I’ve recently been trying hard not to express my dislike of M$ business practices on the front page of this site, and I’d almost canned this post as a result.
Then I realized that it has nothing to do with M$ and everything to do with web development.

Picture this, you have put up a web site, and you decide to add a shopping cart to the mix so that you can sell your wares to your visitors internationally. Not long after, you find yourself being sued by a company who has no real product as such, and makes a living of patenting any little thing that pops into their head and then goes looking for people to extort licensing fees from. Sound far fetched? Think again people, it’s actually happening as you read this.

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My day usually begins by firing up my laptop and starting Thunderbird (my e-mail client) and checking though my e-mail. On an average day I get roughly 1400 or so e-mails. Of that 1400 about 200 or more are spam. I loath SPAM with a passion and just being forced to read the subjects and from address’s is enough to drive me into “spamrage”. (which is similar to roadrage only safer for innocent bystanders.)

My method of reducing my personal SPAM problem is twofold.
First on my Linux mail server, I run Postfix with Amavisd-new combined with Spamassassin and Clamd antivirus which when combined, scan all incoming and outgoing mail for both SPAM and virus’s.
Secondly I use the inbuilt SPAM filter in the free Thunderbird e-mail client (Windows, Linux and Mac versions available) which learns from the mail I get to increase its accuracy in SPAM detection. Between the two methods, I only find on average, 1 spam a week that hasn’t already been dumped into my SPAM folder. (Thereby significantly reducing my Spamrage.)

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Those of you that know me, know I am partial to the Mozilla FireFox web browser, its small, fast, has tabbed browing and a popup blocker, and doens’t have a list of security flaws (also see Securityfocus and theregister) as long as your arm (IE6 has had 153 security flaws found at last count), but best of all, Firefox has “extensions”. Extensions are little downloadable modules that add extra functionality to FireFox, some of which are truely invaluable for web developers, like the Web Developer extension and one I only just discovered, Adblock. Adblock is very cool in that it can block Flash ads, and is fully configurable so you customise it to match your browsing habits, it stops you from wasting your bandwidth downloading big flash ads that you likely didn’t plan in looking at anyway.

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It’s said that Longhorn will be a revolutionary evolution of an operating system. (mostly by Micro$oft I might add.) but for those of us that just want to get our work done and don’t particularly care about eye candy, what does this actually mean?

Well, for one thing, it means that you’re going to have to upgrade, and by upgrade I mean pretty much everything, hardware and software.
Any applications containing 16bit code, will not work on Longhorn, (or even the soon to arrive 64bit version of XP). So thousands of software packages that are used by the corporate world for years will have to be updated to all 32 or 64bit, or they will have to be replaced. This can potentially cost millions of development dollars, something that is likely to upset many corporate decision makers and bean counters.
It’s not just 16bit support that will cause problems, it’s a new security model, and a bunch of subsystems that are quite different from those in use now.

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Recently, I’ve been thinking about just how much market share Microsoft really has on the Internet.
While there is no doubt that it is by far the most popular browser and OS, many browsers like Opera trick sites into believing that they are Internet Explorer on Windows in an effort to open up content that would otherwise be hidden from them. (At least that used to be the case, there is not much content like that around anymore.)

While considering this, I thought that this incorrectly gives web masters the idea that nobody is looking at their site with anything other then IE on Windows. The likely result of that, is that these web masters will never swap to W3C standard compliant code.

Since “choice” is the catchword of the future, it’s in our best interests to encourage open standards as the way of the future, or our options will become very limited. We will have to run Windows and use Internet Explorer. I’m not happy with just having one “choice” though I suspect Micro$oft would be pretty happy with that result.

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Macromedia, the makers of such programs as “Flash”, “Dreamweaver”, “Fireworks” and other web development tools, has just announced a release of Flash 7 for Linux.
Nothing indicates that a platform has reached mainstream then when the big boys start porting their applications over to it.
You can read the press release from Macromedia here.
In short, it means that Linux web browsers like Mozilla, Firefox, Konqueror, Epiphany, Galeon and more will be able to display and run the latest Flash page content as well or better then their windows using brothers (and sisters).

They (MacroMedia) also recently helped with getting their Studio MX software to run under WINE, the Linux/Windows compatability layer that allows many Windows programs to run in Linux. They have said that it is likely this will lead to Linux native versions of their software in the future.

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I just read this on the register, it’s some very good advice and an excellent tip on how to protect yourself online.

The Register

It’s about password safety and how to chose a good password and remember it.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m paranoid and I have been for years, so my passwords are already about 12 characters long and full of letters, numbers and symbols, but that doesn’t make them any easier to remember. The article above however, has some handy tips on how to do exactly that.

Reading this should be obligatory to anyone that doesn’t want to “air their wares online”, or end up in court charged with something that someone who got access to your computer actually did.

I’d also add that if your running any variant of windows, you combine the above advice with a good anti-virus program and a program like
Adaware to remove spyware. (which you should get in the habit of running weekly.)

Also see Wired for more good password advi ce

rgds