Acetio | Blogma

I don't normally broadcast this kind of thing but it was one of those situations where I had been gesturing rudely at the computer screen for hours on end before finally having the revelation: when validating a web form with JavaScript, it will fail if you have hyphens in the form names.

I've been doing this kind of thing for over ten years and I don't recall this ever coming up before.

Normally, when you validate a form, if the code detects a problem (e.g. an empty field that is required, or an email address that's not a real address) it aborts the submission of the form, thus saving time both for the user and the server. But the form I was working with defied this basic rule - it always successfully detected the problem, but then went ahead and allowed the form to be submitted anyway. Removing hyphens from the field names resolved the issue.

Special characters are typically things such as apostrophes or dollar signs, characters that have meaning in cod as well as normal language. But I had thought hyphens were safe.

The surprise to me is that, while googling the keywords almost always provides the needed answer, this one came up with nothing. It felt like I was back in 1996 or something.

I hope future generations will benefit from my wasted time.

In 1994, my first job out of college was creating educational videos for the Division of Biological Sciences at Cornell University. It was toward the end of the year when I was talking to my boss about this thing called The Web because it seemed that a number of other academic departments had web sites (that is why the Web was developed in the first place, after all). I suggested that we should have one, too.

My first job in New York City was as 'Content Editor' at PC Magazine in 1997. That meant I hand-coded all their articles, sometimes up to 200/day. The idea of a dynamic, database-driven site was still new and there were no good solutions at the time. The best was to use Microsoft Word's mail-merge function, placing all the content in an Excel file and opening the HTML template in Word, then merging them together to generate the static pages.

I started working with the staff at Friends Journal in June 2008.
The site is based on Drupal and is a companion site to the printed version, which is published monthly.

It's a good feeling to work on a project that is devoted to communicating ideas and messages of peace, trust, understanding, and all the other values that sometimes seem so rare.

You can buy a subscription for $39 (makes a great gift!)

This guy has a lot of projects worth looking at.

Some are silly Google API hacks:
http://douweosinga.com/projects/googlechatbot

While some have a bit more meaning:
http://douweosinga.com/projects/sealevel

edit:
Johnny B told me about
www.top-10-web-hosting.com
which lists what seem to be some of the best hosts out there.

Lunarpages offers 400GB per month of bandwidth for $8/month.
I just signed on with them to host the Obion games since they've gotten so popular (100,000 players within three weeks)

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This is kind of neat. This site got hacked by someone named 'Badboy'. If this were a commercial site, I might be more concerned, but as it is it turned into an interesting exercise.

The site wasn't really comprimised, just the front page was altered. I suppose a good hacker could have done much worse, so it looks like Badboy is more of a 'white hat' than a 'black hat' - which is to say I imagine that he's just pointing out a lack of security in order to encourage me to hire him to tighten it up.

In looking at stats for this site, I can see where visitors came from, and if they came from a search engine, what search terms they used. Here's the batch from today:

Note the 13th entry. I can't tell if they were researching this in a 'dyi' kind of way, or just idle curiosity (The most dangerous kind!).
13: flash animation cartoons
3: matt slaybaugh
2: circuit diagram for led night rider affect
2: cattlecar
1: mechanical automata
1: rhinos crows poster collective nouns
1: centipede physical and behavioral adaptations
1: 56j co brown
1: flash animation ant
1: bx 24 kit sale
1: capacitor 56j co
1: football metaphors
1: dumping bodies off of brooklyn bridge
1: virtual ant farm
1: nitinol project
1: dimitri negroponte and itp
1: steppers motors midi
1: nitinol circuit
1: creating a hexapod robot
1: dc motor tip120
1: alexander safir
1: xbotx
1: 2n2222 interface
1: nitinol melting point
1: searching within audio
1: meat resistor
1: ascii kick
1: boris nitinol
1: nitinol power requirements
1: acetone napalm

Either way, why does Google consider this site a source of information on that topic? I've only done it a few times, it's not like I'm an expert.