Adrian Holovaty is looking for information on how to run a state of the art browser engine in a headless fashion. Basically he wants programmatic access to all of the DOM information that you can get at through Firebug (or any decent DOM inspector). I don’t know what he’s using it for, but you could use such a system to write an awesome testing tool. I suspect the overhead would not be worth it for most projects. ...
The 1984 Ferrari 308 that Edmunds has been testing for the past year is for sale. They purchased it for $28,000 and spent $5,000 on repairs over the course of the year. Wonder how much they’ll get for it? Probably not as much as they get for the 2002 BMW M3 that the staffers have been raving about since January.
How does The Daily Show find all of those amazing clips of politicians saying stupid and contradictory thing? By tapping into the mind of one guy who has been with the show since the beginning. The Washington Post profiles Adam Chodikoff, the video producer for the show. It’s amazing what he does, when you think about it.
Since it was initially disclosed that the White House had lost millions of emails that were required by law to be archived, I’ve been wondering whether they were lost due to technical ineptitude or “lost” for political expedience. Ars Technica published an article today looking into that question. It looks like incompetence may have played a big part. The White House replaced Lotus Notes with Microsoft Exchange, and replaced the old archiving system with the “hey dude, make a backup every now and then” system. On the other hand, the habitual use of external email accounts by some White House staffers looks more suspicious: ...
Given how easy it is these days to outsource Web functionality that you once had to create for yourself, Wired Compiler asks whether the standalone personal Web site is an endangered species. Back in the day you had to install your own blog software, set up your own photo gallery, and take care of everything else on your own as well. These days it’s a lot easier to just upload your photos to Flickr, set up a blog on any number of free or paid blogging services, and keep track of your friends via any of a number of social networks. ...
Programming guru Donald Knuth on unit tests: As to your real question, the idea of immediate compilation and “unit tests” appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about. Nothing needs to be “mocked up.” If your name is not Donald Knuth, you must continue writing unit tests. ...
Looks like the misreporting of the mass SQL injection attack continues. The exploit is associated with MS SQL Server, not IIS or ASP. It’s confusing because most people run the full Microsoft stack, but the exploit will work against any site that does not prevent SQL injection and uses MS SQL as its database. (This misreporting was most recently seen at the Mass Attack FAQ at hackademix.net and Wired: Compiler. Also it’s worth noting that the best solution to this problem (noted in the comments on yesterday’s post by Simon Willison) is to use prepared statements to generate database statements rather than building them using string concatenation. ...
Seen linked on my Twitter stream: If your goal is to be a productive member of a community, avoid its advocacy groups From the comments at Chris Dolan’s journal.
I’ve been reading up on the mass SQL injection attack launched against servers running IIS and MS SQL Server last week. That article is a bit out of date, as the problem turned out not to be a security hole in IIS but rather security holes in the Web applications themselves. The script that compromised the sites was clever enough to probe for forms that didn’t prevent SQL injection, and injected SQL specifically designed to work with MS SQL. ...
Tyler Cowen in a post entitled Can we learn anything from the Democratic spat?: Nonetheless constructivist attempts to remake America will, by political debate, be reshaped along traditional fault lines. That means your good idea – be it libertarian, progressive, or whatever – had better be pretty robust to mangling by the stupid, the emotional, the cynical, and the ill-informed.