ink page 15 - Dave's Blog

Eat Pants - Interactive Fiction Sessions from my Server Logs

I've looked at my web server logs previously to see if anyone had used my Web Frotz Interpreter and until recently didn't realize that awstats (the web server log report generator) was truncating the query from my URL, so I couldn't tell that anyone was actually using it. But after grepping the logs manually I've pulled out the URLs of visitor's text adventure sessions. If you'll recall, my Web Frotz Interpreter stores the game state in the URL so its easy to see user's game states in the web server logs.

I've put some of the links up on the Web Frotz Interpreter page. Some of the interesting ones:

• Apparently you can eat pants in Lost Pig.
• Someone teaches me that in Zork the egg goes in the display case.
• There's a creepy exchange in Galatea.

Linking to or Embedding a Portion of a Video

I'm excited by HTML5's video tag as are plenty of other people. Once that comes about and once media fragments are adopted, linking to or embedding a portion of a video will be as easy as using the correct fragment on your URL thanks to the Media Fragments WG who has been hard at work since the last time I looked at fragments.

However, until that work is embraced by browsers, embedding portions of videos will continue to require work specific to the site from which you are embedding the video. On the YouTube blog they wrote about how to "link to the best parts in your videos", using a fragment syntax like '#t=1m15s' to start playback of the associated video at 1 minute and 15 seconds. Of course if you want to embed part of a Hulu video it will be different. Although I haven't found an authoritative source describing the URL syntax to use, you can follow Hulu's video guide on linking to part of a video and note how the URL changes as you adjust the slider on the time-line. It looks like their syntax for linking to a Hulu page is to add '?c=[start time in seconds](:[end time in seconds])' with the colon and end time optional in order to link to a portion of a video. And the syntax for embedding appears to be "http://www.hulu.com/embed/.../[start time in seconds](/[end time in seconds])" again with the end time optional.

For more sites, check out the Media Fragments WG's list of existing applications' proprietary fragmenting schemes.

OpenSearchDescriptionToHTML Tool

I've made an OpenSearchDescriptionToHTML XSLT that given an OpenSearch description file produces HTML that describes that file, lets you install it, or search with it. For example, here's a Google OpenSearch description that uses my OpenSearchDescriptionToHTML XSLT.

I had just created an OpenSearch description for WolframAlpha at work and was going about the process of adding another install link to my search provider page so that I could install it. Thinking about it, I realized I could apply an XSLT to the OpenSearch description XML to produce the HTML automatically so I wouldn't have to modify additional documents everytime I create and want to install a new OpenSearch description. While I was in there writing the XSLT I figure why not let the user try out searching with the OpenSearch description file too. And lastly I made the XSLT apply to itself to produce HTML describing its own usage.

Incidentally, I added WolframAlpha at work to replace my FileInfo search provider for the purposes of searching for information about particular Unicode characters. For instance, look at WolframAlpha's lovely output for this search for "Bopomofo zh".

Infrared Paint Link Roundup

I like the idea of QR codes, encoding URLs and placing them on real world objects, but the QR codes themselves are kind of ugly. To make them less obvious I thought I could spray QR codes on to an object with an infrared reflective paint and shine infrared light on the QR codes, since most cameras, for instance the camera in my G1 phone, pick up infrared that our eyes do not.

In my search for infrared paint I've found a seller of IR ink (via programming forum) and an Infrared Paint Recipe (via IR FAQ).

In looking for this paint I've found that it comes up a lot in relation to the military for things like paint markers that are visible at night with proper equipment, and paint that absorbs IR light to make vehicles less obvious to night vision goggles. Even though the first reflects infrared light and the second absorbs it websites end up refering to both as infrared paint which made it difficult to search.

Additionally I found links to some other geeky infrared projects:

• Infrared goggles that block out all light except for the edge of infrared light that humans can perceive.
• A project to make infrared patterns and paint to screw with tourist video/photos.

Netflix CSRF - Stolen Thoughts

Looking at the HTTP traffic of Netflix under Fiddler I could see the HTTP request that added a movie to my queue and didn't see anything obvious that would prevent a CSRF. Sure enough its pretty easy to create a page that, if the user has set Netflix to auto-login, will add movies to the user's queue without their knowledge. I thought this was pretty neat, because I could finally get people to watch Primer. However, when I searched for Netflix CSRF I found that this issue has been known and reported to Netflix since 2006. Again my thoughts stolen from me and the theif doesn't even have the common decency to let me have the thought first!

With this issue known for nearly three years its hard to continue calling it an issue. Really they should just document it in their API docs and be done with it. Who knows what Netflix based web sites and services they'll break if they try to change this behavior? For instance, follow this link to add my Netflix recommended movies to your queue.