We all hate spam. Doesn't matter if it's an email from the Nigerian prince or gazillions of comments posted to your website by bots offering famous blue pill. On my personal website, I deal with it using the Drupal Honeypot package. It worked quite well, but still it was introducing bit of administrative headache. (Hence I recently switched all comments to Disqus).

While working on an expres.js powered website, I noticed there are plenty of SPAM fighting tools available for PHP, but very few for my favourite platform of choice - node.js.

This has bitten me hard on one of the express.js powered websites I worked on - pretty much as soon as we deployed it live and made adding new text content available to unauthenticated users (good luck with that!), we noticed wave of SPAM.

So in order to mitigate this, I've created a small npm package powered by great API from https://www.projecthoneypot.org/

Introducing:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/honeypot

Let me know if you find it useful. Docs are available on the npm and in the related github repo: https://github.com/rochal/honeypot

Conway's Game of Life is an example of cellular automation created by British mathematican John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a very specific type of game as it does not involve any players. Game 'plays itself' using the environment configuration that was set up earlier.

For some reason I found the idea of a game that plays itself very interesing, so.. I decided to implement it in JavaScript. (Because everything should be implemented in JavaScript one day, right?)

HTML5 video pixel manipulation
Original	Transformed
Mode:

(Example above tested in Chrome 17, Firefox 10 and Safari 5)

Recently, there has been a lot of hype about the HTML5 video. No wonder why - Google thinks the format is hot enough it is worth encoding thousads of the YouTube videos as webm and make them available through new HTML5 version of youtube: http://www.youtube.com/html5.

JavaScript bitwise operators are one of these features of JavaScript that we always forget about. It seems like we assume there is no good use for them in a client-side code. Why would we care about ones and zeros if we're not using binary? Why would we ever care for binary AND, OR, XOR or left/right shift?

I am not going to explain how these operators are affecting binary numbers because there are plenty of resources available covering this topic.

Instead, in a series of articles, I will focus on a practical use for few of them showing how to make your JavaScript code faster, more compact and unfortunately often less readable.

Background

On September 27th I attended cool JavaScript meetup in Brighton called asyncjs. During two sessions (unfortunately I missed the first one so I had loads of catching-up to do) we built an amazing JavaScript Jungle / JavaScript environment.

We were asked to fill this environment with jungle creatures that respond to the occurring changes - sun, rain, time of the day and so on. Creatures could move around, eat grass or even eat each other.

Entire environment was created using jQuery and we were also allowed to use HTML5 canvas support libraries such as paper.js and raphael.js. In addition to that, we used fantastic little library called broadcast.js to create event-driven environment for our jungle.

While working on my slimScroll plugin I noticed something very weird in the newest release of Firefox - I was unable to set border-radius CSS property from within the JavaScript.

I created a demo page so you can check how the code in question is behaving in your browser.

I used this HTML to test my theory:

What is slimScroll?

slimScroll is a small (4.6KB) jQuery plugin that transforms any div into a scrollable area with a nice scrollbar - similar to the one Facebook and Google started using in their products recently. slimScroll doesn't occupy any visual space as it only appears on a user initiated mouse-over. User can drag the scrollbar or use mouse-wheel to change the scroll value.

Download

You can download latest stable version from here: slimScroll download.

Or simply use npm:

npm install jquery-slimscroll