C’mon now we’ve all seen them, maybe even written some, those horrible examples of user interfaces. I’m talking about REALLY bad, like bad combinations of colors, fonts too small to read, forms so crowded you can’t make sense of anything. Meaningless error messages are also fair game.
Why does he want that stuff you ask? Well, I’m giving a talk on the importance of GOOD user interfaces and need some examples of what not to do.
So send me your tired, your huddled mass yearning to be… oh, wait a minute wrong speech.
Spent all day yesterday at Dev Days Hartford. Carl Franklin, my employer, spoke on a number of smart client topics but I attended the web security track lead by Pat Hynds.
I thought some of the stats listed were startling. A full 90% of companies had a security breach in the past year but only 30% of them reported it! Manipulation of session management was responsible for 79% of those breaches.
A number of vulnerabilities were discusses along with ways to prevent them. One idea I had never thought of was to use regular expressions to scrub user input, remember all user input is guilty until proved innocent!
The OpenHack application was also reviewed. This app has survived 80,000 plus hack attempts and has not been breached.
You can read more here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/openhack.asp
-D
I have been working with GDI+ in .NET to build a photo manipulation app for a client. Some of you may remember an old commercial for tomato sauce (I think) where one guy would name an ingredient and the other guy would say “It's in there” again and again and again. That's how I felt working with the image class. I was already to brush off the math for matrix transformation to do various tasks but it was already built into the image class. Rotate an image, “It's in there“ (Image.RotateFlip), create a thumbnail “It's in there“ (Image.GetThumbnailImage), etc.
Also being able to save not just to a file but to Response.Outputstream opens up a lot of possiblities.
I'll post more as this app progresses.
-D
Just read a great article in Scientific American about the “Robot Race” that DARPA is sponsoring. A robot vehicle must follow a 200 mile course through the Mojave desert in 10 hours or less. Having worked on robot arms and robot vision systems in my college days I can appreciate how hard this is!
The article followed the team from Carnegie Mellon that took an old Humvee and equipped it with four 3 GHz dual processors Xeon and one 4 processor Itanium system with a combination GPS, radar, stereo camera and laser range finder. WOW talk about compute power!
The race will be held March 13, 2004
Part of the article can be read at
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000942F6-DBA9-101E-990A83414B7F0123
Well hello to all, I've joined the world of blogs. Having read Scoble's, Carl Franklin's and others for awhile it was time to have my own.
So who am I?
Check out www.franklins.net/staff.asp and scroll down to Dennis “Dino“ Perlot for a brief bio.
In a nutshell, I love VB.NET. Having written code in everything from assembler to LISP and Prolog I can't over how quickly you can get applications built with .NET.
One of my favorite things is inheritance. Just one example: I was working with the calendar control and it was choking on null values for date fields from my database. Now I don’t want to have to add code to check for nulls every time I had this issue. So I created my own calendar control (inheriting from the one supplied with Visual Studio) and overrode the value property, dropped my null check in there along with a default value setting via a app.config parameter and it was all over for null db values!
Well that’s all for now, got to get ready to go see the Harlem Globetrotters with my son.
Later
-Dino
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