Eyes (by alaric)

When I was quite young (5 or so?) I remember having conjunctivitis - rather vividly, since it involved my eyes being stuck shut in the mornings and having to be cleaned out by my mother before I could open them. And, alas, I have it again; this morning, my wife had to clean my eyes up before I could see...

So when I could see well enough, we went and got this 'eye ointment' stuff that she had to put in my eyes (holding me down as she did it!), and afterwards, my eyes felt very sensitive so I sat there for some time with them closed.

This brought to mind a long-running area of interest of mine, which is the design of computer interfaces that are usable to the blind. I only see usefully with one eye anyway, so if anything should happen to the other eye, my career in software development will rather depend on such software...

My Story Line for Tron 2 (by sarah)

First of all for those who don't know about Tron! This is a story about how a little bit of each programmer ends up in the program - towit - little versions of the programmer are running around in an electric world - which is very pretty and very styalised and very cool. This was one of my favourite films as a kid - me and my brother begged for fresbys so we could throw them at each other! Of course David always cheated 🙂

I would keep the Tron world pretty similar to the origional to be honest. The parts of the film in the electronic world have not dated unlike the 'real world' scense. I would not however have the main interface as vedeo games as they are too realistic these days - ie no more space invaders and more actually people running around which just wont work! Back then most people didnt really have a concept of computers but they did (if young enough) know about vedeo games and arcades - this is not the case today. My Beavers know more about how to us a computer than many of our helpers and they are only six!

Having said this I think that having the tanks and thing from the first film would still be plusable as it is part of the Tron world - especially as you could show 'retro gaming' (ok I made that phrase up) as fore shadowing - I know lots of people who hunt down the old style games - its sort of afashion thing so no problem there!

As it would probably be a PG made by Disney or Pixa I would have the main protagonist as a young teenager - simpky becuase many people are programmers as adults but a kid who mucks about in their spare time and is intelligent can still be as good as someone coming out of uni with a computing degree!

Throw in some family issue - say perant divorce or some such and have the perant/s work for some big science industry thingy. Have someone have to work late or take the kid in during the holidays and sit them at a terminal etc... etc... Now how to get them into the computer and why that needs a bit more work. But instead of lasers like the first film you coould have nano tech but this I feel would be parralleling too much with the origonal so why not have it as a new uploading your concousness technology. Put helmet on and wam - your in the system in a little glowing cuicritry outfit.

Now what the intrege would be I havent thought up yet but the world itself would be like Tron only bigger with more and different things like the solar sailor - there is the internat and intranets all of which are considerably bigger than when Tron was made. I feel that fire walls would be a fun thing to represent as would the nasty things like worms, viruses etc... I realise that this is where the artists and the computing people would probably start arguing 🙂

Ok so this isnt really a story line I realise that but its an idea, a concept but I bet it'll be made with too flashy graphics and be too paralelled with the first one - sigh.

Oh of course the kid would meet versions of the adults in the system and so learn lots about them in real life - blah blah blah!

Feel free to post your suggestions for a Tron 2 as a comment 🙂

DDOS Attack – why the Salaric Shops not Working (by sarah)

Mew :'(

The reason that my shop has not been working - is that Cafe Press are experiancing a Targeted Distrabuted Denial of Service!

This is bad especially at christmas - those of you that managed to actually view the site I'd linked to may have seen the complete hash of it, that occured becuase I was trying to add a section when the service went 'intermittent'. I have not been able to go and change it as my site isnt up long enough to do so!

But at least I have that much access many have none at all. I am lucky in that this is not my main source of income - infact I have yet to make any money from it at all, but for many it is their livily hood - not to mention the Cafe Press people themselves.

As they cannot get any information out like credit card numbers I woundered why someone would bother with this unless they hated a site - what I've found out makes me sad.

ie someone out there must be using lots of computers to target the server(s) to bring it down - their are two other reasons I can think of why someone would do this - ones blackmail - ie pay us or we wont stop doing this or to destroy a competitor just as you launch! Internet businesses have fickle customers - if the site is down you go and find another!

Mew mew mew 🙁

Going Live! (by alaric)

It's not often that I get to actually write about my work other than tangentially, since it's usually somebody's trade secret, but for a long time now I've been doing the technical architecture and some of the programming for an actual publically viewable web site; and it's been under wraps during development, but now the site is soft-launching, I can start telling people about it.

The implementation of Web applications (by alaric)

I first started Web app development in PHP in 1998. Although PHP as a programming language has many, many, shortfalls, the fundamental model - take an HTML file, change its file extension to bring it to the attention of the PHP module, then stick bits of code in where needed - was great... for the kinds of pages that are the results of simple GET requests; idempotent data-gathering. Code that's purely functional, at least macroscopically.

However, once you started bringing forms beyond search boxes into the mix, things started to go downhill. This first struck me when I had to develop a series of pages that allowed people to register domain names. At the time, this required gathering four sets of contact details (legal registrant, administrative contact, billing contact, and technical contact), along with some technical details. Since, most of the time, all of these sets of contact details would be one and the same, it was decided that we'd start off with a page with a form for the legal registrant's details, and this would have a "Next" button leading to a page with a form for the administrative contact's details, plus a button that would invoke Javascript to fill the form with the legal registrant's details so they could be submitted as-is or modified slightly (perhaps a different person's name, at the same company and postal address), then submitted with a "Next" button that led to the next set of contact details, this time with buttons to prefill with the legal registrant's details or, if they differed, the administrative contact's details. And so on.

And, of course, there was validation; any of these "Next" buttons might well instead bring you back to the page you just came from, with an error flagged, rather than to the next page.