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Blogs » Archive for April, 2004
PGA 2003 Dynamic Cross Fading Image Loader Source
Todd Dominey has released an open source version of the ever popular dynamic cross fading image loader that was used on the 2003 PGA Championship site.
Using external JPGs and an easily configurable XML file to handle the filenames and directory structure, not to mention control over delay and image order why not take a look and see how it works for you.
Click Here to visit the site and download the source.
Win Prizes!
Roy Osherove: “SO here’s the deal. We hold a contest. It will be called “Most useful Add-in/macro for visual studio .Net” You send me your submissions (including code) and according to who wins, we give out some prizes.”
Get coding :)
Let’s Get Started
I’m delighted to have been selected to write this blog! Thank you Georgina and the Sitepoint staff for putting your trust in me.
My charge is to post about 3 blogs each week (along with one column each month). That’s a lot of writing. While I’m happy to write about issues that my current consulting clients face in marketing and selling IT services, or just talk about common marketing and selling issues, I’d prefer to respond directly to your issues and questions in this blog.
So, do you have a burning issue related to the business-end of running your web business? My expertise is especially on the marketing and sales side.
If so, either post a reply to any of the blogs in this section, or email me directly (with Sitepoint blog question in the subject heading) at andrewn@itprosuccess.com.
For instance, George has already written that when he started his business he didn’t have a clue about how much “painful administrative B/S” there would end up being.
He couldn’t be more correct. There’s bookkeeping/accounting, invoicing, proposal development, contracting with clients and (maybe) contractors and employees, benefits management, paying bills, and on and on.
There’s also marketing and sales, which should be your top priority, …
Welcome to Down to Business!
Welcome to Down to Business, SitePoint’s small Web business management blog.
We’re pleased to introduce Andrew Neitlich,who’ll report the latest tips, techniques, and industry developments as he helps you start, develop, and manage your small or freelance Web design or development business.
Check back to stay informed — if you’re serious about building your client list, portfolio, and financial stability, now’s the time to get Down to Business!
ZZ/OSS Installer
Interesting project over at http://www.zzoss.com/phpwiki/index.php/ZzossInstaller;
“ZZ/OSS Installer is a PHP-based installation wizard for professional release management of modular PHP applications.”
In essence it builds on what the PEAR package manager does to allow installation and management of complete applications - plenty of further info on the WIKI.
Certainly a good idea but, at the moment, I’m skeptical.
With the available releases, while playing “I’m a dumb user”, was unable to install the installer. Didn’t look to hard at where the problems were but a number of PHP “gotchas”, like allow_call_time_pass_reference (see here) reared their ugly head, which suggest the current releases are not ready for mass deployment.
More generally, writing installers for PHP, the installer itself also being PHP, is notoriously difficult. The PEAR Package Manager has been a long time in development and there are still issues on platforms like Win98. There’s also questions like “Do you feel secure?” having a tool like this exposed somewhere on your server (even if it is protected with some form of authentication).
Doubts aside, PHP lacks a solid application installer / manager and ZZ/OSS Installer is the first serious attempt I’ve seen at building one. With more user feedback, perhaps the current issues can be cleaned up and …
Open Source on OS X
When Apple released OS X, it served as a benchmark in bringing together the power of Unix with a cutting edge graphical user interface and desktop. With its support for Microsoft Office and interoperability with Windows, it is a wonder that OS X does not become the “killer desktop” the Linux world has been looking for. However, that is another discussion.
Apple joined the open source community by releasing the Unix underpinnings of OS X, Darwin, and enabling it to operate in an X11 environment (among numerous other open source projects Apple is working on - found here. This brought Linux and Unix (*nix) apps to the Macintosh somewhat like Cygwin has brought running X11 to Windows users. The main difference being the core kernel of OS X is a modified BSD Unix kernel, whereas Cygwin emulates a *nix environment atop the Windows kernel.
Fink has gone one step further by porting 3,583 *nix apps (as of this morning) to run within Fink on OS X. Fink can be found at Sourceforge. The platform can be installed one of two ways, either by compiling from source or via a convenient binary package (in the Debian Linux …
Send a Read Receipt through ColdFusion
…posted by davidjmedlock:
Here’s a nifty, and maybe even useful, little tidbit for using CFMAIL. Have you ever gotten an email in Outlook and seen a little popup window after you read it saying “The sender has requested a read receipt for this message. Would you like to send one now?” (Or something like that…) Well, the way that’s done is with mail headers and you can reproduce that in ColdFusion very easily:
This is a test for read receipts.
This works like a charm. It may even be possible to ask the recipient to send a read receipt to someone other than the seller. (I haven’t tried this just yet, but it should work, in theory, since it’s a header independent of the sender’s address…)
Enjoy! (And don’t send me any read receipts, I hate those things…)
PHP London Meetup
Via Markus, a new PHP group has just formed in London, UK - http://www.phplondon.org/ and are meeting up every Thursday at the Cambridge pub in Cambridge Circus, on the Charing Cross road (search for “Cambridge Circus” @ http://www.streetmap.co.uk/).
Good news if you’re in London - PHP is relatively popular in the UK but the PHP developer community lacks organisation compared to say Germany, France or across the water in New York.
Current members are Markus, Jon Ramsey (part of the WACT team among many other things) and Demian Turner (of PHPKitchen), which makes a very credible core. Many more showing interest here so if you’re in London…
[UPDATE] The meetings are monthly (first Thursday of the month), not weekly - the next one is on May 6th.
Javascript and Security
Dori Smith has a great entry on her Javascript Weblog about using Javascript to secure pages of her site. She argues that Javascript really isn’t the right tool for the job, and I completely agree with her. However, it is possible to yse Javascript to further improve the security of a server-side login system.
Unless you are using SSL, the chances are your site’s login system sends passwords in the clear. They may be embedded in a POST request but they are still fair game to sniffer programs such as Ettercap. While far from solving the problem entirely, you can reduce the impact of sniffing attacks by using Javascript to encrypt the user’s password before it is transmitted to your application. An evesdropper may be able to access your application using the data they have sniffed, but they won’t be able to access other applications that use the same password (most people use the same password all over the place).
But surely if the encryption is carried out by Javascript an attacker would be able to reverse engineer it and decrypt the password themselves? Not at all, thanks to the magic of one-way encryption algorithms - in particular, MD5.
MD5 is a one-way …
Updated CFUG tour
…posted by davidjmedlock:
Ben has a list of his upcoming appearances for this summer’s CFUG tour. He’ll be quite a busy guy over the next few months. You can catch this list at forta.com. Looks like the closest he’ll be to me is either Louisville KY or Atlanta, GA (both about 3 to 4 hours from here). Unfortunately, it’s looking like those dates may coincide with other events I have going on. Maybe I’ll be able to make it to one of them and report back here. We’ll have to see…
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