Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

Authentication panel

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

Tomorrow I’m hosting a panel about authentication at our local web-related talks. To make thing a bit more interesting I invited more than just coders and security experts – we have a designer and a usability expert on the podium. I think the whole talk will be enlightening to everyone, since hardly anyone knows all the areas covered by our panelists.

I’ll introduce the panelists here in more detail:
Ozren Škondrič is a friend who dedicated a big part of his life to designing web interfaces. He uses a bunch of web based services and applications and is probably the person who filled the most registration forms amongst all the people I know.
Duška Mervar is probably the most famous around here for a great booklet about writing for the web which a lot of people don’t respect enough. As an expert for the user perspective I’m sure she’ll show us a new meaning to serving customers based on their personal preferences.
Tomaž Cerar works at the same company I do – Parsek. He is a coauthor of the infamous CP2 platform – a Java based CMS system we use and also the lead developer of many e-commerce sites we created.
Marko Perme works on e-banking and e-insurance and other e-solutions for one of the biggest Slovenian IT companies – Hermes Softlab. They created and support a few of the biggest and the most used e-service platforms in the country.

The moment is right for us to reflect on what the internet knows about us and to think about what we want from it. The panelists will help us understand what the trends in this area are and shed some light on the matter that is becoming one of the most important problems of the current wave of web services and applications.

Debikartica

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

The first case-study talk went quite well. Even though I work for the company that presented the project I learned quite a few new things which was great. Unfortunately the number of visitors was quite low – you really did miss on a few thing that could’ve triggered a few sleepy synapses.

Jernej and Igor were a good match, talking about the client and the methodology aspect and the technology respectively. I guess each of the themes actually deserve a talk of its own – unfortunately the number of Wednesdays in a season is finite and good willing speakers are hard to find around here. If you happen to know one (doesn’t need to be from Slovenia) drop a comment.

I’m quite busy in December as you can see from the lack of posts this month – I do have a few longer pieces in writing but don’t have time to finish them.

JavaScript sorting – the talk

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

Last week I had an emergency talk about JavaScript sorting since the original speaker had a last minute change of schedule. I decided to have a talk about sorting since I was just finishing my research into sorting algorithms.

The talk went quite ok – I wish I had more time to prepare though. There were just a few real JavaScript developers in the crowd so it was more challenging than I thought. I was hoping to get a bigger crowd because of the Ajax in the title, but I guess they saw right through me..

The slides to the talk are already online. I’ll be preparing a short article about what I found out soon.

There’s another talk today at Spletne urice, this time a case study about Debikartica.

No more breaking code

Tuesday, November 21st, 2006

Dean Edwards strikes again. This time he solved a problem with extending built-in objects that tends to break other scripts. It seems this might be utterly useful.

In other news I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow in Cyberpipe about sorting in JavaScript, datagrids and a bit of AJAX to spice it all up.

What do you want in HTML?

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Have your say about the future of HTML.

What I’d want:
– Better form controls. But only if they follow other computer conventions.
– Application markup. We already have most things for marking documents.

It’s hard thinking about this since what I want should really be written on small papers, put on a desk and then sorted into structure (HTML), presentation (CSS) and behaviour (JavaScript). But I don’t really have time for this. Do you?

Update: Another reason for the lack of ideas might be that I just learned to work with the limitations. They’re so built into my brain that I’d have to go check some of the pages I made to see where I might have been exploiting the current standard..

Retrieving forgot passwords

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

You know how you allow your browser to save passwords and then forget the master password and can’t see the passwords anymore? Or you own IE6 where you can’t even see what the darn thing saved?

When I was in a situation like this I wrote a simple favelet/bookmarklet that lets you steal your own passwords that are autofilled by the browser.

When run, the favelet will go through all the input fields that have type set to password (the ones you can’t see, cause the browser will mask the content to * or dots) and alert their name and value.

This kind of script, combined with XHR can be a powerful attack tool since you can use it to steal passwords of other people if you can slip it in the page they’re looking at. More about it on ajaxian. Don’t use this script for anything like that!