Google Apps, HFSExplorer, Ajax modal window

Hi,

I’ve recently upgraded to Google Apps for my site. It allows me to use Google Mail for my own personal site and I can use all the Google Documents, Spreadsheets and the rest of their free applications. I just had to modify my MX records for my site to point at Googles MX server(which takes a while to go through). Check it out if you’re a webmaster, I was previously using SquirrelMail so using Gmail is a massive improvement!

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions.html

Recently when I booted up into the Windows XP partition using bootcamp of the Intel Mac I’m using I needed to access the files on the Leopard OSX partition of the hard-drive. After looking around for a bit I found HFSExplorer which can read from a HFS partition(i.e. Mac OS filesystem) and copy from it if needed. It is read-only though which is a bit of a bummer but is open-source and worked pretty well when I used it.

I see that bots have cracked both Gmail and Hotmail Live’s captcha methods. Not only that but did it in 60 seconds, very impressive. Read about it here and more in depth here.

I’ve also been playing around with some Ajax stuff recently. I had to make a modal window that contains a form, the form set a session variable that is set just once for a user’s session. I looked around for a bit, tried a few samples and found Control Modal which is a pretty lightweight, easy to use Modal window Ajax API built on top of Prototype. Check out the demos and grab a version at the Control Modal site. Below is some code I wrote to place the form in the Modal window.

Select an option

Note: Took us ages to figure that onclick was the right Prototype JS event to fire the click event, we were previously using click() but it wasn’t working. So now when the page loads a dom loaded event is triggered which then goes and creates a click event on the modal_link_one id which creates the Ajax modal window.