If you happen to be one of the 2.9% of the people in the USA still using IE 6, it is time to upgrade!!! Check out this chart, Internet Explorer 6 is not secure, not useful, not anything!

It is a bit humorous that Microsoft is having to start a campaign telling people to Stop using one of there products.

I think I am going to work on a random sentence generator for a few different purposes, Similar to:
this site and this site.

Here’s the link for FREE FONTS, TEXTURES, BRUSHES, etc

http://www.graphicmania.net/

Boston, MA, November 28, 2005–As E-tailers prepare for the year’s busiest shopping season starting Cyber Monday, MaxMind offers seven tips for merchants to verify and prevent fraud from online credit card transactions.

1. Perform Address Verification Service (AVS) and Card Verification Value (CVV) checks. If the order passes both checks, accept the order for further processing but do not capture the credit card charge. Instead, select the “Authorization/Pending Capture” mode because fraudsters can easily obtain information to pass these checks. Failing the CVV check indicates that the purchaser may not be in possession of the actual card. Orders that fail the AVS check should be processed with more caution.
2. Lookup the customer’s IP address with a geolocation service provider that also detects anonymous proxies. In most cases, the general geographical location of the IP address should match either the billing or shipping address. Orders from anonymous proxies are considered to have higher risks because fraudsters often use anonymous proxies to hide their true IP addresses.
3. Check the geographical location of the IP address against known high-risk countries such as Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Lebanon, Macedonia, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Ukraine, and Vietnam.
4. Check if the goods will be shipped to a mail-forwarding company when the shipping and billing address are different. An order with a mail-forward address is considered risky since the goods may be shipped overseas.
5. Ensure that the provided zip code corresponds to the city and state fields for both billing and shipping address. AVS only checks the zip code and the numeric portion of the street address. Fraudsters may not always have the complete address and may be too lazy do a zip code reverse lookup for additional information.
6. Request that the customer fax a signed authorization form with copies of the front and back of the credit card if the order is suspicious. This is usually fairly effective but fraudsters have been known to be able to create images of the front and back of credit cards using graphic design software.
7. Ask the customer to provide the bank name and customer service phone number as listed on the credit card. Call customer service to verify if the given phone number matches records for the cardholder. If it matches, call the customer to authorize the transaction. If they are unaware of the purchase, suggest that they call the credit card company and report the card as stolen. This is one of the most effective methods, but is time-consuming.

Source: MaxMind

I found this great simple ad free cgi script that you can install on nearly any webserver. Your shared hosting account probably won’t mind as long as you don’t advertise it and actually start getting lot’s of traffic through your site. Here is the best part, xav.com has creating a super simple installation script that will install it on your server for you. It even worked on my host gator account.  I use a proxy once in awhile just to see if a DNS changes I have progated to other servers.  Now that I can setup my own proxy I don’t have to get annoyed by the silly ads that other proxy sites always put right in front of you nose.

It is actually very simple, first upload your video to box.net. (If your box.net doesn’t look the same as mine, you might just be on a different account level, but you should find similar tools.)

After it has finished uploading click one the link “Share” to make it change to “Shared”

Then, click the arrow to open the drop-down menu of tools for that file and click Link to this File

A window will pop-up, you want to use the bottom of the two links (the one that ends with an actual file extension like .swf or .flv or whatever.

Then just use that link as the src url in your html for your video. For example, I often like using a .flv and then playing it with the JW video player, the code would look something like this:

<div id="container">
<a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
Get the Flash Player</a> to see this player.</div>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/index_files/swfobject.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
       var s1 = new SWFObject("/index_files/player.swf",
"ply","480","290","9","#990000");
       s1.addParam("allowfullscreen","true");
       s1.addParam("allowscriptaccess","always");
       s1.addParam("flashvars",
"file=https://spatical.box.net/shared/static/cd4gb5rmjv.flv");
       s1.write("container");
   </script>

Now that code also requires you already uploaded the JW flash video player, so the player.swf and swobject.js src files need to be linked correctly.  But you’ll see I linked the actual video directly to the file off of my box.net account.

The code for a .swf file with a built in player (like the ones exported from camtasia) require even less code.  You can just link to them directly in an embed tag or object tags.

For that video I just used this code:

<object width="320" height="240"
data="https://spatical.box.net/shared/static/ebx51dtj5i.swf"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="src"
value="https://spatical.box.net/shared/static/ebx51dtj5i.swf" />
</object>

That is it.  You should be able to stream lots of videos.  Of course if you ever start getting a lot of video views you’ll want to make sure you upgrade your box.net account to the highest level so you can make sure to get unlimited bandwidth.

Just another tip from Steven hansen

So today I passed off my chess project in my Computer Science CS 240 class.  I think I finished in a fairly good amount of time.  Only stayed up late one night working on it.  My code isn’t super effective in all aspects, although I did manage to do a few things that helped me simplify things.

• I used an external XML parser called CMarkup, it is free for non-commercial use and it handles all of the silly cases the TA’s give us just fine (just remember to xml.ResetMainPos(); after parsing the board so it can still parse the history even if it came before the board in the xml file.
• I only wrote two GetCandidateMoves functions.  One for my Piece class and one for the Pawn class.  I just defined directions for each piece, and the main piece move method just got squares in each direction until piece was found or it went off the board.  The pawn class was special just because it had special cases for the first move and capturing moves
• I wrote a couple of methods in my main Game class that checked for Check and Checkmate (which also shared some child methods).  Stalemate was simply when it is Checkmate but not Check (with the way I wrote those methods).
• I had memory issues until I took all pointers out of the MoveHistory.  I ended up just saving the piece type and color in the move history instead of a pointer to the piece.  I had issues leaking memory since sometimes I was putting pointers from the pieces saved in the Board class in the MoveHistory then other times I was putting pointers from the Board class in the MoveHistory.  So, so pointers in the move history.  And I made the board basically be the holder for all of the active piece pointers.  When a piece was captured or created, that is when I called delete or new. ( And the board destructor would clean-up any pieces left on the board when exiting or deleting the board before loading a new file).

Another project done for Steven Hansen, and now I am done with a CS minor and a EE major.

For a large project in my Computer Science class at BYU (cs240), I needed to implement a simple webcrawler, that would create a database of words, each page that contains each word, and a database of all of the pages that were crawled (whether they had parsed words on them or not). It was a pretty large project, with the added complexity that many of the standard library tools like or other c++ standard library datatypes where not allowed. We had to implement our own BST and linkedlist. Any way it is now done. And you can get a full .xml document that it includes an index of all of the words on my blog (before this post). Ok, the xml document isn’t really that interesting. It’s just the only output to show for my hours of work for this school project.

afraid.org – FREE dns

and

django – python website framework

jquery plugin I want to try soon – http://media.brianbeck.com/shared/javascript/jquery-ahover/demo/demo.html

and another jquery form validator – http://shugartweb.com/jquery/form