Phasor Burn

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Amusing blog-comment spam script failure…

The following bit of hackery is a type of Rube Goldberg Machinery that can be found nearly everywhere there is some sort of information processing, transforming, or transmitting system.

I continually perpetrate it myself in my day to day sysadmin work, writing scripts to glue systems together, migrate data from one form to another, etc.

What part of Instapaper’s infrastructure are you most proud of?

The bookmarklet has a mechanism to save pages from sites that require logins for full content, such as the Wall Street Journal and Harper’s, by sending a copy of the page’s HTML from the customer’s browser to the server. It’s like automating the “Save as…” menu item: if you have your own account for these sites and can see the page in your browser, you can save it to Instapaper.

The way it does this is ridiculous: instead of calling a simple GET request to save the page, since an entire page’s contents would quickly overrun any URL-length limits in the stack, it injects a FORM with a POST action and populates a hidden value with the page contents.

But form-data requests from browsers aren’t Gzip-compressed, so the resulting data is huge and needs to be sent over people’s (often slow, often mobile) upstream connections. So I found an open-source DEFLATE implementation in Javascript — really — and the bookmarklet compresses the page data right there in the browser before sending it.

The whole procedure is hideously complex, but works incredibly well.

Read the article

On 2011-07-03, at 10:58 AM, “ZHANG L.” wrote:

Hi, I’m Zhang L, Asst. Head of Operations East Asia Bank Hong Kong. I seek your attention for the confirmation of a Project. I have a Project of $26.5M for you. I shall provide you with detailed information immediately i hear from you

Hmm, yeah right… nice try… Let’s try this ….

On 2011-07-03, at 5:38 PM

You still owe me 47.3M from the last project.

Sent from my iPad

And what do you know. No response.

If you can get keyboard lockers that activate upon detecting cat-like typing, how about screen locks that activate upon bug-like-scrolling?