TriLogic Sandbox

I’ve worked with a wide variety of script engines and interpreters throughout my career in programming. It all started when I needed a configuration language for a multi-platform graphics windows kernel I wrote that ran under DOS, X Windows, and proprietary hardware based on the AMD 29K processor. My earliest attempt to implement configuration scripting resulted in a bizarre object oriented event source + event sink architecture we called ‘config’ and while it produced a working user interface for a few venture capital demos it was far from being a good solution. Thankfully I discovered Tcl 6.3 and replaced my handiwork with a simple scripting language that looked and acted like a real programming language. I’ve been hooked on scripting ever since.
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I recently found that I needed the ability to create “a slider” for Wordpress.   In laymans terms this means that I have multiple blocks of related content that I want to display one at a time all in the within same area of a website.

Some important requirements I needed for this project were:

1. The ability to do this in entirely in Wordpress.
2. The ability to be able to put the slider on any page or in any post.
3. The ability to be able to leverage the short code feature of Wordpress.
4. The option of multiple sliders on the same page or even the same post.
5. The option of working within widgets.
6. TO NOT edit the theme in any way to make all this work.

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If you’ve ever wanted to import column based data from a file only to find that the columns varied on each and every “page” of data you know how frustrating it can be to write code to handle all the bizarre contingencies that may arise.  You might be presented with this problem when you’re asked to read data that has been scanned from an image or converted from some other format like an Adobe PDF. Read the rest of this entry »

Some time ago I received an email from a scammer looking to hijack my paypal account. I could tell that the URLs had nothing to do with PayPal but visually the phishing website itself was a dead ringer. I wondered just how many of the innocent unaware this filthy coward would steal from before he was stopped. I think thieves are the worst sort of people and they disgust me so I threw together a quick VB6 application that generated some very real looking data and posted it to the website though Internet Explorer as fast as the site would accept it. Shortly after I hammered 275,000+ form submissions in the site went offline. While Scammer Hammer will never make it to the downloads section the Classic ASP project it inspired can already be found there. Read the rest of this entry »