MailDart(tm) is our easy-to-use newsletter system that lets you create effective and efficient e-mail campaigns. It’s our latest thing, and we think you’ll love it!

Today, we sent out a message to everyone on our email list (yes, we use MailDart ourselves) introducing the new service. A copy of that message is available right here. Here are the highlights:

Top 5 Reasons MailDart Rocks:

1. It gets results! (We know because we use it!)
2. It’s a pay-as-you-go system. There are no monthly fees.
3. No stock templates necessary. We create an email template that looks like YOU.
4. MailDart is fantastically easy to use.
5. Advanced reporting features give you the information you need to fine-tune your campaigns based on viewer feedback.

“MailDart is a great product. The reports allow me to make smart decisions about what I send my customers and the interface is easy to learn and use.” - Derek Cabrera, ThinkWorks

So head on over here for more information, or over here to contact us!

You probably didn’t know this, but this week is Ithaca’s Downtown Office Worker Appreciation Week. One of the many perks of working downtown! I just finished some tasty free pizza!

When I saw the list of activities planned for this week, I admit I got pretty excited when I found out one of them was a Hot Dog Eating Competition!! Now, anyone who plays Ithaca Ultimate Frisbee and Soccer with me, knows I am pretty competitive. Perhaps another lesser known fact is that I like to eat, and I always eat quickly. A perfect opportunity to combine both skills? Let’s put it this way, having never done this before, I couldn’t resist! (Insert a plethora of ‘gross’ & ‘yucks’ from friends who I told this to).

Knowing this competition was only going to be 2 minutes, I wasn’t going to go all out. Training for something like the famous Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Competition takes months of stomach stretching and technique-building. Think about it, 59 hot dogs in 10 minutes! Yea…

But if you are competitive, you want to win, so I trained (for 2 days). My diet for these 2 days existed solely of the cheapest hot dogs you can find, with a complement of water-soaked hot dog buns, and my friend (thanks Jesse!) worked with me on my technique. It certainly paid off….

Yesterday it was time for the competition! Dowtown office workers gathered around to see this spectacle. 18 competitors. I was happy that I was able to tie my training record at 4 hot dogs! I was beat only by a guy from Collegetown Bagels, who got 5 down and my friend who managed to get down 6 1/2 hot dogs in that time. He was a good trainer!

I felt I had pretty good showing at 3rd place. Plus it was free publicity (not to mention a free lunch!) I am getting quite a few strange looks walking around the Commons and “aren’t you the girl that ate 4 hot dogs in 2 minutes?” Why yes, that is me. Could I be the top female competitive eater in Ithaca? Maybe!

If you want to see more, The Ithaca Journal did a front-page article about the heated competition and if you watch the video (credit News 10 Now) you will see AWP and me represented in a, err, less than flattering way. But, it sure was fun! Go AWP!

I’m one of the minority of meat-eaters here at AWP, and even then, I don’t eat a lot of meat (thanks a lot, Omnivore’s Dilemma), and we’re always on the lookout for places that serve up a good dose of ethically treated, naturally grazed animal slices. It’s kind of a treat when Mel and I do get some.

For the past few weeks at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market, we’ve noticed a new stand with a delicious-sounding name: The Piggery.  I like Pig (meat) and I like locally-raised food, so I knew we had to check it out.

Anyway, we made our first purchase there on Sunday: two pounds of tenderloin and a couple of bratwurst.  Last night, we rubbed the tenderloin in salt and fresh cracked pepper and tossed it on the grill.  Man, was it amazing.  The Piggery raises some good pig.  I’m sure it helps that they treat them well, and that they eat pumpkins. The meat was tender and naturally juicy, without any hit of that spongy texture that most store-bought tenderloin has.  The flavor was stronger and fuller than store-bought stuff as well.

So if you dig on pig and live near Ithaca, you should check it out.  I’m hooked.

We love coffee.  It drives us.  It keeps us going through those long, grey days and those too-bright early mornings.  We also love Gimme! Coffee, our local roaster and snooty-delicious provider of the bean.

One of the many perks that comes with working here at AWP is free coffee.  And not just any coffee, we get free Gimme.

That is until we decided to experiment and try out another, Ithaca-based coffee roaster.  You know, for fun.

Well, we paid for that.  Our alternate, unnamed roaster’s coffee tasted like sweet dirt.  Or acid.  We couldn’t decide.  Maybe if a hobo decided to eat sun-baked dirt all day, and then we made him throw up after drinking too many shots of Green Apple Puckers, the resulting hot stew would be akin to what we had just purchased 10 pounds of.

Dammit.

Well, after courageously drinking as much of that swill as possible (with lots and lots of cream), we finally hit the new month, and could go back to our regular provider of coffee: our sweet, sweet Gimme.  Forgive us baby, please.  We didn’t know.

It all serves to illustrate an important point: never try anything new.

I’ve been wrangling with the Cake’s Security Component for the past day, not having the best time with it. If you’ve been trying to use it, you may have noticed that there seems to be near-total lack of documentation on it. Not cool.

So I was trying to use it to make some simple HTTP Authentication requests for a WebTree site of ours. It turns out that whenever the Security Component is initialized in a controller, it requires that all POST-ed data in that controller be validated through the Security Component. For this to work correctly, and not spit you out into a blank page “black hole,” you have to use the Form Helper for every form that needs to be submitted, making sure to use $form->end().

It looks like the Form Helper builds a Hash number based on the name of the fields included in the form and the Security Salt that you set in the config/core.php.

When the form is submitted, a function, __validatePost(), runs automatically, there is currently no way to turn it off, and tries to make the same hash value as all the fields present in the Controller’s $data variable. If the two hash values are the same, we know that no extra data is being submitted directly to the controller, and we proceed with the normal course of things. If they don’t match, we trigger the Black Hole callback function, and go down that route.

Except that in the current RC2 release (7296), there is a bug in the Security Component that will ensure that these two hashes will never be equal.

The problem is in line 662 of /cake/libs/controller/components/security.php:

$check = md5(urlencode(Security::hash(serialize($field) . Configure::read('Security.salt'))));

Should be:

$check = urlencode(Security::hash(serialize($field) . Configure::read('Security.salt')));

Take out the md5() function. Form Helper’s security function that generates the form’s hash value does not include the extra md5 hashing function. It looks like this was fixed in the nightly build.

This will alleviate some of your potential issues using the Security Component. However, if you just want to use some aspects of the component, such as HTTP Auth, there is no way to disable the POST validation, much to my chagrin. Maybe it will change in the future.