mrclay.org

Google is offering programmers their own personal sandbox application—called Jarlsburg—and hints of how to exploit the common vulnerabilities purposefully left in it. Although Google is basically walking folks through how to attack apps, publicizing this info is a necessary evil in order to build safer programmers. We have to start thinking of each line of [...]

By now, Opera’s invention of restoring tabs automatically is available in most browsers, but unlike every other browser, Firefox’s restored tabs retain session cookies for the domains of the saved tabs. This is handy in some ways, but dangerous in others:
It’s fooling web developers by breaking a very old and widely-known convention. Since Netscape’s original [...]

At my new job, we maintain a site powered by Elgg, the PHP-based social networking platform. I’m enjoying getting to know the system and the development community, but my biggest criticisms are related to plugins.
On the basis of “keeping the core light”, almost all functionality is outsourced to plugins, and you’ll need lots of them. [...]

Wow.

IE9 is coming, and it looks like it’ll get Microsoft back in the game. Full Developer Guide.
The Good: New standards supported, hardware-accelerated canvas, SVG, Javascript speed on par with the other browsers, preview installs side-by-side with IE.
The Bad: Not available on XP and no guarantee it will be. XP users will be [...]

May this save you pain.

Apparently on a few AT&T phones, a few Facebook users were dropped into accounts of other users.
After typing Facebook.com into her Nokia smart phone, she was taken into the site without being asked for her user name or password. She was in an account that didn’t look like hers.
… AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said its [...]

Our Ubuntu web host, hosted with OSG, was not able to send mail (using PHP mail) outside of UF. An OSG tech said our From: header should be a valid address at UF (check) and that the logs at smtp.ufl.edu showed those messages never made it there.
The solution was to configure sendmail to use smtp.ufl.edu [...]

Due to web images being optimized for on-screen display (let’s say 96 DPI), images on printed pages are usually blurry, but they don’t have to be:

Start with a high-resolution image. E.g. 2000 x 1000.
Save a version with dimensions that fit well in your printed layout when placed in an IMG element. E.g. 300 x 150.
In [...]

The creators of StackOverflow should team up with the Dept. of Health & Human Services and launch a medical Q&A site based on the SO model.
StackOverflow was designed by a few programmers to scratch an itch within the community, and the model they came up with made it the most effective question/answer site I’ve ever [...]

(Written July 2007)
The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or their [...]