Turn any RSS feed into a slide show

Today I was educating myself on a new format for creating slide shows called “S5“.  It is an open format that can create slide shows using XHTML/CSS and Javascript.  These shows can intern be run in any modern browser making them truly platform independent.  For the most part the standard is extremely well thought out and holds a great deal of promise.

In my research I found a great tool that will convert a RSS feed into a S5 presentation.   Give it a shot and see how flexible this format really is.

Dynamic Comment System

Yesterday a friend of mine showed me a great dynamic comment system being used over at deadspin.com . After seeing it in action I decided it would be fun to implement something similar on my site (even if I rarely get any comments). I have whipped up a bit of Javascript and tweaked my template a bit to support it. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. If it gets decent reviews I can great a tutorial on how to easily implement it on a typical WordPress theme.

Making friends with HAL

As of late I have been having some trouble with HAL(Hardware Abstraction Layer). I finally found the solution and decided I would post it here in case anyone else my need it. The symptoms of this problem are simple. When Gnome boots up you get an error stating “failed to initialize HAL”. There are many problems that can cause this error but the one that I keep running into was tricky to find but extremely easy to resolve.

It boils down to a boot order issue where dbus and HAL are scheduled to boot at the same time. The problem with this is that often HAL requires dbus to be up and running. To figure out if this is the specific cause you can take a look at the /etc/rc2.d/ folder. You simply want to make sure HAL’s three digit prefix comes after dbus’s. For example “S12dbus” followed by “S13hal”. If it doesn’t simply execute something like the following command in the terminal. Make sure you change it to match your system.

sudo mv /etc/rc2.d/S12hal /etc/rc2.d/S13hal

If you have ran into this problem I hope this will help you get it fixed.

HoneyPot Spam Fighting

I have been working on various forum validation techniques lately and came across a simple idea that seems to make a lot of sense. You can read more about it here. The basic idea is that you include a hidden form element. If this element is filled in then it is probably a bot that doesn’t understand CSS or Javascript. When handling this submission you know that you can ignore it.