dev|sushi » miscellaneous

Web Apps, Future, whatever

Adam — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 20:11:16 +0000

Well I have another strong point to add to my list (which I haven’t written down anywhere yet) of reasons why Web Applications are the best way to go for the future. You can’t trust software these days given the maliciousness of “Black Hat” developers and scammers. We just got the reports about a new threat that infects windows with a rootkit and DNS redirector by way of a porn viewer install. It has propagated wildly due to the thirst for free porn of todays Internet user base. The obvious intent is to redirect your traffic to certain website that will generate $$ for the scammer (specifically “OMG YOUR INFECTED! Buy this virus scanner.”).

Web applications are now very functional, don’t require any installation and pose no security risk to your computer. I would rest my case but I can’t imagine everyone is satisfied with this argument since I haven’t provided the rest of the list. Maybe I’ll get on that, or better yet I’ll turn it into a S5 slide show for whatever random conference I go to next. Yaay presenter benefits!

Please watch out for those porn installers, I don’t want to have to come fix your computer again; this time it is going to cost you.

Post-October New Theme

Adam — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:31:55 +0000

October has come and gone and so down must come the Pink for October theme. I’ve been working on this theme in my spare hours but overall I really like it. Nothing revolutionary, no JavaScript, one Internet Explorer 6- CSS file (gif replacement for the transparent png logo) and yet its a great leap forward for me. This design was the first one I did using Photoshop to design the initial layout and look. I don’t know if the end result shows it but I was able to forget about the limitations of CSS and XHTML and really have fun. I think that future designs will translate better from Photoshop to CSS/XHTML but overall I am happy.

I have decided to continue supporting cancer on this site by including links to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation and the Canadian Cancer Society in the footer.

Pink for October

Adam — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 06:00:38 +0000

I am planning on doing a quick redesign for the month of October to support breast cancer awareness month. If you are interested in participating check it out. If instead you wish to donate money to the cause make sure to buy a few ribbons, bracelets or any other supporting product. Most importantly get the word out that checking for breast cancer is simple and should be done by all women, get a mammogram.

Code Control Freaks vs Magic

Adam — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 19:46:32 +0000

I am a code control freak. If I don’t understand every aspect of how something works I can’t get comfortable using it. I don’t know a lot of programmers so I don’t know how common this is in the community. At work I program in ASP.Net using Visual Studio 2005, however, I only use it as a text editor (for the syntax highlighting and intellisense). I am not comfortable with the web project front-end since there is way too much magic going on in there. I don’t want to click a button and have the software generate a bunch of web pages, change some configuration settings and update the database. “Why?” you ask; because what if something goes wrong? I would have no idea how my own application actually works or where to begin looking for bugs. If you surf in a couple ASP.Net forums you will see a lot of users posing questions that show a definite lack of understand about how things work.

Magic in programming is nothing new, every time you use a library you are expecting it to perform the job correctly. You don’t know how it does this and if it fails you don’t know how to fix it. Don’t get me wrong, I love libraries and believe they make our lives thousands of times easier. I do, however, promote the idea of understanding everything possible about a system before turning it loose in a production environment. We’ve all been bitten by the devil in the details, guaranteed.

Today it seems that frameworks are becoming the way of the future for web development. The complexity of reliable cross-browser JavaScript has made it near impossible too know enough to write your own robust AJAX application so prototype and script.aculo.us just make sense. Ruby on Rails is the framework that seems to be the run away favourite with certain groups and is constantly being mentioned on digg, slashdot and others. Recently I have been looking into learning symfony a PHP Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework.

Frameworks utilize magic very heavily as I have come to learn in the last week. When you create a new project using symfony you first create a directory for it on your web server then you run three commands. The first generates the project, the second generates the application and the third generates a module within the application. Each command generates a host of directories and files auto-magically. This is where my comfort level drops to zero. Once I learn a bit more about how everything works and what files do what, when I will gain some comfort but currently it looks insurmountable.