Old School “Medicine” Ads

cocainedrops
Special thanks to Katherine for locating this little gem. We’ve all seen the cigarette ads of the 1950s with doctors proclaiming their medicinal effects. Take a look at this collection on pharmacytechs.net, which unifies the promotion of cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, heroin, opium and dozens of other illegal substances as being safe for family (and children) consumption. See them here »

Flash File Uploader – Allow All Filetypes

flashfileuploader

A [d]online reader recently requested that the Flash File Uploader allow provision to upload all filetypes. And while I’d previously decided against such an option—due to security/malicious action issues, this was not the first time I received such a request. In fact, since the uploader was created a few years back, I’ve gotten dozens of requests for this feature. As such, I’ve decided that my disclaimer for downloading the uploader should adequately cover me from any litigation and wrote the feature into the latest version of the uploader.

For people wishing to just use the uploader without understanding the changes, simply add “all” as an item under the extensions flash variable in the swfobject embed code:

fo.addVariable("types", "video|text|pdf|audio|archive|office|image|all");

For those that wish to know the changes, the Flash loop that adds the array extensions to the “allowed” list also looks for the “all” option and changes a variable to true, if all filetypes are allowed. This is then passed to “upload.php” and skips the extensions test. Lastly, it’s passed to index.php to properly display the success message.

For your convenience, the link is the same as the last one.

Comments and feedback always welcome. Thanks again, Mike, for the assistance and to all the [d]online readers and commenters for your interest in the FFU and readership.

The Vendor-Client Relationship – in Real-world Situations

I found this video as torturous as it was funny, for various reasons, but figure that most of my colleagues would get a good kick out of it. Especially on the heels of the Win Without Pitching manifesto—which friends and [d]online readers replied in unison ‘In a perfect world…”—these two posts have really made me stand back and think about how our industry differs from many others.

That’s all I feel comfortable saying on the subject, in such a public forum, though.

Google Wave: OpenSource & in a browser!

Quite incredible. Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video below, sign up for updates and learn more about how to develop with Google Wave. It’s an HTML 5 App built with the Google Toolkit and works identical on all browsers. 🙂

By the way, did you notice a movement toward natural elements for application names? Gamers have MUD. Mobile.ME users have clouds. Adobe App Developers have AIR. Google now has waves. I’m going to pioneer the use of dirtclods, I think. Just you wait, it’ll be in our vernacular soon…