Today I decided to break away from the standard form extension that comes with TYPO3.  It just wasn't cutting it, and the spam bots were going ape on it.  The new one is called "sp_bettercontact", and it looks like it may do just what i need it to.  It says it has some trickery that it uses to fool spam... we'll see.  I am still working on getting the Captcha set up, so you soon may need to be typing in those little scrambled letters so I know that you are not a computer in some guy's mother's basement where he lives in squalor.

Another nice feature of this mailer is that it has extensive error checking and will Auto-mail the sender.  This may be a nice way of annoying people.  Downside to this extension was that the Engrish not so great on the translation flies.  I may have to send in some corrections to this for them.

So I tried out the beta demo for the new Unreal this week, and I can say that I will be purchasing it when it comes out, as long as I buy flowers for my wife (and by flowers I mean clothes (and by clothes I mean jewelry)).  Granted, it was a little sluggish, but it may have been because I was running it in Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro.  Thankfully, they are not being idiots and only making it available on Windows Vista (cough "Crysis"), and I will be able to buy the Mac version when it comes out.  And yes, I have a Vista PC, so I can say that it's a P.O.S. (poop-operating-system)

There are some sweet new features, including a hoverboard.  Too bad this isn't Tony Hawk, so I don't think you can do any ollies as you flak the blue team.  It does beat waiting for your little man to run a mile across the board.

The graphics are ridiculously tweakable, even in the beta demo.  Some atmospheric settings look awesome, but are a little to distracting.  We'll see how those turn out in the final.  I thought one of the cool features was that carnage will actually stick to your view, so you can't just go barreling through hoards of players with your impact hammer for fear of blindness.

The only thing wrong with the game is that I will have to get everyone else here at work to drop UT2004 and get the new one, and seeing as we just started playing 2004 last year (2006), I'll have two years to get really good at this before they even play it.

Finally, after much whining, I got some pretty URLs on my site.  As you can see, if you go to other pages, the URLs actually can make some sense.  Instead of "/index.php?id=32&type=0", it may now say "/about". I think search engines are supposed to like it too!  It wasn't too bad to do either. 

TYPO3, the CMS that I use, includes a .htaccess file in it's root.  It it make to use mod_rewrite and an extension called RealURL, which takes the pretty URLs people type and turn them into relevant links for the server. Until now, though, I've never realized I actually had to go edit the darn thing to make it relevant to my installation.  All that meant was editing some paths in it.  The only problems I had were a result of having my install in some sub-folders on my GoDaddy server. I had to go in and change the line that reads " RewriteRule .* index.php [L] " to " RewriteRule .* /index.php [L] ".  I also had to comment out the " RewriteBase / " line.

So if anyone wonders how to make lovely little URLs, its not too hard to do once you figure out how it works.

Many would say the days of profit and innovation on the web are dead. The nineties brought product information and business communication to the home office. The turn of the century saw a rise in online purchases and a globalizing effect on product marketing. While both of these periods offered abundant success, it was more often met with uncertainty and inconsistency. As such, company websites have stagnated and online sales have fell into the control of several predominant vendors. These recent trends would lead one to believe that now is not the time to invest resources into a burnt out market, but in fact, now is a better time that ever to begin development for the coming wave of ecommerce.

Within a cooperative work environment, there exists a set of norms for communication and accountability. Whether members are working in a large team or in a pair, there are roles and tasks which different members will fulfill. More specifically, the communication and cooperation of a pair of peers directly influences the success of their production (Ellis & Taggar, 2007). While much is understood about the influence of collaboration and accountability in relation to the performance of individuals, the field of collaboration through technological communication devices and digital media is a rapidly growing field, and is yet not fully understood. Through examining traditional norms of peer accountability, one can examine the influence that newer methods of digital communication and simulated intelligence have on performance.

So after pounding my head against so many walls, embedding everything I could, and reading through the entire internet, I finally figured out why my Actionscript 3 components wouldn't work.  Turns out that little bugger of a wmode messed things up again. Apparently if the Flash is embedded in an HTML page with wmode set to transparent, it just decides to not show components.

Now before you scold me for using "wmode=transparent", I want to let you know that I was actually doing it for a real reason, which I may tell you either when I figure out how to do it otherwise or when you are on your deathbed.

I guess this means no radio buttons mysteriously overlapping HTML content.  Oh bother.

Ok, so I admit that some may find this entirely geeky, but my latest personal knowledge pursuit is endeavoring to merge typo3 and Flash.  Before I get too excited, let me fill you in on what that exactly means.

Typo3 is a content management system, and a rockin one at that.  A fellow in Europe, let's call King Kasper, sat down and wrote this unbelievable CMS.  Now I cannot claim that the coding he did was revolutionary, but the organization and structure of the system is really off the charts.  On, and Flash is what make those little games and banners on the internet.

SO a while ago, in the midst of my independent studies in university, I got bored and started mixing the two.  The real benefit to doing this is that flash looks sweet for interactive and motion websites, but it is not really very cool when it comes to updating content, especially if you are the customer.  Now I am in the midst of using Kasper's typo3 backend to organize content and generate XML feeds for site content.

THIS MEANS that I will soon be able to crank out sites that have very dynamic structure while still maintaining the super sweetness of flash interactivity.  TO see the start of the efforts, head on over to Red Red Design to see it in it's ever increasing Typo3+Flash greatness.

TTFN my BFF
Sir Knowlton