The VP Geek Speaks

Apple's iPhone Announcement is a Big Deal for T-Mobile

Every year, we are treated to a big show from Apple about what the next iPhone will be like, and how magical it actually is. In case you have been living under a rock, this major Apple annoucement is one of the largest news-making fancy press-conferences you will see these days. It used to be this way when Microsoft would launch a new operating system, remember that launch announcement and launch party for Windows XP? What about for Windows 8? Oh yeah, these announcements are only a big deal when you are the dominant force in the marketplace instead of trying to play catch-up in all areas because your technology is old.

T-Mobile Buckles Under iPhone 6 PreOrders

When you are one of the major US carriers that allows its customers to pre-order the new Apple iPhone 6 and Apple iPhone 6 Plus, you would think that you would make sure your internal systems were up to snuff before the pre-order deadline. Well, as luck would have it, when September 12, 2014 rolled around, it turns out that many T-Mobile customers were out of luck when they went to try to pre-order the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Parallax Background Scrolling on Internet Explorer is Not Smooth

One of the pleasures of working on a website that is using some of the latest technologies is that you often run into strange compatability issues that only affect one browser or another, and many of the forums have little to no information about how to properly address the issues. Parallax scrolling is a technique that has been around for a while now, highlighted by Apple’s own iPhone 5s card-esque scrolling on their homepage, among others. While the site I am working on does not have as elaborate a parallax implementation, it does not work instantly across browsers by default either.

5 Ways to Keep Your Nude Pictures Secure

With the recent revelation that there was a massive release of naked or revealing photographs of many female celebrities, it seems to be an important time to remind people how to make sure private photos and other information don’t get shared all around the internet without your permission. As a result, here are my top 5 ways to keep your nude pictures secure.

1. Don’t Take Nude Selfies - Yes, the best and easiest way to keep your naked selfies out of the sight for the public viewers on the internet is to never take a naked selfie in the first place. Just don’t do it.

   #rant #security

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Visual Studio 2013 EditorPackage Did Not Load Correctly

One of the things that continually conspires to drive me away from Microsoft products and towards those that are free and open source are the random bugs that pop up from time to time in their incredibly expensive software. The other day, I had to restart my Windows development system and discovered I had an issue when I tried to start Visual Studio 2013. When Visual Studio tried to start and open any files that had been previously open or that I wanted to open for the first time, I got this error message: The ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.Editor.Implementation.EditorPackage’ package did not load correctly.

Quality Comments Welcome

One of the things, among many, that has been missing from this blog from its beginning has been the inability for users to post comments to articles in the blog. Ghost was created to allow bloggers and writers to focus directly on writing with as few distractions as possible. This is in stark contrast to the way WordPress was created where anyone running a site had to be immersed in the functionality of WordPress themes and extensions to have a fully-functional website.

Google Chrome Makes Web Developers Lazy

This post may make me sound ancient in the world of web development, but here it comes anyway.

Like Microsoft, Google has decided to implement functionality in their dominant browser that is incompatible with the other major competing browsers.

When I first started developing websites professionally, ensuring a website worked for 99% of the site’s visitors was easy, relatively, as you only needed to make sure the site worked in Internet Explorer 6. Obviously, there were a ton of random hacks and tricks required to deal with the quirks of this browser, but you were fairly safe knowing you had developed your site to be tailored to the browser of choice for your visitors. However, the dominance of Internet Explorer 6 was bound to come to an end and it ushered in an era of multiple popular browsers including Firefox and Chrome. With no single browser having a massive advantage in terms of users in all areas, web developers had to make sure that thorough testing of their sites was completed in each of the major browsers.

PHP serialize/unserialize is faster than json_encode/json_decode

One of the things that I tend to focus on with a website is how quickly everything loads and executes. However, that focus can sometimes get to be a bit too narrow, only considering the performance of those resources that are required for the initial page load, and not for other dynamic aspects of the site. We recently implemented New Relic on one site, and gained much insight into how long each aspect of our site took to load, and how long each of the most popular requests took to execute.

IE 10 Text Box Clear Button Covers Text

When working on a project that required quantities to be entered into a text box and displayed aligned to the right of the text box, I ran across a peculiar issue. If the text box had focus, a new button appeared in the text box that would allow the user to completely clear the contents of the text box. When focus moved to another element on the page, the clear button disappeared, but part of the right side of the text that was previously displayed in the text box disappeared as well. If you were to inspect that element’s value via JavaScript, you would discover that the data was still intact, and that only its display was affected.

Hackers Exploiting Gullible Magento Site Administrators

Nexcess recently released a report of a Recent Exploit using Fake Magento Extensions was able to skim credit card information from affected Magento websites. While it seems that some of the stores were breached by correctly guessing simple admin usernames and passwords, others seemed to be the result of site administrators installing Magento Extensions that included backdoors that gave the hackers remote access to the website. Once the backdoor was installed, the hackers went on to modify core Magento files, ensuring that when a credit card order was placed, the credit card information would be saved to a text file that was hidden with an image file name extension .jpg, .gif, .bmp and saved in the /media directory, allowing the hackers, and anyone else on the internet to download the credit card information.