Today I got bored and I made this.
It all started when I told my wife, Sarah, that she was a sloth (for no particular reason that I can remember), and we both realized that we had no idea what the fuck a sloth was. So, I figured I'd help other people who were in a similar situation, and thus whatthefuckisasloth.com was born.
I just launched a new Web site I've been working on for a couple of months now, http://tweetatcongress.com.
TweetAtCongress offers an API for looking up Congress members on Twitter, and was created so that public advocacy organizations can give their supporters a way to communicate with elected officials with a tweet. Right now the API includes data on federal legislators, and state legislators will be added soon!
This was my first attempt at writing my own API, and it was quite neat actually. A big change from my day job of front-end, client-side Web development. I got the idea for the project earlier this year, when an advocacy org I was speaking with said, "Hey, we saw this thing on Obama's Web site where users are able to post a tweet to their Congressperson, how can we do that?" I responded that I could not find a suitable API out there, and they sort of forgot about the idea, but I was intrigued enough to create my own database and write a little code, and here we are.
Currently YouTube doesn't offer an option of embedding its videos via https, so if you try to add a video to a secure page browsers will display a security warning. If you use swfobject.js instead of the code provided by YouTube (as you should!), you'll find the security warning goes away ... in some browsers; IE is fooled and doesn't display a warning, while FireFox will still show its little red exclamation mark in the status bar indicating that not all elements on the page are secure:
The same issue occurs in Opera, as well as Flock and other Mozilla browsers.
And obviously, since swfobject is a JavaScript file, if JavaScript is disabled in the browser the only option for showing the video is a plain ol' Flash object inside noscript tags, and in that case the security warning is displayed for all browsers.
The workaround I came up with is to upload a SWF to the secure site that acts as a proxy and loads the YouTube video (since Flash has its own security model, it doesn't matter that the video is not served via https).
Here is an example from peta2's "Whose Skin Are You In?" Web site:
I've posted the SWF I created to Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/ytplayer.
Here's the ActionScript that makes it all work:
Stage.align="TL";
Stage.scaleMode="noscale";
System.security.allowDomain("http://www.youtube.com");
System.security.loadPolicyFile("http://www.youtube.com/crossdomain.xml");
//create a MovieClip to load the player into
ytplayer=createEmptyMovieClip("ytplayer",1);
//create a listener object for the MovieClipLoader to use
ytPlayerLoaderListener={};
var loadInterval:Number;
//When the player clip first loads, we start an interval to check for when the player is ready
ytPlayerLoaderListener.onLoadInit=function(){
loadInterval=setInterval(checkPlayerLoaded,250);
}
function checkPlayerLoaded():Void{
//once the player is ready, we can subscribe to events
if(ytplayer.isPlayerLoaded()){
ytplayer.setSize(Stage.width,Stage.height);
clearInterval(loadInterval);
}
}
//create a MovieClipLoader to handle the loading of the player
ytPlayerLoader=new MovieClipLoader();
ytPlayerLoader.addListener(ytPlayerLoaderListener);
//load the player
ytPlayerLoader.loadClip("http://www.youtube.com/v/"+vidId+"&hl=en&fs=1",ytplayer);
//adjust size when user clicks full-screen
var listener:Object=new Object();
Stage.addListener(listener);
listener.onFullScreen=respondFunction;
function respondFunction(){
ytplayer.setSize(Stage.width,Stage.height);
}
I tried to find a jQuery plugin I could use with the Twitter Search API to display recent tweets containing a specific keyword or hashtag, but couldn't really find one that fit my needs, so I made one!
I call it TwitStream.
Inspired by the recent flood of donations to Planned Parenthood in honor of Sarah Palin, I'd like to call on rational human beings who believe in consenting adults' right to marry regardless of their gender to donate to the Human Rights Campaign in honor of Orson Scott Card. Hang on, I'll explain ...
It turns out that the fella who wrote Ender's Game—one of my favorite books in my early teen years—is quite a bigot. Like, a really really crazy bigot.
Here's what OSC thinks about legalizing marriage for all Americans.
"Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn. Only when the marriage of heterosexuals has the support of the whole society can we have our best hope of raising each new generation to aspire to continue our civilization...
In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. Ditto with lesbian women. To get those civil rights, all homosexuals have to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in marriage.
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is. They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes.
Homosexual 'marriage' won't accomplish what they hope. They will still be just as far outside the reproductive cycle of life. And they will have inflicted real damage on those of us who are inside it. they will make it harder for us to raise children with any confidence that they, in turn, will take their place in the reproductive cycle."
Insane much?
So, join me in stickin' it to Mr. Card. Go to https://secure.ga3.org/03/inhonorof1 to make as generous a donation as you can afford and show your support for equal rights regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Under "Send acknowledgements to", be sure to include the following name and address to be sure ol' Orson knows you made the donation:
Orson Scott Card
P.O. Box 18184
Greensboro, NC 27419
My son Kjonaas had his first big outing today. He is just the cutest thing since ever.
Things I like:
I'm voting Republican.
Look out, behind you! A thetan!
I can't wait to see this!
More internets:
So apparently it's really hard to be an emo kid in Mexico ...
Ben Stein is stupid.
Choke looks darn good.
See two movies for the price of one!
Famous people punching some guy.
24 Season Two: The Musical?
Cool NES mod.
