Cristiano on Tech/Life

• Popular Websites Vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks | Freedom to Tinker – You would be amazed how little developers know about CSRF attacks and more precisely, how to protect against them.
• CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS | Natalie Downe – Nat wrote a great presentation on CSS Systems, a way for writing maintainable CSS
• Super Mario Rescues The Princess: Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade – Hilarious video of what happens when Super Mario meets the princess.
• I’m a PC too… touché – Mac's are PCs too, as we can see in this "I'm a PC"-remix
• DjangoCon 2008 Keynote: Cal Henderson – Ridiculously funny keynote by Cal Henderson at DjangoCon about why he hates Django
• Terminal Tips: Make extended print dialog show by default – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) – Just something I always wish Mac OS X did by default: show the full print dialog.

BarCampLondon5 is almost a week away and I haven’t figured out my talk yet. I gave two talks at BarCampBrighton3 last month, both photography related, but both not really that well visited which means I’m now kind of without ideas and instead would like to ask you: what should I talk about?

Photography

I still have the feeling that it would be interesting to talk about photography, but it is hard to guess what would be more interesting: an advanced topic or a more simple topic. At BarCampBrighton3 I talked about Histograms and HDR photography, both talks attracting mainly the few experienced photographers. Later on I heard a few people claim they wanted to hear my HDR talk so it might be worth to do that one again.

Instead I could do a beginners/hands-on session, bringing my 2 DSLR and 1 SLR camera and maybe asking some fellow photographers to join me to give some newbies their first hands-on experience with a semi-pro camera. I think this could be loads of fun for everyone, especially if we could bring some nice objects to test people’s photography skills on.

Bookmarklets

Alternatively I could talk about how to make a bookmarklet. I have some experience with two bookmarklets that I made in the past and I could give people a quick overview of what is possible with bookmarklets, the tools you can use to make them, security and limits, and maybe eventually a hands-on session in making a simple bookmarklet.

What do you think?

To sum up my story, I want to know what you (the people attending BarCampLondon5) think would be an interesting topic I could talk about. I think BarCamps should be focussed a bit more about what people want to hear but I guess that’s for a different blog post.

As some of you may know, tickets for BarcampLondon tend to be sold out really fast, leaving many without a ticket. And now, thanks to Harry M, Barcamps have gone full circle with the introduction of the spinoff to BarcampLondon5: BarcampLondon5-Spillover (although I think that to stick with the FooBar concept they really had to go for BazCamp).

So if you can’t come to BarcampLondon5 but you do want to have some Barcamp experience, then sign up for the Spillover event that is held on Saturday September 27th from 9am to 9pm. The venue is provided by The British Computer Society which is nicely located in central London. Tea and coffee will be available for free and work is underway to find a sponsor for lunch.

You can get your tickets on EventWax, and contact me or Harry M on twitter if you are willing to sponsor.

Carsonified is giving away a “golden ticket” to all their events in 2009, including FOWA, FOWD, etc. The only thing one needs to do is write a blog post and get 25 comments on that post.

So please help me out here and write comment on this post to help me enter the draw.

• Goon City – The biggest pixel art city on earth. I can look at this for hours!
• Fluke: iFLAC your Mac – I handy little app that helps you import Flac (lossless audio) into itunes.
• iPhoneModem, Internet for Mac und iPhone – Nice little app that will help you to use your iPhones mobile broadband on your Mac. Not quite flawless yet but with a bit of experience it does seem to do the trick.
• Tip: scp Resume – My broadband at home sucks big time sometimes, failing SCP transfers, etc. This little tip is a handy thing when you want to resume a SCP transfer.
• Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility | The Register – Very funny post from the Register on the "Orgy of Fail" that happens when incompetent fucks like TechCrunch's Michael Arrington get to describe something remotely technical like Google Chrome
• Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser –
• London from above, at night – Gorgeous photo album of London from above, at night.
• McCain is a Cylon? – Pretty sure now about it. Via DanW.
• A List Apart: Articles: Paper Prototyping – Another great article by ALA
• Traffic Shaping –

A while back I wrote about my photos that made it into Flickr Explore. Since then 3 more photos made it into explore and I thought I’d show them to you.

The Cooldown

Made it to #284

Blackfriars Bridge Train

Made it to #274

The Constant Reader – Part 2

Made it to #485

Warning – After a quick email with Google, I advise you to not build your own Gears package. The text below is just a quick reference for me and some others that might want to build their own Gears package.

Google Gears is always a product in development. I wanted to try the latest repository build yesterday and noticed that it was relatively easy. Here is how you can do it yourself.

Step 0 – Install Xcode

If you are doing this I take it you already have Xcode installed, but in case you don’t go to the Apple site and download and install Xcode.

Step 1 – Download Source from SVN

Go into your Terminal and checkout the current Gears repository

svn checkout http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gears-read-only

This can take a while as it is quite huge (640mb+). In the meanwhile proceed to step 2.

Step 2 – Download IceBerg

IceBerg is a tool for making Mac OS X installation packages (.pkg files). The Gears source comes with some commands to make a nice .pkg and I advise on using it (it makes stuff so much easier later on). Just go to the IceBerg site, download the installer and install it. 

Step 3 – Restart your Mac

Unfortunately, IceBerg needs you to restart your Mac before the Gears build-script can pick up the IceBerg tools. So wait for your SVN to check out and restart your Mac.

Step 4 – Build Gears

Open Terminal again, go into the gears-read-only/gears/ folder and type the command 

make

This will start building your code. This can take quite a while depending on your machine. On my MacBook with 4GB of RAM it took about 30 minutes. 

Step 4b – Check if the installers were build

When this process ends, read the last few lines on the terminal to make sure it build the installers. If you forgot to restart your Mac after installing IceBerg, the installers will have failed to build. In this case restart and go into the gears-read-only/gears/ folder again and type

make installers

Step 5 – Run the installer and clean up

In the end of all this you will have a gears-read-only/gears/bin-dbg/installers/Safari/ folder with a gears.pkg installer in it. Run the installer to install your Google Gears for Safari. You might need to restart your Safari afterwards to get it to load for the first time.

Don’t forget to in the end throw away all the source and bin files as it might be more than 1GB of data now.

So here are my slides from my second presentation at BarcampBrighton3. Not very useful without notes but it has some links in it that some people might consider useful.

I won’t be blogging much more about BarcampBrighton3, but Melinda has a massive post up on almost every session that I attended.