Entropy

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Firefox is without a doubt the future of the internet browser. This however doesn’t mean that IE will disappear completely - as much as most web developers wish it would. It has happened to most developers where you get your new app running peachy in Firefox, but the second you open it in IE you are using hacks and the like to get it to render and behave as you wanted it to.

Debugging in Firefox is easy with a vast number of extensions aiding you in tracking down the bugs in your code. Doing the same in IE can be very frustrating with one usually only having access to the mostly unhelpful js error icon in the bottom corner of the browser.

Luckily Six Revisions has put together a list of IE tools that can aid you in the development of your app.

For Web developers wanting to use Micosoft’s Internet Explorer as their primary browser, there’s some terrific IE extensions/add-ons that can aid you analyze, troubleshoot, debug, and speed up development of web pages.

Here, you’ll find the top 6 free IE extensions for web developers.

Where appropriate (and available), you’ll also find related resources, their download page, and documentation.

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Seeing as I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days, I thought I would make one post with all the things that have caught my eye.

• Maximize Firefox without extensions
• Gmail hacks for better spam protection
• 7 of the best designed sites on the web
• 60 AJAX/Javascript resources for professional coding
• 3 ways to test web input with CAPTCHA

Maximize Firefox without extensions

We have made a couple of posts relating to improving FireFox and getting the best out of your FireFox experience and plugins. There are plugins that could do what this article details, but with the release of Beta builds quite frequently over the past 2 months or so, not all plugins work the whole time.

If you type about:config in your address bar, Firefox opens the master directory of user-defined preferences and built-in settings. The ultimate arena for performance tampering, the about:config settings are the foundation for programming Firefox extensions.

We’ll show some simple about:config modifications below. Even if the word “Boolean” means nothing to you, we’ll try to make it easy to understand about:config settings

Gmail hacks for better spam protection

I happen to have a ‘.’ in my gmail address just by chance, and also use the + tip for signing up on certain sites to keep things more organized. But you could just as easily use them to help combat spam.

You can create alias emails for things like shopping sites, places you know will spam you, or anything you want to track to see who they are sharing your email with. To do this, simply put a “+” after your account name and add words.

Apparently, Gmail doesn’t really acknowledge dots in your account name. So I can use “mr.marky.mark@gmail.com” or “mr.markymark@gmail.com” or without any dots at all, “mrmarkymark@gmail.com”.

7 of the best designed sites on the web

Titles of this nature always grab my attention. I’m constantly trying to see how designers are innovating using the latest techniques. While I may not completely agree with this list, I do agree that the sites are visually appealing, even google.com, and that they have crisp layouts.

A sites design is its identity. It can make the biggest difference in attracting and keeping traffic, keeping visitors happy, promoting products and services and establishing an identity on the web.

Website design has come a long way. Previously, down-to-the-point, straightforward sites with minimum graphics and fastest loading and easy navigation were considered the “best” sites in terms of design.

60 AJAX/Javascript resources for professional coding

AJAX is one of the most commonly used techniques for creating seamless webapps these days. However, if you have ever tried to develop something using AJAX, you may have found that it can be frustrating sometimes trying to accomplish the crazy idea that you have set down as your goal. Infact, I was wrestling an AJAX idea in the office today that was partially solved with the scriptaculous javascript library.

When it comes to design of modern web-applications, Ajax is considered as a standard approach. Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, search, tooltips and tables are developed using Ajax libraries and nifty Ajax scripts. Ajax is useful and powerful. However, when using Ajax, one should keep in mind its drawbacks in terms of usability and accessibility. With an extensive use of Ajax, you can easily confuse your visitors offering too much control and too many features.

3 ways to test web input with CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is something that we are all used to by now, it’s those barely readable images we have to re-type to prove that we are human. Turns out that computers are becoming more and more human with spam bots being able to break CAPTCHA codes, in record time, to webmail sites bypassing the human requirement of owning an account. However, it is still seen as an important part of a website where differentiating a legitimate user from a spam bot is required and even though it is being beaten more and more these days it is still one of the best ways to help combat spam.

Many Web forms these days feature a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) as an effort to stop people from setting up computers to automatically fill in Web forms. A typical CAPTCHA is an image with some numbers and letters in it with distortion and/or background noise, and a Web form input field where you are to enter the numbers and letters from the image. This article investigates three CAPTCHA applications that you can use on a PHP Web site.

• You Used JavaScript to Write WHAT? [via Zemanta]

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There are a bunch of tools available that help you track down a free internet hotspot, but LifeHacker has two we think are worth a look at.

The first is the newly published Free Wi-Fi/Hotspot Finder Google Maps mashup which will show you the closest hotspots based on the location you type in - allowing you to plan ahead. On this same site is a great app called wiPod which allows you to select the areas (in America) that you’re interested in and download those maps to your iPod for easy access.

The second Mashup is Hotspotr, which has a cooler name and a cooler interface but apparantly (according to LifeHacker) the maps are not as good. Naturally, we suggest you try them yourself –

• LifeHacker Original Post
• LifeHacker Hotspotr Post
• wiPod
• Hotspot Finder

Source: WikipediaVeriSign has raised the .com and .net registrar prices by another 7% this year (as they did last year); and it seems the trend will continue –

“VeriSign is jacking up prices for the .com and .net domains for the second year running, increasing both by the maximum 7% allowed under its exclusive contract with ICANN. ‘Assuming that VeriSign continues the 7 percent rise each year (which seems reasonable given the company’s history), registrars will be looking at $9.00 for .com domains by the time the current contract ends in 2012 — a 50 percent increase in six years.’ Registrars have no choice but to pony up, and chances are they’ll pass the pain on to customers.”

Discuss and read more at Slashdot.

There is a great article at arstechnica about using Bittorrent to roll out patches to 6500 machines. You can read more here.

The peer-to-peer protocol allows PCs to download most of the updates from each other—the remaining servers are mostly needed to send out the first few copies and then coordinate the up- and downloading. One of the advantages of the BitTorrent protocol is that it uses bandwidth where it can find it: faster links are automatically used more.

Using this technology, updating all 6,500 PCs can be done in less than four hours. Previously, this took four days. Four days down to four hours for the same needs!

Its always nice to see some legitimate uses for a clever protocol.

“The latest version of Mozilla Thunderbird may still only be in beta but already the user community have started creating an extensive set of viable Exhchange killers. One such example is the latest mashup between Thunderbird and Google Calendars, providing bi-directional syncing of calendar information from both the client and internet. How long will it be before open-source software can provide a complete, accessible office suite for a fraction of the cost that Microsoft current impose?”

See the discussion at Slashdot

My previous news post on the new age of P2P (Speed Up Your P2P) has been getting some interesting traction from search engines and the like, so in that stead I’ve decided to post a little more on the concept behind Similarity-Enhanced Transfer P2P.

First off, our basis of understanding of what SET hopes to be is based on this comment from CNET —

“Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon and Purdue say they’ve conquered one of the frustrations of P2P downloads: the sometimes painfully slow speed.”

SET is to be aimed at the sharing of academic papers throughout the community; and will no doubt have other uses given enough time. They have already been quoted saying it would be effective in the transfers of large data files, for example movies and music.

EurekAlert has an article which describes it in more detail, but essentially (to my understanding) the system does the following: locate chunks of data that are similar to the required data for your download. This means that it increases the amount of sources available for a given P2P steam (like in the bittorrent protocol - more sources = more throughput). For example if you were downloading a whole movie, it could download “parts” of it from people sharing the trailer to the movie.

In some cases, SET might speed transfers by just 5 percent; in others, it might make downloads five times faster.

Anderson hopes the technique is used elsewhere, across all relevant P2P networks. Anderson says “developers should just take the idea and use it in their own systems.”

In tests based upon real files downloaded from today’s peer-to-peer networks, SET improved the transfer time of an MP3 music file by 71 percent. A larger 55-megabyte movie trailer went 30 percent faster using the researchers’ techniques to draw from movie trailers that were 47 percent similar. The researchers hope that the efficiency gains from SET will enable the next generation of high-speed online multimedia delivery.

For more information see EurekAlert and CNET.

P2P is a good thing - whether you hate it or love it, its almost definitely for some illegal/legal reasons. I’m talking about the idea and the potential business benefits and network benefits in a bandwidth strained world. No matter how you look at it, it’s a growing and strong technology, and scientists at Carnegie Melon are taking it to the next step!

File sharing may soon move at a faster pace. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon and Purdue say they’ve conquered one of the frustatrations of P2P downloads: the sometimes painfully slow speed.

Tomorrow the new SET protocol will be released at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. SET stands for Similarity-Enhanced Transfer. That conference is 4th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. The scientists say their new system is aimed at easier sharing of academic papers.

One of SET’s creators says they will release the system. He added, “This is a technique that I would like people to steal.” Bet you can name the software companies he does NOT work for.

P2P downloads at warp speed
Update: My explanation of SET

Gaim Renamed — Now Pidgin IM

“Announced on the Gaim mailing lists earlier today, the Gaim project is being renamed. This follows a lengthy and, unfortunately, secret legal process with AOL, which also prevented any code releases except betas. The project will now be known as Pidgin IM. Development is being migrated off of sourceforge.net as well and is now being hosted on developer.pidgin.im”

Asus.com [was] Compromised With Exploit Code according to a Slashdotting —

Juha-Matti Laurio writes in with news that the Web site of ASUSTeK Computer (asus.com) has been compromised to spread exploit code. The original report from Kaspersky Lab claimed that the compromise lead to code exploiting the recently patched Microsoft Windows Animated Cursor (.ANI) 0-day vulnerability, but sans.org found no evidence of this. Apparently a malicious iframe was added to one of the machines in asus.com’s DNS round-robin.

Another article has more details.