Maximum PC | Cool Site of the Week: Codeacademy

 Design, Education, Internet News  309 Responses »
Sep 062011
 

 

 

Unpretentious and easy to approach, Codeacademy makes coding so enjoyable, it’s hard to believe you’re actually learning something. The website starts users off small, offering tutorials on how to use some very basic JavaScript commands. Each lesson is incrementally progressive and conversational in tone, making it easy to advance your skills without breaking a sweat. Each time you reach a new plateau of coding knowledge, users are awarded with a virtual trophy, making the time spent learning how to do something useful feel a like playing a game.

via Maximum PC | Cool Site of the Week: Codeacademy.

Hackers Issue Rogue SSL Certificates for CIA, MI6, and Mossad; Apple Stands Pat

 Internet News, Law  431 Responses »
Sep 062011
 

A well known security firm warns that the number of compromised digital security certificates from DigiNotar, a Dutch certificate authority outfit owned by VASCO Data Security International, has doubled in size over the past week from 250 false SSL certificates to 531. False certificates have now been issued for Facebook, Google, Tor, Skype, Mossad, CIA, MI6, Twitter, and several other high profile sites.

“This is really bad news. As DigiNotar is a ‘root’ certificate, they can assign authority to intermediaries to sign and validate certificates on their behalf,” security firm Sophos explains. “It appears the attackers signed 186 certificates that could have been intermediate certificates. These certificates masqueraded as well-known certificate authorities like Thawte, Verisign, Comodo, and Equifax.”

According to Sophos, computers users of IE and Safari on Windows 7/Vista/2008/2008R2 and/or Chrome and Firefox on all platforms are immune from exploitation, so long as you’re rocking a fully patched browser and OS. Things aren’t as peachy for Apple users.

via Maximum PC | Hackers Issue Rogue SSL Certificates for CIA, MI6, and Mossad; Apple Stands Pat.

Cool Cargo: 45 Prefab & Shipping Container Home Designs

 Design  971 Responses »
Sep 062011
 

 

 

Building a home is only half the battle – and the easier half when it comes to steep, remote or otherwise complex sites. Prefabrication or cargo container reuse) can be a cost-saving solution in such cases, but can also lead to remarkable innovations in technology and style along the way.

via Cool Cargo: 45 Prefab & Shipping Container Home Designs | Designs & Ideas on Dornob.

Facebook’s Unannounced Like Button Extension for Chrome Is Live and Waiting for Users

 interface, Tech News  20 Responses »
Sep 062011
 

 

 

Facebook quietly launched a Like button browser extension for Chrome a couple months ago, TechCrunch has discovered today. The extension appears as a button to the right of the search and address box in the Chrome interface, and as an option in the right-click menu. As one might expect, it lets you like any web page, share content and your commentary back to Facebook, and see the number of other Facebook users who have liked a post.

via Facebook’s Unannounced Like Button Extension for Chrome Is Live and Waiting for Users.

Debunking PHP’s bad reputation | Opinion

 Tech News  114 Responses »
Sep 062011
 

 

 

PHP has the reputation of being the poor cousin of scripting languages, due to outdated language features and plenty of poor quality code written using it. I use PHP as my main programming language and it’s seen waves of change over the last five years; it’s so much more than a language for script kiddies and hobbyist hackers. There are some ‘truths’ about the language that aren’t true these days, so I’d like to bring you a little update.

via Debunking PHP’s bad reputation | Opinion | .net magazine.

Take advantage of the CSS background-size property | Tutorial

 Education, interface  223 Responses »
Sep 062011
 

Oh sure, gradients are all the rage — and rightly so — but there are some super-handy bits you may not have investigated thoroughly. Maybe they seem more utilitarian and don’t have the swagger of box-shadow and border-radius, but in this tutorial I intend to change your mind. One of my favourites is background-size. Let’s see what some of the possibilities are.

The background-size property does exactly what you would expect — it allows you to specify the size of a background image on both the X-axis (horizontally) and the Y-axis (vertically).

via Take advantage of the CSS background-size property | Tutorial | .net magazine.

Facebook Flaw Lets You Hijack Page from Original Owner

 Internet News, Your Brand  173 Responses »
Sep 062011
 

 

 

Unfortunately, as evidenced in the video embedded below, a newly appointed Page admin can remove the Page creator’s admin status, which can be very nasty in certain cases. Today, Facebook Pages are more than fun, they’re a serious part of business promotion and losing administrative access to a Page can lead to host of problems.

via Facebook Flaw Lets You Hijack Page from Original Owner.

Could Google Fast Flip Have Survived on Tablets?

 interface, Internet News, Tech News  53 Responses »
Sep 062011
 

 

 

Fast Flip is one of nine in a batch of products to be discontinued from Google Labs. The company announced it would shutter Labs experiments shortly after releasing its second-quarter earnings results in mid-July.

Other Labs products Google will shut down:

Aardvark: Social search product that helps people answer each others’ questions.

Desktop: Gives instant access to data while online or offline.

Fast Flip: Provides a faster, richer news content browsing and reading experience.

Google Maps API for Flash: Allows ActionScript developers to integrate Google Maps into their applications.

Google Pack: Makes it easy to download and install a package of Google and third-party applications.

Google Web Security: Protects against web malware attacks.

Image Labeler: Helps people explore and label images on the web.

Notebook: Helps people combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they can share and publish.

Sidewiki: A browser sidebar that lets people contribute and read information alongside any web page.

Subscribed Links: Enables developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users.

via Could Google Fast Flip Have Survived on Tablets?.

WordPress Installation and Maintenance

 interface, Web Design  353 Responses »
Sep 052011
 

Over the long weekend I took the opportunity to tweak our WordPress blog, and mock up another for a client. While WordPress seems so easy to use, I’m starting to think that impression is a bit deceptive.

For one thing, I seem to find myself spending a lot of time activating and deactivating plugins, and installing and uninstalling various widgets and other add-ons. I’ve discovered that user ratings are very important. Even a quality plugin might not work exactly the way you expect it to. If you are lucky, this will only lead to some unexpected time spent scratching your head until you figure out the problem, or find an alternative. Worst case scenario(which does not seem all that infrequent), when something goes wrong, you may lose access to the platform altogether, and be faced with 404 pages, and figuring out what code is out of place over ftp.

The biggest issue seems to be quality. So this is fair warning: make sure you go with the highest quality you can find, and save yourself some headaches. That means highest quality add-ons, that are well-maintained and come highly recommended. It also means quality information. One issue I ran into: information about what you are trying to do(whatever it is)is all over the web, but it may not apply exactly to your situation. I mentioned that I was working on our blog and a mock-up. I thought, “there has to be a way to have more than one blog on the same domain.” I discovered WordPress Multisite. It seemed simple enough; a tweak here and there, a few lines of code, and I would be good to go.

Not so fast.

A couple of days and a downgrade, and complete second installation later, I knew better. What I learned from piecing together low-quality info from around the web is that a) there are a few more steps than at first glance, b) many of the steps are quite server specific, and the biggie, c) for some reason you can’t successfully convert blogs older than 30 days to multisite. Well, not for ‘some reason,’ rather some reason I don’t care to remember at this point.

Bottom line: save yourself time and headaches by finding the best quality information you can, know the steps to your project, and know the information necessary for your specific situation.

-James Andre

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