Archive for the ‘Our Work’ 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:

Posted in BaseTools, Business, Cool Stuff, Martial Arts, Our Work | No Comments »

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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A not so brief history of base-10 design & development inc.

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Not many people know how Base-10 started or where it came from, so I am going to give you a brief history lesson that will shed some light on our origins and how we came to be.

It all started back in 2003 almost 7 years ago… Ramin and I both trained in Kickboxing and attended Champions Martial Arts. Ramin was 19, I was 17 and we were not even good friends at the time, in fact I clearly remember Ramin picking on me. We had been training together for more then 5  years at the time and knew that we were both computer geeks. Ramin was into graphics and 3d rendering and I was into linux system administration; we were both into gaming. This is how we first connected, by fragging and ganking each other in Counter Strike and other such games. One day I was approached by Amin Sabounchi, another member of Champions, asking me if I knew how to make websites because he was interested in getting a new real estate site for his business. I told him what any 17 year old underachiever, wannabe computer hacker would say, “Of course I do!!”. To tell you the truth, I did not know how to make a website, especially a dynamic real estate website.. all I knew was some super basic HTML and the general concepts involved.. I had no programming experience and absolutely no design skills. Armed with nothing but an idea of where to start, I bought a book on Perl (Programming Perl!!) and called up Ramin with a proposition. (more…)

Posted in Business, Our Work | 10 Comments »

New updates to an old site

Monday, August 24th, 2009

One of the highest traffic sites we have created got a substantial update today; the site I am talking about is Vancitylofts.com. We inherited this site in 2003 in the form of a massive plate of PHP 4 spaghetti code and went through a complete rewrite in 2006. As part of the rewrite we ported the site to perl and the Catalyst web framework. Since then the site has gone through a number of random updates and feature additions and as of today, has finally been brought into the web 2.0 era. (more…)

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