“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

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.

Seen at the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog.

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.

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.

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

The “user’s choice” for application servers, according to more than 700 software developers, include two of the oldest — one might say mature — and one relative newcomer.

In this survey, Adobe ColdFusion, Red Hat JBoss and Sun Java System Application Server/GlassFish also earned high marks from their users.

Adobe ColdFusion has a long history. Originally introduced by Allaire, it was acquired by Macromedia, then became part of Adobe in yet another acquisition. ColdFusion version 8.0 was released in July 2007, featuring Microsoft .NET integration, integration with Adobe Acrobat forms, and enhanced performance. ColdFusion scored best with developers for its scalability, support and security.

The true nature of Web development is a complicated metric to gauge without being in the field for many years, and without reading about and listening to thousands who are in the field with you. It can be a frustrating experience for any one person graduating college and starting their career, or wanting to transition into a separate discipline. I decided to try and change that with some personal reflection.

Information Architecture

Information architects had previously performed the role of business analyst or programmer, but the field has centered fundamentally now around library and information sciences practices. Several veterans began their career focusing on an entirely separate discipline, but graduates entering the field will usually have a strong focus on behavioural sciences like psychology, sociology, or a degree in human-computer interaction. The role is often given to those demonstrating a high capacity for organizing information in a fashion that benefits profiled groups of users.

Web Design

There is a misnomer in the field that Web designers must be practitioners of client-side programming, standards and accessibility. However, this continues to be the result of an outspoken minority who claim to speak for a vast majority. The reality is that many very successful Web designers understand the medium and the constraints without ever touching code. It is simply that more individuals have chosen to branch out, and there is no indication of competence as a Web designer with respect to client-side development skills.

Client-side Programming

Client-side programming (or scripting) has become a mixed-bag of sorts, and can be masked behind several titles like Front-end Developer, Web Developer and even Web Designer. In the early days of the profession, a basic knowledge of HTML could land you a well-paid position. This is no longer the case, and the best client-side programmers are experts with XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, ActionScript, XML, standards, accessibility, have a very firm grasp of design theory, and often have some basic experience with a server-side language like PHP, Ruby, Java, or C#.

Server-side Programming

There are several titles for this discipline, which include Programmer, Software Engineer and Web Developer to name a few. The field has seen numerous changes over the last five years, and it covers a broad spectrum of languages, platforms, technologies and frameworks. More than any other discipline, this one has the greatest number of passionate voices, who often grasp onto a concept and never seem to let go. It is highly competitive, stressful, and regularly requires “work” outside of work.

UPDATE:I’ve created a tutorial that uses the latest version of the extension and Ext-JS.

Ext.ns('Sample');
Sample.ExtGMap = function() {

	var el = 'ext-map';

	function _init() {

		new Ext.Panel({
			renderTo: el,
			layout: 'fit',
			height: 300,
			hideLabel: true,
			items: [
		        {
		        	xtype: 'gmappanel',
		        	gmapType: 'map',
		        	zoomLevel: 14,
		            setCenter: {
		        		lat: 40.782686,
		        		lng: -73.96524,
			            marker: {
		        			title: 'Central Park'
			            }
			        }
		        }
			]
		});

	}

	return {
		init: _init
	}

}();
Ext.onReady(Sample.ExtGMap.init, Sample.ExtGMap);

Configuration options:

It’s just as easy to create a Google map window that maps addresses and places markers at their locations (which could just as easily be nested in a layout instead).

A couple of the primary Google maps handlers and settings are setup as configuration options. For instance, ‘addControl’ allows adding of a standard Google map control (zoom, pan, etc) and the ‘zoomLevel’ sets a default zoom level for the map.

Geocoding can be used by substituting the lat/long configuration options with a ‘geoCodeAddr’ string.

The ’setCenter’ configuration allows the default center location of the map to be set, along with a marker. More markers can be added to the map using the ‘markers’ array.