SolutionBot

Phone companies have been kicking around wireless handsets for years. Everyone claiming that the future was wireless handset devices. Soon we won’t need our laptops anymore. We’ll have all the computing power, media and communication we need all in the palm of our hands. There are alot of technical challenges though that havn’t been overcome quite yet. Thus, no large group has bought into one particular mobile device. Not however, until the iPhone.

This is a video demonstration of how static photographs can enhance lower quality video to enhance lighting, resolution, camera shake and much more. It’s an amazing example of where video technology is headed. You can find out more about the technology and even download the source code here.

As exciting as this technology is, I think it does bring a few things to mind. For one, YouTube in the future will not be dependable. The cameras can and will ‘lie’. The line between the real and the fake is being increasingly blurred. Using video surveillance will require knowing the source of the video and ensuring that the video hasn’t been tampered with. We are living in a media driven world; a world in which it is increasingly easy to manipulate media. ‘Seeing is believing’ is becoming less and less prudent. There are alot of pros and cons from any new technology and the greatest defense against the ‘cons’ is understanding the technology and what it is capable of.

This simply goes to prove that there is always more than one way to learn something. There is a lot of basic but key lessons to this song. Listen and learn. If you already know all of this, you will at least enjoy the entertainment value of it and your brain will benefit from reiterating facts once again. Enjoy!

I just installed minefield on my computer and enabled the new TraceMonkey javascript engine and all I can say is wow. In case you don’t know what TraceMonkey is, in short it is an extremely powerful javascript engine that allows for native compiling of javascript. Javascript is now competing with compiled languages instead of interpreted scripting languages. To see TraceMonkey in action for yourself simply download ‘MineField’ from Mozilla and go to your config (about:config) and set javascript.options.jit.content to ‘true’.

I recently finished up a project at Qorvis for Horatio Alger Association. Qorvis did a beautiful redesign of the website but as anyone who has ever built a website knows, it doesn’t matter if you have the most beautiful website in the world if no one ever sees it. Ensuring that a website is seen is no easy task and there are many different solutions to this. In this particular case we took the route of building a widget for Horatio Alger.

The Legacy

I recently worked on a legacy asp web application that had been hacked. The problem? The programmers didn’t think that hackers would/could attack them. This seems to be a prevalent problem in the development world. Developers have a zebra mentality. ‘Ok, we all have to cross the river, but if we all jump in at the same time hopefully I won’t be the one to get eaten’. If you don’t see the flaw in this logic please do not waste any more time with this article and go have loads of fun playing Click the Button. If you do see the logic continue on.

What is it?

The Publish/Subscribe model allows you to build loosely coupled applications in which an event is ‘fired’ and subscribing functions ‘respond’. This can be very powerful, if implemented correctly, and provides your application with more scalability.

"I don’t know how in the world you can sit in front of a computer screen and stare at weird words and symbols all day!" is a question I’ve heard many a time from many a friend. It can, and is, mentally exhausting after a few hours. And of course then there are deadline days; crunch time; The day which all the work is due all at the same time and you have to stay till 6 AM (whew). So how do we just sit and type syntax all day?

Site maps are important tools for webmasters to have some sort of control over how their sites are indexed. This doesn’t give ultimate control by any stretch of the imagination. Google and yahoo will still index websites the way they will, a site map is more like a webmasters ‘tip’ to crawler bots to tell them what pages they should crawl, how often they change and what kind of priority the crawler bots should give to certain pages.

Debugging is something that all mortal programmers must do. Any programmer who claims that his code is perfect the first time he writes it is #1 Lying #2 A legendary immortal Greek god of Programming. I for one am not a legendary immortal Greek god of Programming so I need methods to debug the code that I write. In this article, I’ll be talking about methods of debugging Javascript in Visual Studio and Internet Explorer. Part II will be debugging Javascript in Eclipse and Firefox.