Mar 09
ClaudeArticles, Opinion Liberty
“While American politicians and intellectuals have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision. Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights, reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion, by the state. These Americans who run Washington, and their intellectual supporters, believe they have superior wisdom and greater intelligence than the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Like any other tyrant, they have what they consider good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. A tyrant’s primary agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Markets imply voluntary exchange and tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning and regulation, which is little more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite. We Americans have forgotten founder Thomas Paine’s warning that ‘Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.’” –George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams
Reposted from The Patriot Post Brief, March 8th, 2010
May 13
ClaudeArticles, Ext JS, Framework, JavaScript, Platform, Protocol .NET, ColdFusion, Ext JS, Framework, Java, JavaScript, Library, Perl, PHP, Ruby
Evan Trimboli of the Ext-JS team just published an article describing Ext.Direct, a remoting API that is part of Ext 3.0. The team has created a remoting specification that you can use to implement the server-side stack of your choice.
Details about server-specific implementations already being maintained can be found here.
Ext.Direct is a new package in Ext JS 3.0 that helps alleviate many of these issues by streamlining communication between your client and server. When using Ext.Direct, you can expect to write 30% less code by eliminating common boiler plate code.
The Ext.direct namespace introduces several new classes for a close integration with the server-side. New classes have also been added to the Ext.data namespace for working with Ext.data.Stores which are backed by data from an Ext.Direct method.
Ext.Direct uses a provider architecture, where one or more providers are used to transport data to and from the server. There are several providers that exist in the core at the moment, for example a JsonProvider for simple JSON operations and a PollingProvider for repeated requests. One of the most powerful providers is the RemotingProvider.
Read the rest here.
Apr 29
ClaudeArticles, Presentation, Video Dojo, Gears, HTML5, Performance, Storage
Web developers now have the ability to store large amounts of persistent data on the client-side, way beyond the 4K limit of cookies. Options include HTML 5 Storage, Gears, Dojo Storage, and more. Brad Neuberg talks about the latest ways to achieve browser-based client-side storage and how it can help you make better web apps.
Seen at the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog.
Dec 08
ClaudeArticles Image Optimization, Performance, Yahoo!
This article, part 5 of a series on image optimization, talks about the use of transparent PNGs with IE6 and why the AlphaImageLoader hack is bad and a very interesting solution
This installment of the image optimization series is about the IE-proprietary AlphaImageLoader CSS filter, which developers often use as a workaround to solve transparency issues with truecolor PNGs in IE. The problem with AlphaImageLoader is that it hurts page performance and, therefore, hurts user experience. I argue that AlphaImageLoader should be avoided when at all possible.
The rest is here.
Nov 11
ClaudeArticles, Research, Security WiFi, Wireless
Arstechnica has a great explanation of the issue.
Academic researchers have found an exploitable hole in a popular form of wireless networking encryption. The hole is in a part of 802.11i that forms the basis of WiFi Protected Access (WPA), so it could affect routers worldwide. German graduate student Erik Tews will present a paper at next week’s PacSec in Tokyo coauthored with fellow student and aircrack-ng team member Martin Beck that reveals how remnants of WPA’s predecessor allow them to slip a knife into a crack in the encryption scheme and send bogus data to an unsuspecting WiFi client.
In an interview from Germany, where he is a PhD candidate studying encryption at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Tews explained that an existing attack on Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) was modified to provide a slim vector for sending arbitrary data to networks that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). (Tews’ collaborator Beck is a student at the Technical University of Dresden; Tews credits Beck with the discovery, after which they jointly developed the paper that Tews will present at PacSec.)
With the Tews/Beck method, an attacker sniffs a packet, makes minor modifications to affect the checksum, and checks the results by sending the packet back to the access point. “It’s not a key recovery attack,” Tews said, “It just allows you to do the decryption of individual packets.” This approach works only with short packets, but could allow ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) poisoning and possibly DNS (Domain Name Service) spoofing or poisoning.
The paper, Practical Attacks against WEP and WPA, is now available for download.
So even though TKIP is not broken, the best way to protect your network is by switching from TKIP to AES with a relatively random password at least 20 characters long.
Nov 11
ClaudeArticles, Ext JS, Framework, JavaScript, Presentation Ext JS, JavaScript, Library, Screencast
Jack Slocum has posted a screencast of the visual designer tool that will be part of upcoming release of Ext.
The roadmap for version 3, due out in the first quarter of 2009, has also been updated. Here is what we can expect (I am really interested in the ones in bold):
- All new lightweight, high-speed core base library
- Flash Charting API
- Ext.Direct – Remoting and data streaming/comet support
- Integrated client-server data binding/marshaling of updates
- ListView component
- Enhanced Button and Toolbar components
- ARIA/Section 508 accessibility improvements
- CSS updates for reset style scoping and easier custom theming
- Update the Ext event registration model
- Ext.Ajax enhancements
Oct 29
ClaudeArticles, Ext JS, Tutorials Ext JS, Tutorials
Chris Boersma posted this example of using TaskRunner and TaskManager to keep a user informed while a task is handled server-side.
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