Archive for the ‘Cool Stuff’ Category

How time flies and why our blog seems so dead

Monday, March 21st, 2011

Wow! Time sure does fly! It seems like only yesterday that we announced the launch of our new web service called RealtyNinja which makes awesome websites for the busy real estate agent. The reason I am writing this post is because I noticed that our last post was almost 5 months ago!! And one thing I always tell my clients is that a blog can be a good thing, but if you let it go stale, it can do more harm than good! So here is me updating the blog to keep things ‘fresh’ and also to let you all know that RealtyNinja is getting more and more awesome as the days go by. We have added a whole bunch of amazing new features and plan to make it the best real estate agent website creator in the industry. Check it out for your self:

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Captcha Fail

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Over the past couple of weeks we have been struggling with a rather intelligent spam bot (or person?) that has been hammering one of our clients forms. Currently we are using a non-image based representation of a set of digits you have to type in to successfully post the form. On top of that we have implemented a minimum time limit as well as a dummy form field that is positioned off screen so a user will not see or fill it out. If it is filled, we know it is a bot because in the markup, it is directly below the real input field… It worked for a couple days bit has now been broken =( We have a couple more tricks up our sleeves that we are working on and will report back on our findings. Now the question that comes to mind is, should I post the details of the new captcha if it is successful? Or would that just give the spammers the means to break it?

Here is a really cool CAPTCHA implementation from www.captcha.net and is based around the concept of tracing around a specific image from a set. It is called squigle-pix: http://server251.theory.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/sq-pix . I would like to see a bot break that!! Only problem is, I can’t find an easy to implement version of this; it seems like it just exists as a proof of concept.

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9 Station Pour Over Bar @ Cafca

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

It just so happens that our office is located within walking distance to probably the most fantastic café in Vancouver (imho). The name of the café is a bit of a mouthful, but well worth the effort to remember: The Café for Contemporary Art or just cafca for short. Last night they hosted an after party for the Vancouver Coffee & Tea show and featured a 9 station pour over bar.

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Google street view finally comes to Canada

Friday, October 9th, 2009

I figured I would join the party in blogging about the launch of Google Street View in Canada. Privacy concerns aside, I think it is a very cool service and will come in handy for all sorts of things. Other then personal uses, we will be integrating it into our real estate sites so that users can check out a house as if they are standing in front of it.

One downside of the service is that you have no control of when or what was taken in the photos. As you can see from this shot of our office there is a huge van in the way =(

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Hacking your sleep

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

I came across an interesting product during my afternoon web wanderings; so interesting in fact, I decided to blog about it. Being somewhat of a geek and coming from a programming/system administration background, I naturally try to optimize my surroundings and myself. Some would call this being a perfectionist or a tad OCD, but I think it is just a healthy urge to make oneself better. Lest I go of on a random tangent, the product I came across today is called the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach.

The Zeo Sleep Coach
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