Chris Hardie's Weblog

Sometimes people forget how much information is being collected about them when they visit a website. It's actually not all that much - what IP address you're visiting from, what kind of operating system and web browser you're running, and perhaps what other website you came from in your visit. The real fun starts [...]

Sometimes when people call us for technical support at Summersault, they tell us that in trying to troubleshoot a problem on their desktop computer, they have "deleted the Internet." It's always tempting to feign shock and horror, saying "that was YOU!?" and ask them to "get it back, oh dear God, get it back [...]

This post is about one way to have a more enjoyable experience in online discussion forums in general, and I'm going to use the forums at the Palladium-Item, a local daily newspaper in Richmond, as an example. I'll show you how to rediscover the pleasures of online discussion by simply blocking out the posts [...]

I'm looking for one of those lamp/appliance timers I could plug my computer into that will do the following during times when I really need to focus:

Block incoming e-mail that isn't related to the specific projects I need to make progress on, but allow others through
Block outgoing web requests that are more than one degree [...]

I spent some time tonight getting a live chat feature working on the ProgressiveWayneCounty.org website. I believe it might be the only live chat room up and running that exists for Wayne County citizens in general...correct me if I'm wrong.
Hmmm, I wonder if we're ready for that. There's been some demand for it [...]

At lunch today we were talking about all the social networking sites that have popped up on the Intertubes over the recent years. Mark and I sounded a little curmudgeonly about it, noting that we've long since been ignoring invitations to join the latest fad in making virtual connections to the rest of the [...]

Today is the first day of the course I'm co-teaching at Earlham this semester, CS345: Software Engineering. I'm excited to be back in a classroom again and thinking in new ways and on different levels about a topic that's very much a part of what I do every day for Summersault (and why Summersault [...]

I recently wrote in the Summersault weblog about how website content syndication is changing the way we use the web. Of course, if the sites you care about aren't syndicating their content, the phenomenon is a little less exciting. For me, the only ones I cared about that were in this category were [...]

The eminent and celebrated E. Thomas Kemp points us to a wonderful and clever use of news aggregation and weblog technologies, Plogress. Using Perl and Wordpress, the apparently anonymous administrator has created a site that sucks data out of the Library of Congress and displays a blog of the doings of individual Senators and [...]

After a few incidents of going over my Sprint PCS minute usage without any warning, I hacked together a Perl script that will log in to the sprintpcs.com website and check my minute usage for me. It e-mails me a warning if I go over a certain usage percentage. I thought I'd post [...]