Author Archive
XAuth
Meebo, the web-based IM service, have proposed a new standard called XAuth. Using a new feature of HTML5, similar to cookies, an authentication token is stored in ‘LocalStorage’ within the browser. Therefore this will only work with modern browsers (IE8+, Safari4+, Chrome3+, FF3+). You can see a demo of Meebo’s proposal at http://www.meebo.com/xauth and also there’s [...]
Would Twitter’s user model help combat email spam?
As Twitter grows, so the number of potential spammers to my daily tweet stream increases. Twitter’s user model is the saving factor in all of this ‘noise’. It prevents me from being overwhelmed and could have important advantages over existing legacy internet services like email. In this blog post I’ll look at whether other internet [...]
Debugging iPhone application unit tests
I’ve been learning a whole raft of new things lately as I get back into developing for the iPhone in earnest. There is a series of blog posts I’ve been planning on setting up Continuous Integration and Test Driven Development for iPhone applications. However, this post is more of a “where I’ve got to so [...]
When did you last ask an Aardvark a question?
Not too long ago, companies chased the illusive ‘Web 2.0′ buzz-phrase which seemed to only consist of glossy icons and sticking ‘BETA’ somewhere on your new site design. These days it’s ‘social networks’ that is the ‘must-have’ feature for the success of any new online service. Social networks have their uses in finding out what your [...]
Plesk 9.2.1 Greylisting
In case, like me, you’re having trouble enabling the newly supported ‘Greylisting’ feature after upgrading Plesk to 9.2.1, I managed to find the solution. Every time I tried to enable Greylisting I got Failed to exec glmng cli. file does not exist or is not executable: / usr / local / psa / admin / [...]
Speedy MIME Image decoding using HTML
I’ve been working with our Esendex Email MMS service which forwards any inbound MMS picture messages to an email address. As the picture is MIME encoded I needed a quick way to check the image included. Thanks to a post by Zmeeagain I found the very handy trick of pasting the Base64 encoded text into [...]
Avoid Google keyword detection picking up Firefox ‘aq=’
For those of you who are monitoring or stripping keywords from referrer strings from Google you may be seeking out the query string parameter ‘q=’. Beware that a simple string match on ‘q=’ could lead you to match on the additional Firefox parameter ‘aq=’. This appears in a Google referrer string if the search terms [...]
TechEd Day 2: Summary
Today was the first fully packed schedule. Lots of notes still to write up but here’s a quick overview of what happened. First off I went into the Building Rich Web Applications using Silverlight 2 session. Kathy introduced a 200 level session on what kinds of things Silverlight 2 can do over Silverlight. The answer [...]
TechEd Day 1 : Keynote speech
As we were ushered in to an imposing auditorium It seemed the three DJs and VJ were entertaining a lonely, featured HP server rack on stage. Having a tiny special ‘Early Bird’ section down the front did seem a little pointless when I’d hazard a guess that well over 70% of delegates would’ve been signing up for [...]
TechEd : Day 1
Greetings from Barcelona. Today started in the afternoon with the keynote speech from Jason Zander which has introduced new functionality in Visual Studio 2010. A very honest bloke who was brave enough to demo us Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7. Not just taking the safety off, but practically taking the tightrope away as well. [...]
