Murtuza Topiwalla

DKNY BE DELICIOUS ART
*No purchase required
End date : 30th September

Prizes:
100 DKNY Be Delicious Art Body Lotions

Blah Blah:
Just submit your details for a chance to get DKNY Be Delicious Art Body Lotions. There are 100 pcs to be won so start submitting the names of all your family members now! hehe..no games, not at all difficult.

My take on it
Why not just submit your particulars and try to win something in the process. Not like you don’t have some bank agents calling you to sign up for insurance anyway.

Singapore Government Web Excellence Awards

*No purchase required
End date : 31st October

Prizes:
100winners of $100vouchers

Blah Blah:
Singapore government websites are up for you to rank right now!
Here you have a list of 66 websites set up to assist Singaporeans in various methods from Tax to Sex.

Voters can vote for their favorite websites for three award categories as follows:

• Most User-friendly
• Best Content
• Top e-Service

Be sure to vote as many times as you want as there are no limits to the number of votes you can place. But I am unsure if each vote is 1 entry.

My take on it
Spend sometime on it. The rules are long but easy to read and understand. I didn’t bother to go through the entire list. I think I just voted for my favourite sites and left. Did not bother spending much time on it.

Recently and a long time back, sometime in December 08 to be exact, I had the rare challenge of making HTTPS calls from a swf which did not sit on the same server. I faced quite a bunch of problems and I still do. But I do have some solutions which I have found on the internet from reliable sources, though not tried and tested, which may solve your issues should you come across this situation at any time.

The “allow-access-from” has an attribute called secure which very few people use.

Adobe says : 

secure

[HTTPS and Sockets only, optional] When false, allows an HTTPS policy file to grant access to a request coming from an HTTP source. The default for URL policy files is true, providing only HTTPS sources permission. Using false is not recommended. Socket policy files use a default of false.

So a sample would be

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM
"http://www.adobe.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">

<cross-domain-policy>
	<allow-access-from domain="*.somedomain.com" secure="false"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

The second option which I believe will never give you any problems is using a proxy. This works even when you cannot get a crossdomain file onto the server you are feeding from.

A sample PHP Proxy is as follows:

<?php
$dataURL = "http://www.sowebme.com/murtaza/feed/";
//note that this does not follow redirects.
readfile($dataURL);
?>