Illusion had been one of my favorite topic of interests.  It is fascinating how sometimes mind interprets three dimensions and shades. Sometimes you are fooled to think that something exists when it is really not.  This site on “Optical illusions” contains seven trucks painted with illusionary effects. I am sure people on the street have to look carefully to not to be fooled.

Happy weekend!

With the help of AltaVista’s Bable Fish, I have added an addition to TechMasala.  TechMasala can be translated into six languages with a click on the country flag in the BableFish section (look at the sidebar).

I am sure you must have been a victim of email spamming if you have exposed your mail id in a site. Though there are spam blockers that come with the hosting/email provider still it is not 100% foolproof. A better way is to mask your email and present. There are few ways of doing it. “Great ways to mask your email” has few ideas to mask your email when you are exposing it on a site.

In some of my earlier posts we have seen that JavaScript vulnerabilities could cause havoc, particularly if JavaScript in one application opened in a browser window is able to access the data of an application opened up in another browser window. That was one type of vulnerability and there were more that were formed as a security policy by Netscape when it introduced JavaScript on its browser. These policies to avoid such vulnerabilities were coined with the name Cross Site Scripting (CSS, usually confused with Cascading Style Sheets). The types of CSS and explanation of each of them is available on the wikipedia. Fortunately a lot of these policies are implemented in the browsers so we do not need to do anything from the application side. A little old but a worth reading whitepaper “Cross Site Scripting Explained” has explained CSS in a neat way and how to check if your site is protected from it.

In software development, analysis paralysis is getting paralyzed doing only analysis and never coming to a decision. It is quite a common scene during the early stages of the project trying to find out everything in the beginning and lose the time. This would end up in a crunch situation. Agile and eXtreme programming practices preach that some output be generated every day. Which means whatever information is available try and make something out it. Changes are applied incrementally and as and when required. This also makes the team focus on what information is available and only look at that piece of it rather than looking at the whole system in one shot.

I stumbled upon this site that has reproduced a 1980 Ad. “The early hard drive ads” really made me look back from where we came in technology. The ad seems to boast about the performance and capacity of the hard disk which is really true at that time. In two and half decades the multitude of technology growth is evident, now even if you want you cannot buy a medium with a capacity of 18 MB unless and otherwise specifically manufactured. Probably another two and half decades later you or I might laugh at this same post.

With Ruby on Rails (ROR) getting so much popularity recently, I am sure any techie would have had this thought, but for how complex projects can ROR support? How about enterprise applications? You would also get the answer that any language/technology would take its own time to mature and be ready for any type of problem/complexity. Said that there is also a question should it really meet all complexity requirements? I think a variety of language/technology choices for different complexity level of projects is always better than any language/technology choice trying to mature and cover up all problem spaces. Anyway here is an article in enterprise open source journal on “Bringing Ruby to the enterprise” that talks about where Ruby stands.

Internet is so common now that for most of us it is difficult to live without it.  With high network bandwidth becoming common it has reached even the common man who does not know computers.  Developers are dependent on it as solutions to the problems are available most of the time.  It is like minds working together helping each other.  For such breathtaking technology advancement it is worth understanding the history behind internet.  Here is “A Brief History of Internet” from the Internet Society.