GHOST TOWN is the most interesting site I have seen in my nine years on the net. It speaks for itself.

I normally don’t like flash sites. This one for an advertising merchandise site, however, seems to load fast and has some neat elements to it. MTIsite

While doing my weekly check of securityfocus.com for news of any new vunerabilities, I came across this excellent article on Web application security:

Securing web applications (session management).

I’m paranoid as anyone that knows me is aware of.. so this sort of thing really appeals to me..
The session management of both the downloader and stats counter both already roughly follow the suggestions made by that story. It would not really be possible to steal a session from one of the scripts because the session files and cookie strings are extremely long and random, the cookies are “session” cookies that disapear when the browser is closed, and the script itself removes any old session files each time its run, and in fact even if someone did manage to create a session the same as a previous valid session, they will still need to know the hash inside the session file that is based on the user and password of the login, (which is checked for, in every access of the admin screens.). Ironically, all of that is just protecting a screen of download counts (in the downloader script) and a bunch of web user statistics (in the stats counter and the advanced stats counters), for that sort of data, such protection is probably massive overkill, but I plan to use the same lib file (with some updating) as the basis for some e-commerce apps later on.

regards

Franki

In 2002, a company that has the patent on the JPG technology started enforcing their patent.

They did so after waiting till JPG had become the industry standard and up till that point had kept quiet about it to make sure the prospect of patent enforcement did not hamper its uptake.. Once JPG reached maximium usage, out comes the lawsuits “you owe us millions”.

In a very similiar move to the SCO debarkle.. company has sliding revenue and not much in the way of future prospects, company buys some IP from another company, company goes after other companies for IP infringment, and sue them for millions and companies original business goes down the tubes in favour of lawsuits.

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Recently Google have created a new webmail service that looks likely to make both yahoo and MSN hotmail look really lame by comparision.
For one thing you get a massive 1 gig of data storage for free, when both yahoo and hotmail charge you around $50 a year to give you just 100mb,
(and only 4 or 2mb respectively if you pay nothing).

The downside is that the Gmail service is paid for by text ads, and google spider your emails to target the ads to the emails contents.. (it should be said that the spidering is done by computer not person.. its still private.. the spider program just looks for words in the emails and finds relevant ads to display, its really no less intrusive then what people get from hotmail and much less obtrusive then yahoo. (which occasionally makes you click “continue” on a full page ad to get back to your email.)

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Now this looks like a nice utility! The The Regex Coach will help you see the effect of a proposed regex (Regular Expression) match using a perl compatible engine. I am going to give this a try. What do you use for this purpose? Leave a comment on what you use.

I have always struggled with formulating regex expressions. I get them in theory, I usually understand when I look at one someone else wrote, but when I need to draft one it is always a bit of guess work and fiddling. This will make that fiddling much faster, and the interactive explainations provided may in fact help me better understand the outcomes so I will fiddle less and less. I can hope can’t I?

Update at Microsoft once again unless you like living dangerously! Microsoft this week released what has been called a “flurry of critical updates” due to vulnerabilities that could be exploited. You will need to use your Microsoft Internet Explorer to update, even though by now you likely use Firefox as your standard browser if you think like we do … and if you don’t you probably should give it a whirl. It is very nice. The updates affect Windows OS as well as several of the programs like Outlook Express.

cheers

Don