point map (which I’m still excited about trying).