Over the years the display size of the average computer screen has increased. As a consequence nowadays more and more websites are designed with a 1024 width screen in mind. For example: BBC, Adobe and The New York Times. With at least 78% of the users using a 1024 or higher resolution screen the time seems right to move away from the 800px designs. But what about accessibility? And usability? And is full page zooming really better than text scaling?
…Yesterday I attended a presentation showcasing Drupal. Like Joomla! and WordPress an easy install routine presents the user with a lot of functionality right out of the box. By adding modules as needed one can achieve whatever he wants. So it seems… After the showcase part, the session continued into a case study. The case at hand was a project were all sorts of specific functionality (think: facebook, digg, etc. web 2.0 you know) was required. And it didn’t go as smooth and quick as expected. How come?
…Last week I read an article on webwereld titled ‘2008 was year of the SQL injection attack‘. It was based on an article with the same title on networkworld.com. Apparently SQL injection has taken over the lead from XSS. Not surprisingly the first user-comment stated that almost 100% of the exploits were certainly in PHP applications written by would-be programmers. With things so obvious it’s of course unneccessary to provide factual data backing up such a statement. So, nothing to win in that discussion. Three days ago news came that a customer database of Kaspersky was hacked. By using SQL injection. On a PHP website. Could commenter X be right?
…Past saturday (february 7th) I visited Engineering World, a conference organised by Sogeti, as both attendant and speaker. With my colleague Richard de Vries I delivered a presentation on the topic usability. I attended some interesing presentations of which two were about methodologies: One about SCRUM and the closing keynote by Ian Spence of Ivar Jacobsen International about Agile. The latter with all of the myths about Agile (Doesn’t matter where the team is going, as long as it’s going somewhere) being tackled in true Mythbuster fashion.…
Although my blog was ready for quite some time I had some trouble getting my domain to point at it. The main problem was getting control over the DNS settings as tibobeijen.nl was originally registered with a shared hosting company. At that time a viable solution as registering a .nl domain used to be limited to companies. Although the whole procedure was a bit sluggish it’s finally complete. Kuddo’s to my friends at Yuna for providing quality hosting.…
Last saturday (2009 jan 24th) I attended the phpGG Frontend Special. phpGG stands for ‘PHP Gebruikersgroep’ which translates to ‘PHP user group’. The meeting was held in a nice little theater in The Hague and was attended by what looked like about 50 people. The four main presentations scheduled:
Today I stumbled across an interesting new Firefox extension: FireScope. It’s developed by Sitepoint, a site I visit regularly. I was aware of their reference material on html, css and javascript and now they use that content to feed this extension. FireScope is an extension to Firebug, assumably known and installed by anyone interested in FireScope. On the official firefox add-ons page it has the status ‘experimental’ and hence requires logging in.…
Following my first post on the MSDN inTrack day I’ll now cover the second half of the day. The two topics featured were the presentation side of things and the Microsoft Live platform.
…Last week I attended a one-day Microsoft event about what the Microsoft platform has to offer for PHP developers. Four topics were covered: MS Server 2008 � IIS 7, SQL Server, Presentation and the Live platform. As was explicitly mentioned, the event wasn’t about ‘learning PHP’ but about ‘what’s in store’. It seems like Microsoft takes PHP’s growth seriously . In this first post I’ll cover IIS and SQL Server 2008.
…A couple of days ago I attended a presentation titled ‘WPF in LOB applications’. Without the abbreviations that would be ‘Windows Presentation Foundation in Line Of Business applications’. It was just an overview but some interesting points were mentioned. First of all, it was explained that Microsoft Silverlight is a web-based subset of WPF. Now that places things in perspective for the web-minded. Then there was some coverage on XAML, a markup language used to develop interfaces, thereby separating business from logic.…