Inside the Mind of Sators

This will show you how easy it is to send someone a txt message by emailing them. Great to avoid outgoing txt charges on your cell phone service.

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The past two weeks I have begun tinkering with Linux again. I initially a few months back had installed an instance of Kubuntu on my desktop, only to become completely frustrated with it taking 12 hours to get a dual-head display adapter working correctly. This time though I reformatted a server I was using for Asterisk and installed Cent-OS 5.1 Server on it and at the same time went for trying straight up Ubuntu on my laptop. (more…)

Dang it. It’s been over a month since I blogged. Guilty as charged. My soul intention is to keep writing ever other day or so, but isn’t it amazing how quickly priorities can change and all of a sudden five other things come up and blogging gets pushed to the back burner. Sad because I really do enjoy writing my thoughts out (Jamie is really good at that and inspires me to work on it more). (more…)

In the past week, I’ve come in contact with a surprising handful of random folks with websites who either are sending credit card account information over clear email, or asked me directly for my account information over email in a handy form to just “Reply” to. Why don’t I go out on my back porch with a loudspeaker and just announce my credit card information over and over again. C’mon folks! Fraud is REAL!

With each individual or company that I came in contact with, learning that their practices were this way, I sternly warned them of how carelessly they are handling their clients sensitive data that email is clear as day for anybody to sniff, read, and pick up along the way, meaning who knows who just picked up that credit card information and stored it away (better charge those cards quick cause they’ll soon to be cancelled when the owners finds out he’s been frauded).

One company, of whom I will name, Eli Journals, is a publication center that puts out many newsletters on web design tips, as well as other software tricks. I received an email from them last week asking me to renew my subscription, and simply hit reply to their email and fill out the handy form at the bottom of the email and send it back. You guessed it, they asked clearly for my Credit Card Account and Exp. information. I was honestly quite appauled and wrote them a very stern warning and that I may just cancel my subscription because of the clear example of how lax they are in handling my personal data. I couldn’t believe it!

I’m amazed at how many start up websites all the way up to corporations are transmitting credit card information over email. You would think in this day in age people would know, but aparently people think they are invincible to fraud or something. Help the cause and warn those that you see in this act of the danger of account fraud involved with not keeping credit card data secure and under lock and key.

This one’s for the tech nerds. I recently upgraded to Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Web Design and absolutely love it. I’ve been trucking along through all the programs until I get to Flash CS3. I design a little nav creation as I have done so many times in the past until I go to start Actionscripting. Whoa - actions can’t be applied to objects?! Have to add listener events and all this new standards compliant stuff. I’m all for standards, but this threw me for a curve. I’m still stuck at trying to figure out how to pass variables to functions called by listener events…as soon as I can figure out how to do that, I think I’ll be back on course.

Anybody got any ideas? Below is my actionscript. I have a list of movieclips that I want to jump around the object’s timelines based on hover triggers from another button. I basically want to pass into the function which object I want to send to “in” and “out” frames and thus save lots of redundant programming…

import flash.events.MouseEvent;
function hoverIn(event:MouseEvent):void{ home.gotoAndPlay(”in”)}
function hoverOut(event:MouseEvent):void{ home.gotoAndPlay(”out”)}

home_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, hoverIn);
home_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT, hoverOut);