IBM’s open source Eclipse platform is an incredibly powerful development tool. Despite the fact that it’s a bit of a resource hog, the productivity gains I get from it are well worth it. Thanks to its open source license, there are an increasing number of excellent tools that let me work with anything from PHP to PovRay.
IBM does a pretty good job of soliciting input from the development community, and in many cases they respond well. But not today. (more…)
I was out with a friend last night and we got onto the subject of how it seemed difficult for smart people to take advantage of simple opportunities. I’ve both seen and been the guy who sees a market opportunity far ahead of the pack, moves quickly to seize the opportunity, but ultimately fails to make it.
The good news is that I’m developing a better understanding of why this happens and I’m going to tell all.
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I have always wanted to beat “phishers” at their own game. Briefly, a phishing scam creates a page that looks like a legitimate site, requesting user name and password information. The scammers send phony requests via electronic mail under a variety of pretenses, urging customers to follow the enclosed link. Instead of going to your bank or eBay or PayPal, the link goes to their rogue server that looks like a legitimate site and the information is logged there for subsequent criminal activity.
As a rule, if everyone who received a phising attempt (or a mortgage solicitation for that matter) took the time to follow the link, then input bogus data, then the scam / solicitation would instantly be rendered ineffective. The criminals would be faced with sorting through thousands of garbage records in order to locate the actual victims.
Unfortunately as a society, we’re don’t do all that well at things that benefit the “collective good”, so we’re stuck with scams in our mailboxes.
But AJAX changes that.
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Every once in a while organized crime gives me a call. It’s not that I’m so special, they just happen to know my phone number. The call comes in “Unknown number” which is a warning sign in itself. Then I’ve won a trip to Florida, Vegas, or wherever. Red flag. Press nine and you get a very happy and enthusiastic person who wants to give you a free trip, all you have to do is be a credit card holder.
Stop right there. These people are offering you great sounding (and nonexistent) stuff for the sole purpose of capturing your name and credit card number so they can rip you off. (more…)
This post is written for developers who use the PHP programming language. It provides a technique for catching a common class of typo by using the __call() __get() and __set() overloading methods. (more…)
If You Liked “The Secret” went live yesterday. Talk about a project that expands to exceed available resources, this was it.
The site is for people who liked the movie “The Secret”. It offers some of the classic titles in this field of thought, customized with a person’s name and downloaded in electronic format. It sounds like a good idea on its own, but it’s a surprisingly powerful moment when you open up a book and find it written for you. (more…)
As a developer of web sites, I’ve had experience with quite a few hosting providers over the years. Few of them have been much beyond “satisfactory”. After watching how Rochen managed the extraordinary demands of the Joomla community web site (www.joomla.org), and considering that they did this above and beyond the call of duty — as a sponsor Rochen sees no direct revenue from Joomla, I recently decided to open an account there.
The relationship is new, but so far it’s looking very, very good. (more…)
My McAfee anti-viral, anti-hack, anti-this, anti-that software service updated itself a little while back. Aside from an irritating attempt to assume control over some security functions that I use other tools for, it dropped in a pretty large set of generally reasonable functions to protect my system. Let me qualify that. That’s “generally reasonable” for Windows. For just about any other modern operating system, they’d be redundant or meaningless.
The problem is that even after disabling a lot of the new functionality, this update also did a fine job of reducing the overall performance of my machine by about 30 percent. The incredible load imposed by this class of “defensive software” is a direct result of major architectural flaws in Microsoft Windows.
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Those of us who do web development face a daunting task. Even with well defined web standards, every browser implementation has differing levels of compliance, bugs, and differences in interpretation that can make a site that looks great in one browser look awful, or even non-functional in another.
Then there’s Microsoft. Despite being a party to the development of many of these standards, they’re notorious for going their own way and for ignoring standards when it doesn’t suit them. The problem is that Internet Explorer is by far the most installed browser out there, so web site developers are left to accommodate their errors and arrogance. (more…)
I’ve been running a nifty little package called “phpGroupWare” for a few years now with great success. It’s got just about everything you would want in a groupware package: contact management, shared calendars, document storage and retrieval, e-mail, and much more.
This is a project that experienced an all too common event in open source: a fork. Some years ago, there was an argument on the future direction of the project. As I vaguely recall, it had something to do with licensing. I wasn’t around for the fireworks, but this tends to be a deeply philosophical issue and one of the most common reasons for OSS forks. (more…)
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