neurofuzzy, flash game development, rich internet applications, free source code – *alt.neurotica.fuzzy*

I do load-balancing on one of my sites by delivering content from different servers based on the referring URL.  I have a media player that uses Flash to deliver content, and if the player is embedded on an external site, such as MySpace, the content comes from a different server.  This worked fine in Flash 8, but in Flash 9, the content still comes from my original server.  The reason behind it seems to be that Flash 9 reports its referrers differently.  I use a BASE attribute to set the players base URL to my main server, so Flash 9 reports that as the referrer.  Has anyone else run into this behavior?  Is this something to do with the new Flash 9 security model?

Joey Lott at Person13 has a great article on how to create custom components using Actionscript 2.0.  I’m glad to see there’s a code-only solution to component parameters using the [Inspectable] metatag.  I was always curious how that was done. 

For quite a while, I’ve been using Authimage with Veriword as my CAPTCHA system.  It was working well for a while, but soon the spammers found way around it.  With one of the latest Wordpress upgrades, Authimage stopped working, not allowing anyone to post comments, except spammers! Somehow Authimage began doing the opposite of what it was suppossed to do.  So, I decided to roll my own CAPTCHA using a combination of Flash and PHP.

I would love to open source my work, and give it to the public.  But, the truth of it is, if everyone started using it, the spammers would find a way to break through it.  So, my recommendation to everyone is, read up on how CAPTCHAs work, and build your own. 

I posted recently about image file uploads to PHP, and how they would fail in Safari.  It was a nasty bug that wouldn’t go away, but I finally discovered the problem.  On my upload form, I was using javascript and CSS to hide the form fields and replace them with an “Uploading files…” prompt.  It seems that there’s a bug in Safari where hidden forms will contain no values.  So, in hiding my form, nothing was being sent to my site!

I just launched Slideroll for Sites, a service that allows site owners to extend the Slideroll Slideshow Creator technology to their own sites. I’m initially launching a private beta, so if you are interested in participating, or know someone who is, drop me a line here.