Primitive Captcha Solving / OCR in Javascript
Blizzard's recently concluded Diablo 3 beta key giveaway Twitter contest provides an opportunity to demonstrate primitive Captcha solving / OCR in Javascript, along with some basic use of the HTML5 canvas element, a Javascript OAuth library, and artificial neural networks.
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Unpacking Javascript
If you’ve worked with numerous javascript-heavy open source web applications, you’ve probably come across javascript files that look like they were encoded into a single large block of gibberish. Whether the purpose of this obfuscation was to protect the original code or to minimize the download size, it becomes a pain if you are trying to debug or modify a piece of javascript code that looks something like this:
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Case Sensitivity in PHP
It surprised me to learn that class names in PHP are actually case insensitive. That means the following is legal:
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Curly Braces within Double Quotes in PHP
Curly braces are used to delimit variables in double quoted strings in PHP. While very useful in many situations, this can cause confusion when trying to print a combination of curly braces and variables.
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Automating Facebook
You know those Facebook applications that require you to click a button over and over again? Ever wish you could program your browser to automatically click those buttons so you don't have to do it yourself? With a little programming knowledge you can, and here's how.
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PHP Bug in array_multisort()
Be careful when using array_multisort() on copies of arrays, as you might end up changing the original array. This is actually a real bug in PHP 5.0.4-dev, and I lost half a day to debugging as a result of this. I explain the bug and a workaround here.
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