pf » Archives for January, 2006

Chris Shiflett, the author of Essential PHP Security posted a cool idea on his blog about secure forms. His idea was to have browsers show visually that a form action is secure (going to a HTTPS page). A good idea, I hope to see that implemented.

I noticed something new today on my Mac. When you download a file with Safari, the icon for the new file has a progress bar that updates as it downloads.

The Ruby programming language is getting a lot of interest these days, thanks to the Ruby on Rails framework developed by 37 Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson.

I've been working on a small piece of software that I plan on releasing with an open source license. There are so many licenses out there that I often forget what differentiates them. So I put together a small chart outlining some of the differences.

Every time I want to setup public key authentication over SSH, I have to look it up, and I've never found a simple guide, so here's mine.

Generate key on local machine

ssh-keygen -t rsa

It will ask you for a password but you can leave it blank.

I was delighted to find that connecting to a subversion repository on a remote server over SSH was quite easy on my Mac (windows may be another story).

Last week I was reading about the 5 Second Test. It's a usability test given to focus groups. You give the tester a goal, and then flash the page for 5 seconds. If the user can complete the goal the test passes.

I was surprised to find that my AJAX zip code example made it on digg today. I was wondering why I was getting so many blog comments today...

Anyways since I used ColdFusion in this example you will find some debate on ColdFusion in the comments on digg.

Ben Forta sent me a copy of his latest book: MySQL Crash Course a book based on his: Teach yourself SQL in 10 minutes book.

MySQL Crash Course is a concise guide (it's actually about the size of a novel, but 300 pages) to MySQL. I am a big fan of short and to the point books.

I had a comment asking about styling forms using CSS with the label tag in my last blog entry, so I thought I would write another post to show an example.

As a web user filling out a form tends to be a most dreaded activity. While forms will always be mundane to fill out, it is possible to create forms that don't drive the user crazy.

I'd like to challenge some common bad practices, and promote some best practices that are often ignored.

I noticed that Apple is still promoting their blue RSS icon in the marketing material for their new iWeb software in iLife '06. This despite the fact that Microsoft has said that IE will use same feed icon as firefox.

ColdFusion 7 appears to be much better at passing null values to a java object. ColdFusion 6 however likes to block you from doing it, even when you want to.

I am tring to work with a java API that requires me to pass a null value to a method.

While working today I had to write an error message that a user would see if their session had timed out. I was tempted to write something like:

Sorry your session has expired please login again.

I have been looking into Skype vs the Gizmo Project a bit today. It can be pretty tricky to choose which service to use - I don't like to run lots of programs at once, so I'd rather just pick one than use both.

If anyone is looking for some new features to implement in CFEclipse, I would suggest checking out TextMate. The editor is pretty popular among developers on the Mac, and Ruby on Rails folks.

If you don't have a mac you can checkout some of the screencasts for TextMate.

Kunal Anand sent me an email to let me know about his tagging engine for coldfusion - check it out.