Moblog - Software

Five New IT books: A To-Do List

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:35:59 +0100

I regularly browse through the list of new acquisitions of our university's library. Turns out there are a few interesting new books to read!
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10 Quick Tips for (Web) Interface Design

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:26:58 +0100

Dmitry Fadeyev from Smashing Magazine has posted some useful tips for (mostly Web related) interface design.

Projekte, Strukturen und Herzblutenergie

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:40:25 +0100

Auszüge aus dem Artikel Projekte, Strukturen und Herzblutenergie von Gunter Dueck, IBM Distinguished Engineer, aus der aktuellen "Informatik Spektrum" Dezember 2008:

QUOTE:

Wer beginnt heute einfach mal so ein Projekt - aus unternehmerischer Lust? Das kann sich vielleicht ein mittelständischer Unternehmer leisten, der das Sagen hat und das eigene Geld gibt und dazu noch alles gut selbst überschauen kann. (...) Wer aber blickt bei großen Projekten noch durch? Etwas Neues muss überall genehmigt werden. Jeder sagt etwas dazu. Stellen Sie sich vor, Sie haben eine große Idee und besitzen nicht zufällig die Firma oder die Unversität selbst. Sie können das Projekt nicht stemmen, Ihr Chef auch nicht, dessen Chef ebenfalls nicht. Keiner will eine neue Baustelle aufmachen.

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The Music Room

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:39:00 +0100

A 3D world, filled with music coming from different sources, blended together in surround sound (5.1/7.1). Similar music is closer together (for example, based on last.fm information). You can freely move around, with distant sources fading out, until you only hear the closest source (standing "inside" it).
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Eliminate Form Spam Using Behavioural Analysis and Individual Forms

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:00:52 +0100

Do you really need CAPTCHAs?

Spam bots are so effective today mostly because there's only a handful of different publishing software used (forum, blog, CMS). This is very convenient, because all information required to write and tweak a bot is identical for all installations. All the bot software has to do is query Google for parts of a particular URL (eg. inurl:yabb.pl or inurl:phpbb/posting.php) and continue with algorithms to circumvent the specific protection (if any).
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Five Good Programming Habits in PHP

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:31:52 +0100

QUOTE:

Just like any language, developers can write code in PHP that ranges in quality from truly awful to very good. Learn good programming habits that can help you bridge the productivity gap.

Depending on whom you ask, the difference between a good developer and an excellent developer, in terms of productivity, is a factor of 10 to 20. An excellent developer is more productive because of his experience and good habits. When poor programming habits sneak into your code, they're a drain on productivity. This article demonstrates some good programming habits that can make you a better programmer.

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Croudsourcing Bugs

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:21:56 +0100

uTest, a new startup, pays users for harvesting bugs in products.

What Sun Should Do

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:30:24 +0100

Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun, wrote an interesting article about the company future, from his point of view. His main statements: Focus on web technologies (you probably guessed that) and give the Java Community Process (JCP) to the community in full.
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Swype Gesture Keyboard Input for Mobile Devices

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 15:09:52 +0100

There are so many inventions these days, it's easy to miss one. I've seen Swype logos, but didn't bother to look closer at this gesture based keyboard input software. Watch this demo, it's impressive!
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Business Opportunity: P2P Video plugin for Firefox

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 02:26:55 +0100

Idea: Build an extension for Firefox that supports all popular (and upcoming) peer-to-peer video streaming engines.

Eclipse Riena

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:34:37 +0100

QUOTE:

"The Riena platform will be the foundation for building multi-tier enterprise client/server applications. As such Riena will broaden the usage of the service oriented architecture of OSGi/Equinox by providing access to local and remote services in a transparent way. Using this uniform programming model, the components of Riena and the business components of the enterprise application can be developed regardless of their target location. Components are later easily placed on client or server depending on the business requirements."

Protect your own websites against CSRF attacks

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:20:18 +0100

Jeff Atwood explains an easy "double-submitted cookie" technique to prevent Cross-Site Request Forgeries on own websites.

Observing Requirements

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 22:16:30 +0100

Martin Fowler suggests to gather (new) requirements by analyzing user behavior within the application/web site.

QUOTE:

Everyone knows how big the difference is between what people say they want and what people actually need and use. By watching what people actually do with your application, you can find out what actually happens with the software - which can give you much more direct information than other sources. As a result I think more teams should consider adding this approach to their toolkit.

Windows 7: The "All New" Toolbar?

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:48:58 +0100

On the Windows 7 development blog, you can find an introduction to the new Windows 7 toolbar. Judge for yourself.
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Croudsourcing for Localization

nospam@example.com (Mo) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:32:50 +0100

Crowdsourcing seems to be the new future. The Microsoft internationalization team is currently testing "collaborative translation", where visitors aid to improve machine translated content. They're also working on CLIP, a small utility that shows a local translation within the tooltip of a caption.
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