Web Dev Ireland

For the last couple of week I have been so busy I didn’t even have time to blog.
Work is really busy and I’m spending a lot of time using SQL server and Transact SQL. Some of it is very interesting, especially the object oriented database concepts.

At home I have been working with Joomla, for those of you that are familiar with Mambo. This is mambo but the Open Source developers had a disagreement about the direction that Miro are taking the project. So off they went to start Joomla and I have to admit I’m very happy with it. I spent most of the weekend creating a template and getting to know the API, I like it.
Try it if you need a content management system.

I remember doing research for an assignment in college back in 1999 and I stumbled across a research company called Cambridge Technology and they were looking into holographic storage using lasers to put information onto an optical cube.
The idea as I understood it was if you had lasers(two or more) put information into a 3d shape they could store huge amounts of info in the tiny cube because they were working in three dimensions you had a huge amount of space to put the information i.e you not only had a flat surface to put your data on you also had the depth of the cube to put data into.
The researchers very optimistic about the technology because it would give speed comparable to RAM but it would be non-volatile (i.e. if you turn the power off the data is not lost) and have massive storage capacity. I thought this was amazing and so “futuristic”, well it turns out the future is here people!

The Register has an article today on holograpic disks with Maxell already announcing a 300gb holographic storage system to be launched next year. This is only the start of the holograpic disk, with disks upto 1.6Tb!!!(yes thats Terra-bytes) envisioned by Maxell. Data transfer will start at 20Mbs and rise to 120Mbs (thats plenty to play even the most hi-def films).

Other companys, such as toshiba have put their money into a format with the catchy name HVD - Holographic Versatile Disc. This will be a standard DVD/CD sized disk with staggering specs (1Tb storage with 1GBs throughput) .

I’m glad to see this technology finally come to fruition.

In my current job I spend quite a bit of time moving between client sites where I don’t always have admin access on the PC’s I use. I refuse pointblank to use Internet Explorer if I am to use the machine for more then a day. Luckily Firefox doesn’t need admin rights to install as all it does is unpack itself to a folder and doesn’t need registery entries to operate. So I can use FF all the time, woohoo .

The only problem is that to install the Flash plugin you do need admin rights, sigh.
I don’t really mind not having flash installed, but what does get on my nerves is that little yellow dropdown that reminds you that it’s not installed everytime you access a page with flash on it (which is quite a few in this ad driven age).

additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page

Now this is great for a lot of newbies i’m sure but it’s not something I like to see, especially when I have no way to install the plugin.

So here is how to disable this message

1. Type about:config in the address bar
2. Search for plugin.default_plugin_disabled by typing it into the filter text box.
3. Set the value to false by double-clicking on the text (or you can right click on the line and click toggle)
4. Restart Firefox

I hope this helps someone else besides me.

According to wired.com they have categorised the 10 worst software bugs in History. I quiet like their explanation of how the word “bug” became the defacto description of a flaw in a computer program. I’m not sure if it’s true or not but I like it none the less.

a club that began in 1947 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer’s logbook with the words: “first actual case of a bug being found.

Certain bugs come to mind as being particulary bad, the therac-25 X-ray machince that gave six people lethal doses of radiation is a pretty good reason not to ever get x-rayed again. :p

Read the article on wired.com

It’s worth a few minutes of your day.

mozillaZine announced that the long awaited Firefox 1.5 Release candidate will be available October 28th!
For those of you that do not know what a relsease candidate is I shall explain, A release candidate is simply the last pre-release version of a piece of software to go for testing (usually more common in the Open Source Community) and by testing that means just simply to make sure that all the bugs have been fixed an the software is stable. Before a Pre-release a beta (or 2) is released, these are usually largely stable(i.e don’t crash every minute) but need the bugs Ironed out.

The Release notes state that the biggest additions to the new version are

- Improvements to automated update system.
- Improvements to Web site rendering and performance.
- Several security fixes.
- Bug Fixes

The automated update system is a huge feature, which will allow patches to be much smaller so the entire firefox binary doesn’t have to be downloaded everytime.

I will try and get a full list of the new features and post it later.

edit:

additional features

- SVG
- Fastback - which is memory caching of previously visited pages i.e your back/forward button
- Ability to group tabs and drag tabs(which I always wanted )
- One click removal of cookies, history and temporary internet files

SVG graphics are cool. They will basically be an XML based W3C compliant version of macromedia flash.

Finally they have me doing some real work. Thats why I have not being posting so much recently. I will make a dedicated effort to post more I promise :p .

So anyway this is what I’m doing:

Unit testing and Regression testing a very large website. It’s interesting to see how much effort goes into a large enterprise web portal with a huge backend!

I’m doing all this using HTTPUnit and JUnit. Which are based on Java, which I don’t know too well. I’m having to learn very quickly.

I posted about this on boards.ie but thought I should put this up here too for all you firefox users.

Simple yet very effective buffer overflow bug vunerability found in FF 1.0.6(probably all 1.0.x) releases and Beta 1.5.

originally posted here

Technical Details:
The problem seems to be when a hostname which has all dashes causes the NormalizeIDN
call in nsStandardURL::BuildNormalizedSpec to return true, but is sets encHost to an
empty string. Meaning, Firefox appends 0 to approxLen and then appends the long
string of dashes to the buffer instead. The following HTML code below will reproduce
this issue:

A HREF=https:———————————————

I’m assuming that this is already being exploited since it would take all of 10 seconds to post a URL somewhere.

Mozilla have a fix/workaround

Yesterday eBay announced that they are going to pay $2.6 Billion for Skype. Thats a lot of cash!
Skype were the pioneers in the VoIP market giving away it’s Client for free to users so they could call each other on the internet with nothing more then a microphone and a set of speakers(mind the feedback loop ).
Google have entered the fray with their own IM and VoIP client called, suprise suprise. Google Talk.
Microsoft have also added VoIP functionality to their Instant Messenger

So now we have three of the biggest companies in the world vying to carry all our VoIP calls (and eventually all our telephone calls too). It should be interesting to see what happens over the next six months or so, expect back biting and masses of marketing.

It’s interesting to own a search engine and be able to place your self in all the target keyword top 10’s. (Try typing “talk”,”VoIP client” and “instant messenger” into Google)

Having seen recently that A List Apart has had a makeover, I came across a reference to the technology that the new version is built on at Zeldmans site. He was saying that the new version of A List Apart(which he is a key creator/contributor to) is now built with the open source web framework Ruby On Rails, having sparked my interest I decided to have a look at their website. I watched This Intro Movie (50mb /qt), it is a demonstration of a blog being built with Ruby on Rails. The guy builds the blog in 15 minutes! I can see this being an excellent way to create web applications very fast.
A list of realworld companies using Ruby on Rails can be found here, the list includes NASA, Motorola, HP, etc…

I was reading an article on the emerging web technology AJAX
AJAX is a muddle of XML and DHTML that could be used to feed new information to ticker-type elements of a webpage. However I can see it being abused instantly with the likes of rotating adverts, bandwidth sucked up without your knowledge! I’m not a big fan of it, not a big fan of JavaScript at all to be honest. Just as I was about to discount the technology and move on, in the comments I came across this very funny, yet true qoute

web technologies are the porn stars of our time. they look pretty and we ogle at their behaviour, but underneath they’re a mess and eventually succumb to viruses and droopy tits.