The Perceptus Back Story

Yes, our hosted bingo card generator looks a little different as of this evening.  We’ve given print-bingo.com a minor face lift – it’s a little bit wider, and a little bit brighter.  The main goal was to accommodate our new custom wares store (hosted by CafePress), but more on that later.

It’s the same great site under the hood!

P.S.  It’s not too late to generate your custom Easter Bingo Cards!  It only takes a minute from start to print!

People who have never had to make a website often wonder, why don’t people use nicer or unique fonts?

People who make the websites wish that they could!

I know that I’m bored with Verdana, Arial, and Times New Roman (or their Apple equivalents).  But, since we can’t guarantee that every computer will have every font, that’s pretty much what we are stuck using.

While we can’t change the font of the main content of our webpages, we do use some tricks to get nice headers.  In fact, we’ve just updated print-bingo.com’s decorative font headers.  We’ve had them for a couple years, but our (now) older software tool didn’t work with the latest Adobe Flash Player, version 10.  We’ve also changed the font that we use… we hope you like it.

For the geeks: We’re running SIFR 3 v.436.  The font file was built with a free online sIFR font generator, and we were formerly using sIFR 2.

When will we see the day where crazy steps aren’t needed for a nicely rendered web page?

SPAM, SPAM, SPAM. How do I hate thee.

Well, it finally happened again – abuse of one of our web pages by spammers.  This time, it is form spam – an automated web crawling tool (I assume) has discovered the “save/send/share” feature of print-bingo.com.  That form lets print-bingo.com users email their custom bingo designs to friends, family, or themselves. This form is now used by a spam bot network to send poor quality spam using our “invite” emails.  I’m currently getting about 10 bounce backs a day and growing – it has to be stopped before my VPS gets blacklisted for spamming.

I could setup a CAPTCHA, but I hate them – particularly the ticketmaster.com’s.  So, I will try to foil spammers with simple tricks to fool “dumb” automated spam software.

I’m trying a hidden to humans “fake” email field.  This post Quick tip to fight email form spam is the model.  The basic idea is to create a form field with “email” in the name and hide it with CSS (display:none) so that humans will not see or fill in the field.  Then deny attempts to use the form where the hidden field has been filled in.

We’ll see how well this works.

Merry Christmas!

It’s funny how one stumbles upon the finer differences between XP Home and XP Professional once in a while. Every good geek knows the biggest limits to XP Home such as no ability to join a corporate network, no Remote Desktop, and no encrypted file system (EFS).  But who knew about a tiny utility that will run a Windows Scheduled Task from the command line? That would be “schtasks.exe”, and it’s not included in XP Home.

The background: I needed a Limited User in Windows to be able to do something requiring Administrative permissions.  There are a few ways to do this, but in this situation, running a scheduled task was the obvious best choice because the task was already there as an overnight maintenance job.

A quick Google search for “run scheduled task from command line” will lead you to the aforementioned schtasks tool.  Well, I could copy the file from an XP Pro workstation, but that would violate Microsoft’s copywrite.

Fortunately, more searching will turn up a reference to an old MS tool “jt.exe” from it’s Windows 2000 Resource Kit.  You can get individual tools from the W2K ResKit here: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/reskit/win2000/. The license to JT and is much more permissive.  You’re free to use it, but at your own risk.

The “JT” syntax is not straight forward to me.  But these the two examples will probably help:

This lists all tasks: jt.exe /se

This will run (“activate”?) a task (you do not need to include the .job in the TaskName): jt.exe /sac TaskName /rj

On the XP Home Edition computer I was setting this on, the Limited User could run all the scheduled tasks, even when it couldn’t “see” the task in the list. YMMV.

One could  make this end-user friendly by wrapping a batch file around it and put an icon with a link to your script on the Desktop.

A couple months ago we released the first minimally useful version of our free Chinese to English dictionary.

Well, after a couple months of use, it was decided to re-do it, this time keeping the full Chinese characters. Now you’ll have a chance of being able to use it to order from a Chinese only menu! Unfortunately, it now requires that a Chinese font be installed also, but you can steal a copy from your desktop.

If the first version was minimally useful, this version is generally OK.

So, get your free copy of our CEDICT based Windows Mobile English to Chinese Dictionary now.