Exploiting the YOP Poll WordPress plugin

Somewhere in the vast expanses of the wild internet, there is a site I sometimes frequent that likes to put surveys in their blog posts.  Quite by accident, I discovered that if I reload the page in an incognito window, I could vote in these surveys multiple times.  Being hopelessly curious about what's going on behind the curtain, I ventured down the rabbit hole that led me to spammy scripts and purple underwear (No, seriously...).

Algorithms Case Study: Dynamic Programming in JavaScript

Several days ago, a civil engineer friend of mine asked me if he could pick my brains.  He'd run into a bit of a problem analyzing a bridge design, and wanted to see if I had any thoughts on how to attack the problem.  So we sat down over Jimmy Johns and he explained his problem to me, and my first impression was that is sounded like a textbook dynamic programming problem.  I told him I would have a look at it, which I finally did today.

How to dismantle a poorly designed registration wall

Mr. SiteOwner... tear down this wall!

Sorry, couldn't resist.  Let's ignore the fact that I was five years old when Ronald Reagan spoke those words.  I hate forced registration.  If your content is free, make it free.  If I want to get your shitty emails, then I'll sign up, but this whole passive-aggressive "you can look if you give me your email address" bullshit just gets on my nerves.

Fun with ciphers and generated text with JavaScript

Many moons ago, on a day I had very little else to do, I had this silly notion to create a Google Spreadsheet that would generate a line of text "mad-lib" style.  I'd already created a "team name" generator that basically just picked an adjective and a noun and put them together, which made for some rather amusing results, such as "The Pensive Tangerines", "The Drunk Stumpies", and "The Kindly Rippers".

Fun with Coordinates: A story about using JavaScript to do things the hard way.

Went to a training class this morning on using Google's MyMaps.  Interesting enough, though I don't see myself ever really using it.  For the uninitiated, this application lets you upload a spreadsheet of locations with a bunch of metadata, and you can manipulate the visualization.  Well, the map pointers are placed based on either an address or a lat and long.  The presenter noted that she wasn't sure if you could use UTM or State Planar Coordinate System coordinates.  Because I had pretty much exhausted my interest in playing with the MyMaps interface in about 10 minutes, I took it as a challenge to obtain and test a UTM data set.  I did a search for an available dataset but didn't find anything useful, however I had at my disposal a Google Sheets spreadsheet that had the Wyoming zip codes with latitudes and longitudes (basically a truncated version of this file). "So I'll just convert the ones I have, easy..." BWAHAHAHA ok, we'll get to what that was about.