Archives for the 'Coding' Category
Phishing with 3-D Secure
A couple of years ago, I was obliged to find out about the user experience of Verified by Visa and the Mastercard SecureCode systems for inclusion on our site. it was plain to me from the outset that the designers of 3-D Secure (the protocal on which these are based) had not a clue about [...]
Is It Too Slow Yet?
About a year ago, I decided to turn off pagination on this blog. If you scroll down, you will see at least the introduction to every post I’ve ever made – approaching 700 now. The reason I did this was to have some counter evidence to give people when they tell me that long pages [...]
Google Wave: OpenDoc Redux
I’m watching the keynote from Google I/O the other day and it’s impressive stuff, technically at least. I can count on the fingers of one hand the occasions I’ve wanted (or needed) to collaborate on the same document in real-time with anyone, but I shall curb my natural cynicism. The mere fact that they are [...]
Ubiquity: The Command Line Comes Home
When Apple launched the Mac, one of its supposed great advantages was that it was graphical. “Just point and click” – what could be easier? Certainly better than the awful DOS (or even UNIX) command line! The command line was thus condemned to be seen as symbolic of the old school. Arcane commands typed in [...]
Happy 25th Birthday, GNU
Faviki.com: No OpenID – Fail
While I yield to no man in my admiration of Tim Rowe, I cannot accept his latest invitation to join him on faviki.com. This is because I have resolved to boycott any new service unless it supports OpenID. I have written to Faviki about this. Let’s see what happens (nothing probably), but in my opinion, [...]
Monoculture Reloaded
I used to think I had a handle on the state of spam and malware. I chuckled at the obfuscated spam content, marvelled at the botnets, and secretly admired the general ingenuity of those skript kidz and their r00tkits. But I didn’t know the half of it until I read this (670K PDF – thanks [...]
Will Thermo Be Too Hot for Axure?
With the advent of Thermo “some time next year” things are at last hotting up in the RIA design space. Regular readers of this blog (if there are any such people) will know that I have been wondering for a long time in a somewhat Pooh-bearish way about the future of “The Designer” in the [...]
The Right Way To Do It
I like Flickr more every time I go there. I like it so much I’m now paying for it just as soon as my PayPal echeque clears. As a rule I pay for nothing in life if I can possibly help it. This alone is a measure that they are doing the right thing. And [...]
Getting Real
I’ve been reading 37 Signals’s book Getting Real on line. This caused a bit of stir when it came out as it self-consciously throws out the rule book(s) on application development and looks firmly towards the new dawn of Web 2.0, and (sort of) in the direction of an extreme “agile” methodology. All the rage. [...]
Windows Presentation Foundation: It’s Not Flash
I went to the Microsoft Campus yesterday to have an informal preview of some of the new Windows UI things to be announced next week (technically under NDA – so sue me).
Managing Content Another Way
Lawd – I is churnin’ it out today!
Why is content not treated in the same way as page designs and HTML?
On most projects, one of the primary deliverables is a set of HTML “templates” to be integrated at some point into a CMS. The CMS then uses these templates to render content loaded into it. This represents a transition from an initial set of page designs (usually developed with a graphics package) into a format (HTML) generally suitable for “decomposition” in some way.
CSS – nice!
So far, I’ve managed to avoid being paid to do HTML – and I count that as a Very Good Thing. To date, the pinnacle of my achievement in creating an entire site from scratch is www.bakerbates.com. Which is crap, obviously.
One from the logs
I was going through my chat logs this evening looking for something. It’s only the second time I’ve ever done it I think, but I must do it more often – you find all sorts of interesting stuff. Anyway, I spotted this amusing account of an exchange I’d had (edited to protect the innocent and to correct my howling typos):
