The user

As developers, we have to consider users all the time. How easy it is for a user to do something. Designers and Information Architects have to at the base of it (if they are missing these, well, they should be doing it) and all of these can be discovered by proper testing. But a developer has to consider a little bit more what bugs may cause a security risk, make the site a den of iniquity or just how many users might use the site, and with which browser. Most do this by default, but I have been thinking of a list of what and who the user is (it isn’t flattering). So here goes. This is off the top of my head, so any more ideas would be interesting: Would you like to know more?

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Saving email

Generally if a client asks for an email on their website, I tend to ask whether its possible to just add an email form. In this day and age, to have an email address on a site, it doesn’t look too great. Email sending forms are easy to make, and, if the proper framework is in place, should be very fast.

However, sometimes, it just isn’t possible to convince them of this. So you end up having to add an email address, which eventually get picked up my mail bots, and spammed to death.
Would you like to know more?

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Avoid SQL Injections

Recently (the last 2 years or so) there has been an increasing number of reports of SQL injections. This affects all databases and is very simple to do. In fact, being one of the good guys, I still get tempted to try it out, it’s that simple.

The idea is to change a SQL statement to be whatever you want it to be, including being able to get data, delete it, even drop a table with all the data in it! Here’s an example below: Would you like to know more?

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I love, I love Typography

OK, thought it was about time I mentioned the I love typography site, after discovering it a couple of months ago I’ve been popping back for more and more of its goodness. As you can guess its a site all about typography, a collection of well written articles discussing everything about the subject, like ‘15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography‘, interviews and much more.

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Kuler like no other

I came across kuler a few weeks ago and have been using it loads. It’s an Adobe site that helps you pick colour combinations. You can either create your own by entering the Hex number of your colour then dragging the handles about in the tool or using the slider bars. Alternatively you can search for other people’s uploaded colour rated combinations. This is a great tool to aid you whilst choosing your colour palette.

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What can you do with bytes?

New in Actionscript 3 is the ability to work with binary data i.e access data on the byte level. This enables us to do all sorts of funky things that previously hasn’t been possible in Flash. Like on-the-fly image compression (see Adobe CoreLib’s Jpg & Png encoders), creating pdf’s (AlivePDF) , compress and zip files (ASZip) and work with audio data on the very lowest level (Andre Michelle) and very possibly much more..

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Minority Wii-port

..no sooner do I despair, then someone goes and does something like this and my hope for humanity is bolstered.. What can I say? It’s an emotional rollercoaster.

If you’ve an interest in sci-fi/Tom Cruise/Space Clams/Human-Computer-Interaction you may recall the computer interface used in the movie Minority Report - using your hands and gestures in the air to interact with data objects. Since then, there have been plenty of MIT-type projects recreating this type of interface on fancy custom hardware. Now a bright spark has figured out a way to do this on something much cheaper - Would you like to know more?

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Ingenious Spam

The human capacity for mis-appropriating/mis-directing genius never ceases to amaze me.. all too often schemes unfortunately used to cheat people out of something or generally make the world a worse place, rather than using this ingenuity and talent to do something good.

Now comes a story about a spam Trojan that entices users to play a simple game in order to disrobe a lady on-screen. As you’d expect, there are no shortage of takers out there. Except what players are actually helping to do is allow some nefarious parties to crack “captchas” (the challenge-response systems used to try to ensure that the user on the other end is a human being and not an automated system), the game being that the user is identifying the displayed symbols and thus helping spammers to overcome these protection systems and register for e-mail accounts etc. en masse, which they would otherwise be unable to do.

Clever, eh? :/

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“Making Hearable” - The New Copyright Crime

We’ve seen people being found guilty of “Making Available” songs on P2P. Now the UK’s Performing Rights Society - they who collect royalties for songwriters and publishers - have come up with a new copyright infringement term: “Making Hearable”.

Would you like to know more?

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The C# null coalescing operator

I’ve just discovered something I wish I had discovered 3 years ago, oh well.

Working similar to a ternary operator. This allows the developer to check whether a value is null, and if it is, giving it another value. Ok, very simple to do anyway usually, but so much nice this way:

string text = "Hello World";
text = text ?? "value was null";


The outcome here will be that text is “Hello World”

string text = null;
text = text ?? "value was null";


The outcome here will be that text is now “value was null”.

And that’s it, simple but effective.

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