You can read about making your own Chalkboard Paint, or just mix these ingredients:
3 teaspoons acrylic paint [colour of choice]
1 1/2 teaspoons glazing medium [water based]
1/2 teaspoon powder tile grout
I’ve been working on learning some Qt 4 and while perusing their site, ran across PowerComics. If you download the content and run the software (no install, it runs off the link), you can quickly design your own comics. It’s certainly a rough version (it crashed on me before I could touch up the first panel), but it’s a lot of fun. This literally took about 3 minutes to put together.
I love laying the smack down on people that try to get away with dirty little evil things online. Today’s example: someone selling our software on eBay, and hotlinking our front page flash demo and images from our site. Basically, they’re using our servers and bandwidth to illegally sell copies of our software.
So I dug down a bit in Apache and implemented a few rules to fix things up. I used to just issue a 403 Forbidden HTTP error when they did this, but I just disabled that rule in favor of today’s new one.
What we do is rewrite requests for any images or flash files coming from eBay to a special image/flash file that helps educate you on the evils of software piracy. Arrrr 
To test things out, I also implemented it on this site before doing it live. Here’s an example of a normal image, and then a hotlinked image:
The code for those images is:
<img src="/images/HDProBox.jpg" alt="Home Designer Pro Box" /> <img src="http://www.chiefarchitect.com/HDProBox.jpg" alt="Home Designer Pro Box" />
How do you do it? With Apache, it’s pretty simple. In your conf/httpd.conf, add:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/warning.jpg$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\\.)?bogomip.net/.*
RewriteRule .*\\.(jpg|gif|png)$ http://chiefarchitect.com/warning.jpg
Swap out bogomip.net and chiefarchitect.com as needed. You must have mod_rewrite active for this to work.
Today is Tera B’s birthday. I sent her an email, I hope it gets through. We haven’t emailed each other in quite a while. It didn’t bounce, though.
Happy birthday, Tera!
I came in to the office early today, just after 7am, to make sure things go smooth. We have three training courses being taught in our conference rooms. That means lots of people we don’t know coming up here to learn how to use our software. We got set up late yesterday, and I just wanted to be around in case there were any last minute issues, but there weren’t.
So despite the roughness of yesterday, things seem to be going pretty well today.