Stub – andrewBridge

Lessons learnt today: Double quotes, redirection and rubbish routers

I haven’t posted here in a long while, and no doubt that will continue unfortunately. However, tonight I’ve learnt (or in some cases re-learnt) a few, albeit simple, lessons and it felt sensible to note it down so I can remember in the future.

Double Quotes vs. Single Quotes in PHP

This was a massive rookie error and a sign that I haven’t worked in PHP much over the past year.

While tightening my database security, I ended up patching up some dodgy db related code in PHP in a particularly old project. I spent nearly half an hour trying to work out why my passworded database user was being denied access to the database.

After a bit of debugging, I noticed the password was being cut off in the middle, and after further debugging and tracing the string back, I noticed that my randomly generated, double quoted password string happened to have a ‘$’ character in it.

PHP (among other languages) tries to resolve variables within double quoted strings, meaning “abc123$efg456” is resolved to “abc123”, if the variable $efg456 doesn’t exist in your script. The solution was to simply exchange the double quotes for single quotes.

Lesson: If you’re working in a language which treats double and single quoted strings differently, check you’re using the right ones!

.htaccess redirection

.htaccess always ends up leeching away my time. This time I was trying to set up some redirects to treat a sub-directory as the root directoy, but only if the file or directory didn’t exist in the root directory and did exist in the sub-directory.

This is simple enough if you know what the .htaccess variables mean, but in using examples and making assumptions I tripped myself up. So here’s the bit I learnt:

%{REQUEST_FILENAME} – This isn’t just the filename that was requested, but the absolute path from the root of the server.
%{REQUEST_URI} – This is the filename on its own.
%{DOCUMENT_ROOT} – This is usually the path up to the root directory of your site (though I’m quite sure this is not always the case).

So given the path “/a/file/path/to/a/website/index.html”:

%{REQUEST_FILENAME} = /a/file/path/to/a/website/index.html
%{REQUEST_URI} = index.html
%{DOCUMENT_ROOT} = /a/file/path/to/a/website

Simple when you know, but confusing otherwise! In any case, here’s the resulting rule I cobbled together:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/other%{REQUEST_URI} -f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /other/$1 [L,QSA]

That won’t suffice if you need directories to work as expected, and it will only apply to files, but it’s as much as I need for now.

Lesson: Don’t assume things, especially when dealing with something as powerful as .htaccess files. The more you know and use it, the less of a pain it will be.

NAT Loopback and remote IPs not working locally

Having acquired a new domain name today, I decided to put it to work as a domain for my home server (with help from no-ip). Having set it all up, I came across a peculiar scenario where I was able to access the machine remotely with the domain (the outward facing IP), I was able to access the machine locally with the local IP address, but I was unable to access the machine locally with the public IP or domain name.

In a few minutes I realised that this was not so peculiar at all. The Network Address Translation (NAT) rules decide where inbound requests should go when it hits the router, I have my router set up to allow certain connections to forward through to my server. However, these rules don’t apply to requests which pass through the router on the way out. I’d only be guessing, but I’d imagine this is because responses to requests across the Internet would otherwise have these rules applied to them as well, completely breaking the network.

To solve this issue, NAT loopback, a feature or further rule which resolves requests to the router’s public IP from inside the network correctly, is available in many routers. It is commonly turned off due to security concerns, or simply may not be available in some routers.

Unfortunately, my Huawei HG533 router falls into the latter group, with no obvious plans of an upgrade which would fix this.

Lesson: If you want to use one address to access a machine locally and remotely, ensure NAT Loopback is set up.

All simple stuff, but it’s been interesting learning about it all. Hopefully I can continue documenting the small things like this over the next year, my final year of university should be a steep learning curve!

A “filtered” Internet

The recent news has featured two main stories, both of which have already been discussed to death. There was the futile efforts at keeping the royal baby news going while Kate had the baby, recovered and walked outside with him in her arms and there was the huge trumpeting of Internet safety from David Cameron. The latter, which the Prime Minister set out as a way of stopping child abuse and guarding children from viewing adult content in one fell swoop, irritated me quite a lot. There were a number of reasons for my irritation…

TL;DR

Blacklisting search terms doesn’t stop any target audience from finding the adult or illegal material.
Parental controls at the ISP level are good, but the way they’re implemented should be regulated and the way they’re used should be determined by the account holder.
Parents don’t want their children to see this damaging content, so tell them how to guard against it.
Mainstream media is just as damaging as hard to find, extreme material online.
Aiming the blame at tech companies is lazy, and doesn’t attack the root cause.

Paedophiles don’t Google “child abuse”

This calling for search companies to provide a blacklist is actually popular with a lot of people, with the idea that “if you can’t Google it, it won’t be there”. The problems with this method are pretty easy to see, while its effect is pretty minimal:

Those who actually want to find the horrific parts of the Internet certainly won’t be using Google in the first place, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be using any of the terms on that blacklist.
Kids aren’t just going to accidentally stumble upon the keywords and innocently type them in, it’s not something that grabs their curiosity.
Google and the other search engines already have filtering and guarding against sites with adult themes.
Because neither of the target audiences will be affected by the change, the only loss is to researchers or those with genuinely innocent searches which somehow fall into the blacklist.
Finally, blacklists are easy to get around, mis-spelling words, using acronyms or replacements for words, sites would simply target keywords which simply couldn’t be blacklisted.

The “accidentally stumbling” scenario which is often painted out is also well guarded against nowadays, with further, definite steps being required to access content which is deemed inappropriate for some audiences. That is already provided for, many companies do in fact have whole departments devoted to ridding their services of this type of content, or at least flagging it as such to the user.

ISPs are not your babysitter

The blame was also passed on to ISPs because they weren’t doing enough, with Mr Cameron insisting that they filter the Internet service which they provide. This is where many who care about freedom and worry about censorship begin to get panicky because:

What organisation is maintaining the filter, suggesting what is adult content and what is not? Is it down to the ISPs? Is it a government enforced thing? My bet is that it won’t be a free, open body that decides these things, unlike the rest of the Internet.
There is a worry that these filters will be leaned on too much, rather than parents learning about the service they have, and how to control it so that it is child-friendly in their opinion. Why is it the ISPs job? You won’t find Freeview users being asked whether they’d like adult content on their TVs, there are instead tools which are set up by each end-user which filters the service at their end?
For many, including myself, there is a sense that, despite not viewing any of the adult content which would be blocked, the restriction on my service is unwelcome and quickly feels like a policed, monitored service is being provided, instead of the fully-fledged, free Internet that we currently use.

On speaking to my family about this point, it was quickly mentioned that “It’s just like any other law, you wouldn’t complain about not being allowed to drink and drive”. Immediately this argument is flawed, because I still have the ability of having a few too many beers and walking out to my car and driving it, there isn’t a breathalyzer test which I must take before driving, or a guard which won’t allow me to get behind the wheel when I’m over the limit – I still have the ability to commit the crime.

To make this point worse, after the announcement from the Prime Minister, many ISPs came out and described the parental tools which are already supplied by their service, and alluded to the fact that David Cameron’s jubilance, was simply taking credit for work that had already been done.

For the record, I’m actually all for parental controls at the service level, it provides a service wide coverage for the filtering of websites, which means most children will be unable to get past the filters (as most mobile networks impose filters, as do all schools and colleges), especially if the filtering includes proxy servers and websites. However, it certainly doesn’t stop anyone who is over 18 from removing the filters and accessing illegal content online. The idea is to also provide the filters automatically, passing over the parents heads and assuming their computer illiteracy, which leads me on to…

Work with parents, not for them

Most parents are probably quite concerned at the thought of their child being exposed to adult content online. Many will actually ensure that a child’s Internet use is supervised at an early age, and any filtering which the parents should be applying to their Internet connection is not absent through choice. Technology companies and the government (as they’re so interested) should be working with parents, providing support, training and user-friendly tools to parents, rather than just applying a blanket filter to all their account holders and patronising them. Clearly this is happening to some extent already, but the level of involvement could certainly do with raising.

As much as many people protest, the parents do have a huge responsibility when they allow their children to use the Internet, just as they do in not allowing them to watch films with an age rating which is too old for them or watch TV channels which are specifically intended for adults. They should be provided with the necessary information to fulfil this responsibility, but otherwise it should be up to them.

Realise that mainstream media isn’t squeaky clean

The other point that has annoyed many people is the fact that much of the mainstream media now has strong sexual, violent or addiction promoting themes, which have been entirely overlooked in this review.

Examples aren’t possible to count, but obvious examples can be found in most tabloid newspapers, gossip magazines and adverts (that’s printed, televised or digital). These slightly softer images are just as damaging as those more extreme images on the Internet, because they are in publications or media channels which contain everyday information alongside them, normalising them and sending similarly bad messages to children. If the Internet is going to be filtered, the filters already in place in other forms of media should be reviewed as well.

The tech companies don’t produce the illegal content

The final, and most concerning thing, is that the government seem to be aiming their efforts at the wrong end of the whole issue.

The ISPs provide a service, plain and simple, they serve up whatever is available on the Internet – that’s what they’re meant to do.
The search engines are tools which find relevant information on the Internet in relation to a selection of keywords entered by a user – that’s what they’re meant to do.

They do not produce illegal material, nor do they promote it. Asking them to do something about that material is already too far along the line, because by then the illegal act has occurred, been filmed or in some way documented, uploaded publically and then is accessible to anyone that knows where and how to get the content.

It’s like those weed killer adverts, the competitor product always just kills the weed at the surface, not at the root – the material can easily be hidden from view, but that doesn’t stop the root cause.

What really needs to be done is further investigation, more of a focus on finding those that cause harm to others for personal gain, unfortunately Mr Cameron’s budget cuts are actually doing the complete opposite – that’s what makes me quite so irritated.

The whole issue is huge, and calls into question the privacy of Internet users and the freedom of the Internet itself, as well as the degree to which the government are misguided when the word “technology” is mentioned. What David Cameron has suggested will detriment normal Internet users, bastardise the Internet and completely fail to achieve most of the aims which he has set out.</rant>

Stub: 2013 Week 11 & 12

Looks like I’ve falled behind with my posts! The year is certainly starting to become busy! So I’d better catch up on the past two weeks!

This er…fortnight:

Amazon tries to apply for total control over the .book domain, but rivals and industry groups (unsurprisingly) oppose it…
The artists that recorded the samples used in Bauuer’s “Harlem Shake” take legal action against the record label for use of the samples without a license. It seems to be the risk you take when you use any sample just plucked from the Internet.
It certainly made me smile when I saw that a father had hacked the classic NES game “Donkey Kong” to allow his daughter to play as the female character, instead saving Mario from Donkey Kong.
In my last post I commented on the proposal which was to be decided on by European Parliament. It originally set out to ban many things including porn, in aid of gender equality. I certainly wasn’t surprised to see that they changed the wording and decided not to ban Internet porn…
I was very interested to hear that Facebook, along with other Silicon Valley companies, have vending machines which dispense IT hardware (such as keyboards and mice). I think it’s a great idea!
A website which has been described as a “Pirate Bay for 3D printing” has been launched. While this initially sounds interesting, the creator is actually concentrating on uploading designs which would otherwise be paid for or not for the public. I’d prefer a place where any 3D blueprint could be uploaded for print, it’d be great to see what people came up with!
Wilson Miner wrote a nice little piece which compared video game design to interface design, it really is a brilliant comparison!
Quite a surprising bit of news also came out as Google announced it would retired its Reader service! It came as a shock to many, as competitors scrambled to pick up the extra users.
A bit of a change from the norm – Dropbox (rather than Google or Microsoft) acquires Mailbox. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with it.
SIML looks great, looks like it may actually save time when writing out HTML!
Depressingly, it was announced that the “First Tablet for Women” would be released. The dumbed down tablet focuses on improving fitness and meeting the demands of a housewife (with a yoga, cooking and shopping list app pre-installed). It really is worse than it even sounds.
The new San Francisco 49ers’ stadium was announced, and it promises to serve 68,000 users with a 6Mb/s connection. If they can pull that off – it’ll be a very
impressive achievement!
Around the 18th March, a huge DDoS attack was launched at an anti-spam company, it was such a huge attack that it affected the Internet worldwide, including services such as Netflix. To make matters worse it’s still going on at the time of writing and the effects will be lasting for a few weeks after as well. Just staggering!
Apple was in the news as they submit an application for a patent on a technology which ensures a phone always lands on it’s back, similar to a cat.
Over-sensitivity started a huge Internet talking point, as Adria Richards, an equality evangelist for a Silicon Valley company, overreacted and made assumptions about comments and jokes made by men behind her at a conference. She then preceded to take photos of the men and get one of them fired. She’s now been fired herself for her immature actions. It’s certainly interesting to read about how the story unfolded.
An interesting behaviour in browsers was noted, where Javascript may redirect a user to a different page after a link has been clicked. It’s started a debate as to whether it’s an unsafe behaviour to allow, but it’s certainly a good thing to know.
A very impressive web app from the Google Chrome experiments website turns web pages into levels of a marble game. I’d urge anyone with Chrome on their desktop and phone to give it a try!
Microsoft claims that it outsold iPhone, and of course it turns out that technicalities have been overlooked…such as counting markets where the iPhone is not even sold.
This guy has definitely found the right profession, after his app is bought for millions by Yahoo.
And finally, “Kiss the Jedi bride, you may.” is something you could hear at the next wedding you attend.

Stub: 2013 Week 10

As is always the way, this week has been far busier than the week before it!

This week:

A project to create a ‘DRM Chair’, which self-destructs after being sat on tries to point out how crazy DRM is, and how we wouldn’t accept it in other forms. Amusing and interesting, if not a little bit of a waste of time.
If their description isn’t hyperbole, the Famo.us HTML5, app framework is very impressive. I’d be interested to play around with it and see what it could do!
Surprised to see a beta of Opera’s mobile browser (sporting a new WebKit engine), so quickly after the announcement of the switch. It’s not too shabby either!
Further rumours of the Apple watch emerge. It looks promising, and sounds like they’re actually putting some work into it, but will it be better than Pebble?
As with all new and exciting technologies, it’s easy to forget the accessibility issues that may come with new interfaces, whether that’s touch, gesture or speech.
China doesn’t like the look of Android’s impending domination worldwide, I wonder if we’ll be seeing a competitor to Android come out of China in the next few months or years…
The Mars rover hits a glitch! It would be very disappointing if they can’t resolve the issues!
I was very amused by this, it’s not the first company or person that I’ve seen exploiting Facebook’s “Promote this post” feature horrifically (nearly every post is promoted for instance), seeing these people getting bitten by their own lazy ad campaign is a little satisfying…
We’re getting ever closer to camera’s which truly see what we see, or even what we don’t see, this sensor from Canon makes a radical difference.
Flat UI seems to be a fork of Bootstrap and some other projects to create a nice, modern looking (a little Metro-ish sadly), design framework. Try it out!
PPK, the owner of QuirksBlog who publishes a wealth of knowledge on several web technologies and the browser-compatibility for them has done further testing on mobiles. Interesting to see what’s safe to use!
The gesture “Punch to Zoom” amused me no end, it seems like hand recognition will be the flavour of the year in terms of interface control, as Microsoft seems to be pushing it with Windows 8.
Sticking with Microsoft, they’ve been fined because a “technical error” caused them to remove the “Browser Choice” box, sneaky. While I think the “Browser Choice” box is probably a bad idea, and leads to further confusion, it’s important to give browser developers a fair chance.
Facebook is to begin rolling out a new design for it’s news feed, while the space for ads is indeed bigger, and inevitably was a large part of the redesign, it does look nice. More minimal than we’ve seen from Facebook before.
Ubuntu chief, Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t have time for elitist Linux users who don’t want the masses using Linux. I’d agree with this, Ubuntu is a great OS and very usable by the average computer user. Where I’d stop agreeing is if the power-user features were lost.
A study about whether games make people violent has concluded that while they do, many other things including crispy bacon and snakes make people violent too. This amused me no end, but I fear that just the conclusion about video games will be separated and the rest forgotten.
Once a funny, seemingly useless currency, BitCoins have gained credibility, but the sites which were once not at threat of being attacked, which dealt with BitCoins, have now suffered a DNS Hijack.
I think there’s a lot of this in many industries, but especially a fast moving one like the Web industry. Many fall into ruts, and end up using outdated ways and having a very strong opinion about why everything newer is worse. Instead, keeping an open mind will probably keep you in your industry longer.
Facebook were clever enough to find a bug and patch it before it was discovered publicly…but not before they attacked the security hole themselves! Very good way of using a bug to test your service.
A proposal that the EU will vote on may ban online porn in the aid of gender equality, while this is admirable, pornography could account for nearly half a billion pages on the Internet, I’d be impressed to see them ban and block all of those.
There’s clearly a surplus of Google employees when they reveal a concept project, the Google Shoe.
This weeks ShopTalk show was with Jeff Starr, writer of books and websites including subjects such as .htaccess and WordPress, they discuss many interesting topics, including sexism still floating about in the industry, the Opera to Webkit announcement and interesting new workflows incorporating Git. ShopTalk #57: Jeff Starr
And finally, Physicists have create a vortex knot, similar to tying a smoke ring. The video of it is very impressive, as is the technology they used to achieve it!

Stub: 2013 Week 9

A slightly late Stub article for the week! March is here! It’s been a busy weekend, and a brighter weekend – Spring is on it’s way!

This week:

Nokia releases a £13 phone with a 35 day battery life.
IE10 has finally made it’s way to Windows 7. At least now, if we’re stuck with Windows 7 users in 10 years time, they at have a browser that’s compliant…
A suggestion that we should have the choice to pay for an ad-free Google…an idea that sounds very much like it would pave the way for everything becoming a paid-for utility. Not a fan.
Another plan that I wasn’t a fan of, the proposal of a .uk domain name, has been “shelved”. I hope it stays there, we don’t need even more confusion with similar domain names!
An amusing bug has been found in most popular, “modern” browser. The reason? Browser vendors not following the W3C specification. A lesson to be learned!
I finally had the chance to give the Spotify in-browser player a test run. It’s very impressive, the interface is almost preferable to the native application!
A supercharged web browser is a great idea for a second computer. But a £1000 second computer is probably not ideal. What a shame!
Another year, another set of Facebook tweaks to co-inside with Facebook’s Graph Search.
Another week, another security breach! This week: Evernote falls victim…
A new Java vulnerability is currently going unpatched and exploited “in the wild”.
Brilliant to hear Yahoo! is refocussing and getting rid of the clutter.
This weeks Big Web Show featured guest, Scott Jehl, of the jQuery Filament group. He discussed “responsible” responsive design and commented on those that complained that responsive design is “destroying creativity”, as well as speaking about why people love to include jQuery for even the smallest things. 5By5 | The Big Web Show #83: Scott Jehl
And finally, you may’ve heard of the four-legged robot, “BigDog” that can run at 28mph. Well it can now also throw breezeblocks around with it’s new, powerful arm.

Stub: 2013 Week 8

This week has been a particularly productive, but the fact that it’s the last week in February already is a little startling!

This week:

Scientists have found a method to sober mice up from inebriation using a combination of enzymes. Incredible and slightly worrying as to what will be done with it now!
Nothing to do with technology, and a lot to do with pure determination – this woman can legally pilot a plane despite being armless.
Quite simply bizarre, Amazon sold out of these replica UAV predator drones after “parody reviews” were posted, suggesting the toy was good to “hone children’s killing skills”. Looks like people really do respect reviews on Amazon.
Bill Gates calls the Windows Phone strategy “inadequate”, which certainly makes me wonder if Steve Ballmer will still be quite so smug in future…
A strange story all around, the signer Chubby Check has sued HP who allowed an app with the same name, onto their Palm OS app store. The app purports to estimate one’s penis size. Clearly there’s very little else to do if you have a Palm OS based device!
With Burger King, Jeep and Jeremy Clarkson all suffering hacked Twitter accounts, it could only get more bizarre when high-profile hacker collective, Anonymous, also had it’s account hacked. The usual call to strengthen passwords followed! Hopefully a better, less human reliant system of authentication can be decided on to get past all these “hacks”.
Moving on to more legitimate hacks, I only just found a new set of .htaccess rules which will help you defend your site from common exploits and bad URLs, I’d advise you use it!
An article which turned out to link to a rather half-baked alternative to GPS, but it did raise a more interesting idea of an alternative, open solution to global positioning.
I was incredibly impressed by this video from Ubuntu, briefly demonstrating the Ubuntu tablet OS. The OS turned out to be the beginnings of a single, unified OS for all devices. While this descriptions sounds disappointedly like Windows 8, the video shows an impressive transformation of the UI (which Mark Shuttleworth describes as less jarring than Windows 8) depending on the device/situation that it’s used. I certainly wouldn’t be averse to this kind of unified OS!
An article from Wired, originally asking “Can Google Glass ever look cool?”. The article actually touches on a far more important point, that our concentration is already adversely affected by mobile phones in our hands, but if it was in front of our eyes all the time, the situation would be magnitudes worse.
For those interested in DB flavours, Slashdot submitter, Travis Brown, evaluates DynamoDB and MongoDB.
Interestingly, it looks like Apple has been working on a touchscreen watch since 2011! With Pebble now lurking about, they better move fast!
In Beta #37 had special guest, Salah Esmaeili. He spoke about producing a 3rd-party Twitter client for Android, during a time when Twitter has strongly advised against creating 3rd-part clients, and coming from a designers background and learning to program from scratch. This led to some very interesting discussion points around learning to code by yourself, programming for Android, programming for both tablets and mobiles and working around the Twitter API 1.1, which changes and, in some cases, restricts apps such as his own. 5By5 | In Beta #37: Speak Designers’ Language
And finally, this simply looks very interesting, a pen which creates 3D structures, with fast hardening plastic from the looks of things! They’ve surpassed their goal by a huge margin, but there’s still time to back it if you wish!

Stub: 2013 Week 7

Not sure where the week has gone! Valentine’s has come and gone already!

This week:

Facebook are being sued over the “Like” button, I somehow don’t think this will be an issue for them.
An interesting reminder that as far as technology may have advanced, there are still some systems which will probably be running for many, many years to come.
Is the mobile market plateauing? The figures suggest it may be!
Possibly the best bit of web related news that I’ve seen this week – Opera will be ditching it’s Presto rendering engine in favour of Webkit! 3 engines is definitely better than 4!
Not really news, but an interesting discussion on where we’d be without Oxygen (the answer is we wouldn’t).
I noticed Facebook becoming a little smarter this week, associating a link from a website that I shared, with a Facebook page and offering a “Like” button for that page to me. Clever.
Amazon opens up it’s Redshift service to the public, it looks as though it could be immensely useful to anyone working with high-volumes of data!
Facebook wins a court battle to enforce the use of real-names on it’s service. I’m not too bothered by this as the whole point of it is to connect your friends that you know outside of Facebook, just so long as the trend doesn’t continue elsewhere!
Why Facebook’s Graph Search is fundamentally flawed. A nicely detailed piece on The Verge as to why analysing data by “Likes” just doesn’t work.
This seems to use many of the philosophies behind truly concurrent programming languages, but to have an entirely uncrashable computer would be an impressive result nevertheless!
I was excited to hear that the Camera Board is nearly ready for the Raspberry Pi!
In Beta #36 begun looking at Mailbox (a new iPhone app which makes it easier to get through your mail) and moved on to how much worth there is in aiming very high with projects. 5By5 | In Beta #36: Yoga Pose Calibration App
The Web Ahead #47 was with Jen Robbins, she discusses the issues which cropped up with making the GNN website, one of the first 100 or so websites available on the web. A very interesting edition for anyone who wasn’t working with the web 2 decades ago! 5By5 | The Web Ahead #47: Jen Robbins
The Big Web Show was with Tina Roth Eisenberg, interesting to hear about her experience in the design/development world. 5By5 | The Big Web Show #81: Tina Roth Eisenberg
Shoptalk took a couple of shows to answer questions from listeners, ranging from the specifics of CSS coding, to workflow and even far more general information about the web development industry in the USA. Shoptalk #13 & #14
And finally, the Harlem Shake craze has been given the javascript treatment. On a technical level, it’s interesting to see the way it works…but it’s quite amusing anyway. Enjoy!

Stub: 2013 Week 6

February rolls on (and my workload picks up!) another week of news has passed by!

This week:

A limited, but “serious weakness” has been uncovered in the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol used by sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter right up to banks and email accounts. It’s not a huge risk and can only be carried out on the same network, but it’s still a surprising flaw to be uncovered! Popular platforms are already preparing patches.
Twitter looks to be planning on following suit by beginning “multi-factor” authentication to access your account…
…and Amazon looks to be following suit by beginning to offer it’s own virtual currency for the Kindle Fire, similar to Microsoft Points.
A bit of fun – What your Twitter bio says about you.
Apple may have let slip that Siri may feature in a coming version of OS X.
An article looking at the core performance of some of the animation methods in CSS3. Interesting!
Sometimes Twitter can make you quite blunt, and in some cases just plain mean! Not a good way to go when you’re commenting on someone else’s work!
Kirby looks to be a brilliantly powerful, easy-to-set-up, no DB CMS. Take a look!
A situation that few are in – you’ve got all the devices for a mobile testing lab, you just don’t want to have to navigate to the same page 30 times. If you are in that situation, there’s a script that can help!
You don’t often think about designing your UI to look nice without content, but you should! Here are some ideas.
A very impressive app which uses augmented reality for something other than waving your phone around like a maniac. Now Japanese children can use an app to get content from a regular, adult newspaper in a children target tone. Nice.
Wrongly reported by the article (and myself on Twitter) as in-game cheats, instead a glitch is allowing gamers to get paid for upgrades for free, throwing those that partake in this glitch into a “legal grey-area”.
Microsoft continues to push it’s new iteration of webmail, Outlook mail. It’s doing this by attacking it’s competitors, while it’s not a new tactic, it’s unfortunately making them look rather desperate…
A hilariously wide spanning (and now fixed) bug was unearthed where the string “File:///” typed into any Apple made Mac program would crash that program. Apparently it was an issue with a core library!
It seems Facebook is so set on giving emoticons more emotion, they’ve begun collaborating with someone from Pixar to reinvent the emoticon.
A strange bug in Google throws up porn in the search results of certain, impossible equations.
If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of how Javascript works, this article will be just right for you. All about why the delete function works in the way it does.
It looks like carousels simply add to the visual fluff of a page, these figures show that they are not at all useful. Further to this, some user testing has been carried out which has shown that auto-advancing a carousel will probably hide what you want users to see before they see it!
I found a small but interesting snippet of code which implements Java’s hashCode function in Javascript.
In Beta #35 looked into learning code by yourself using online resources as well as the anxiety of people laughing at your code if you upload it (and how that is stifling some from getting involved in open source). 5By5 | In Beta #35: Hammers of the Beards
And finally, I never had any idea about the drastic difference there is between Japanese pop and Western pop. It certainly made for a good read. The Verge | Dating AKB48: the J-pop cult banned from falling in love

Stub: 2013 Week 5

February is here already and a lot’s happened!

This week:

Popular Twitter powered (and authored) app Vine had embarrassing moment this week when a porn video reached the “Editor’s Pick” section.
Speaking of Vine, this week’s edition of In Beta was mainly taken up with a discussion which stemmed Vine, and how it’s only available on iOS currently. They commented on how cross-platform is an important factor in creating a mobile app, especially for a large company such as Twitter. They go on to discuss an article which suggests that Android is popular because it’s cheap. 5By5 | In Beta #34: Vine Voyeurism
Newegg have beaten a “patent troll” who has been suing large companies over small parts of their shopping cart system. A victory for all the large companies being targeted.
An amusing, bizarre and scary story concerning showing that dating site algorithms can’t weed out the crazy people of the world. Woman Sues Match.com After Date Stabs Her
My series of articles on refactoring continues, one describing re-writing code in an Object-Oriented way, and another published today, describing good coding practices to be friendly to other developers.
Steve Ballmer, in another hilarious comment, has called Dropbox a ‘little startup’ with ‘only’ 100 million. I don’t quite see how Microsoft haven’t fired him yet.
Staying on the topic of Dropbox and other cloud services, a US legislation has been passed which enables US authorities to look at any files stored in US territory without a warrant.
Another employee has succumbed to getting fired by the company they work for, by mocking them publically.
I revisited Chrome Experiments and found this rather amazing production using pure standards. Check out ROME.
We got a little more information about the release date for the new iteration of Android this week, Key Lime Pie.
The Google Trekker project continues to push Google Maps Street View away from just streets. Now you can visit all 75 miles of the Grand Canyon from the comfort of your own home.
Another “pay-to-unlock” virus begins to gain momentum.
Sony ends the production of Mini Disc…after years of the format being forgotten.
TicketMaster are the first high-profile company to stop the use of CAPTCHAs, instead using a different, more human-friendly method.
In Beta #33 was mainly focussed on discussing the low moments of agreeing to do voluntary work for small/non-profit companies. Including DNS issues, no end of contract agreement and negativity and high expectations despite your kind gesture of free work. 5By5 | In Beta #33: Internal Resentfulness Meter
And finally, I implore you to watch this new short from Disney, impressive new animation techniques and a sweet narrative make it doubly watchable.

Stub: 2013 Week 4

As I begin to settle in to Uni life again, it’s been a bit of a slow week, but I’ve still got something to report!

This week:

Primark bags are for show, don’t expect anything special.
It was sad to see Atari falling to it’s knees…even if they don’t seem to have made their mark for years…
A prediction which we all saw coming – if the networks don’t do something, we’re about to see phone networks crumple under the strain of more and more smartphone users.
Looks like I am good for something – I got promoted!
Google Images has made another subtle UI change, and it looks suspiciously like something else.
Something that I’m very surprised that I missed off of last week’s stub – Facebook released the unmeaningfully-named-to-most Graph Search feature, maybe we can actually get something back from the data we’ve been feeding into Facebook over the years!
Speaking of Graph Search, I’m still a week behind on 5by5 and only just managed to catch #32, where they talk about Graph Search and the issues that joke “likes” may actually start biting people back with this new feature. 5By5 | In Beta #32
I think this was my quickest concept code up to date. This is probably the most simplistic, pure javascript photo gallery you will ever see.
I’ve started my first article series here on my blog, this one is about refactoring and using object-oriented code patterns. Check it out, the next article in the series will be out in the week!
Turns out that my “slow week” has in fact been a pretty empty week in terms of articles! I’ve been busy with a current project which I can hopefully reveal on here soon…
And finally, use the HDR Toning feature in Photoshop right and you can add a nice, retro drawing effect to your photos!