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Blogs » Archive for November, 2006
Not the Perfect Time Tracking Tool
The last post received some very interesting comments, and even a few mentions of specific time tracking systems that our readers use. As a process and methodology fanatic, I’m always interested in any tools that can help me to be more efficient – especially if they are related to time management.
Personally, I’ve only had success with two time tracking systems. The first was Microsoft Excel, which means we didn’t really use a ‘system’ at all. Instead, we had a standard spreadsheet form that each employee would complete and submit every Friday. This crude system worked well because it was flexible, easy, and required no maintenance or training. Unfortunately, it still required an administrator to manually process each timesheet as we created client invoices and prepared payroll for the developers. So, the ‘manual’ process of time tracking could be described as low risk and very effective, but cumbersome.
For the last few years, we’ve been using the QuickBooks timer system. The QuickBooks timer is a small time tracking application that comes bundled with QuickBooks, and it’s far from the ‘perfect’ solution. It’s a standalone application, requiring every employee to install the software. To make things even more cumbersome, the Customer/Job list needs …
Sql Server Full-Text Search Protips Part 1: Setup
Full-Text search is fun and easy! And the first step to getting there is to configure Full-Text search in your Sql Server Database.
Where Does Your Time Go?
Over the past few years I’ve noticed an alarming trend - many web developers don’t track their time effectively. Of course there are lots of experienced web designers and programmers who are terrific at logging and tracking their activities. But a surprising percentage track their time using incomplete or inaccurate methods, or don’t track their time at all.
Why is this so important? The answer is simple. If you can track your time effectively, you can measure your profits effectively. After all, your biggest asset as a human being is your time, and you have made a decision to use that time to generate money. If you had a job, you’d be ‘trading’ your time for a pre-determined amount of money. However, your decision to go into business for yourself means that there’s really no limit to how much profit you can make in a single hour. Why not measure this ‘hourly profit’ and make sure that it’s increasing as your business grows?
Even if you already know your hourly rate, it’s very useful to understand how much you profited on each particular project. By tracking your time and expenses carefully, you can determine the actual profits after marketing and operational …
How Deep are your Defenses?
So, you have built your secured web application. You have enabled ASP.NET’s handy authentication and authorization features. But have you done enough? No, not at all. What happens if you forget to deploy the web.config controlling access to the application’s administrative folder? Or if an attacker gains access to the box by exploting your database and references your business logic layers? Or if an attacker finds a SQL injection and starts writing directly to the database? In many cases, the short answer is “bad things” oftentimes leading to unemployment.
HTML’s Uncertain Future
The following is republished from the Tech Times #152.
What would you change if you were in charge of the next version of HTML? Would you add new tags for things that you need to mark up in your documents? Would you remove tags that you never use? What makes a good HTML tag, and how do you accommodate specific needs that don’t justify adding tags to HTML?
All of these questions have been asked and answered by members of the W3C, but not all of the answers have stood the test of time. In a landmark blog post late last month, W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee acknowledged that XHTML has failed to deliver on the promise of well-formed, extensible markup, mainly because browsers continued to process good old “tag soup” HTML without complaint.
As a result of this, he announced that the W3C would revise its approach to HTML, starting with a new working group to resume development of the long-abandoned HTML specification. This group will add new features to HTML and XHTML in parallel, operating independently from continued efforts to develop the next version of XHTML.
If we can expect one thing to come out of this, it’s a range of new W3C-endorsed …
News Wire: The Future of HTML and IE
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Pyjamas: Pythons answer to GWT
Just as the Google Web Toolkit lets you write JavaScript-powered web UIs by writing Java code, Pyjamas lets you write JavaScript-powered web UIs by writing Python code. Still early days for this framework, but worth a look if you’re into Python.
(tags: python javascript) -
moo.fx 2.0: a whole new mooing
I was afraid the moo.fx JavaScript effects library’s ultra-lightweight days were behind it now that the full mootools library is out, but moo.fx 2.0 is now out and it’s still tiny! Includes versions that rely on mootools and Prototype Lite.
(tags: javascript) -
Adobe Press Room: For immediate release
Adobe has announced it will contribute to the Mozilla project a large body of source code that is used in Flash Player 9’s new ActionScript™ virtual machine. Dubbed the Tamarin project, this code will support ECMAScript 4 in future Mozilla browsers.
(tags: javascript opensource flash firefox) -
PHP configuration statistics
Damien Seguy has compiled statistics about PHP configurations by gathering the output of the php_info() function from 11,000 sites. Some quick stats: register_globals enabled on 57% of sites; magic_quotes_gpc enabled on 76%; display_errors enabled on 80%.
(tags: php security) -
Refining Data Tables
A nice discussion of the available interface design patterns for presenting large tables of data with filtering/sorting features. …
Welcome to the Web Pro Business Blog
Hello and welcome to a new chapter in Sitepoint’s ‘Down to Business’ blog! I’d like to thank Simon and the whole SitePoint staff for giving me the opportunity to participate in such a useful and widely read blog. I’m very excited to interact with the SitePoint community on a new level, and will do my best to make this blog as informative and interesting as possible.
I’d also like to recognize Andrew Neitlich for his outstanding effort as SitePoint’s business blogger over the last two years. Like many of you, I’ve applied the sales and marketing lessons I learned from Andrew and my business has increased its revenues dramatically as a result. I’ll certainly be watching to see what Andrew does next!
A bit about me: I’m a life-long computer enthusiast who was born around the same time as the Internet (the Arpanet, more accurately). In 1985 I went professional as a support and repair technician for PC’s and Macs at a Computerland retail store. I later entered the software world, developing large applications for businesses, movie studios, start-ups and governments. I continue to work as a process and methodology consultant to Fortune 50 and government clients, but my main focus is …
This is just wrong…
Messing around with gscloud.pl against the webtuesday access logs and noticed a surprising number of referrals from Google for searches like 14th November - the 9th result takes you to to here! (I’m not logged out from Google so I assume these aren’t somehow weighted by my search history)
Exploring further…
- Search: 16th May - 7th result to here.
- Search: 13th June - 3rd result to here
- Search: 11th July - 13th result to here
- Search: 8th August - 6th result to here
- Search: 12th September - 13th result to here (just think if we’d held it one day earlier…)
- Search: 10th October - 5th result to here
- Search: 12th December - 10th result to here
- Search: 9th January - 6th result to here
That last meeting on the 9th Jan 2007 has yet to happen, was only created just over 2 weeks ago and has had no signficant external linking-to, other than upcoming.
Here’s a snippet of webtuesday access log analysis (thanks to visitors);
* Number of unique visitors: 1492
* Different days in logfile: 6
29/Oct/2006: 224 |################################## 15.0%
30/Oct/2006: 243 |##################################### …
News Wire: Microsoft to Tackle PHP
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Feeling validated
The W3C recently removed the ability to view the document outline (including heading structure) from its HTML validator. It turns out this useful feature is now available as a part of the little-known semantic data extractor tool, also from the W3C.
(tags: html standards) -
NetBeans 5.5 has been released
Sun’s open source Java IDE gets better with every version, and this release includes major speed improvements, a preview of the NetBeans Visual Web Pack (basically Java Studio Creator bundled as a NetBeans plugin), and a lot more!
(tags: java opensource) -
Real-Time 3D in Javascript
A slick demo of just how far you can push JavaScript and CSS to produce dynamic graphics. By using the corners of CSS borders to produce colored triangles, this demo renders a spinning 3D object using nothing but HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
(tags: javascript css) -
Designing for Dyslexics: Part 2 of 3
Mel Pedley explains that the current WCAG recommendation does not take dyslexia into account in its treatment of contrast. Consequently, she recommends offering a style sheet with non-compliant contrast ratios to increase your site’s accessibility.
(tags: accessibility design) -
Firefox 2 vs IE 7
With Firefox 2 out, Zimbra has updated its recent JavaScript performance test results. In short, the difference between Firefox 1.5 and …
Gone Phishing
Although this isn’t strictly a web development topic, it’s at least an interesting quirk about the way domains work that many may not know — we certainly didn’t till today, so it’s probably worth bringing to attention.
Today I received another eBay phishing scam. This is nothing new in itself — like most people I’ve received dozens over the last year — but this one was a little different. Generally the URLs embedded in phishing emails are quite obviously dodgy as they clearly begin with an IP number. However, as you can see above, the URL looked more reasonable than most.
I’m listing the real IPs here for reference but I’ve disabled the links as they are obviously controlled by shady characters, so we don’t recommend you visit them.
To my surprise the ‘http://3281702273′ part was a viable IP.
Now I’d personally never seen anything like this before, but as I’m no DNS expert so that’s no big deal there. However after tossing the URL around the office I found no-one else seemed to have seen anything similar either.
Kevin did a little trial and error and figured out how it works. The number ‘3281702273′ is a …
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