The VP Geek Speaks

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.

Links Not Working? Check AdBlock Plus

It turns out that the issues with useForcedLinkTracking are not isolated just to Safari’s popup blocker. Unfortunately, one of the most popular browser for both Chrome and Firefox, AdBlock Plus is subject to this issue as well.

One of the things that the AdBlock Plus plugin does is attempt to intercept any and all link traffic to determine whether it was created from an actual mouse click or if it was triggered through JavaScript as part of a marketing campaign. When used on a site with Adobe’s SiteCatalyst analytics with useForcedLinkTracking turned on and target="_blank" set in the hyperlink, you will trigger the issue. If you run into this issue, you can fix it by:

Write Software for People, Not Computers

Throughout a normal day, I end up reading a lot of information about current issues in technology, and today is no different. There was a debate raging about whether or not high-level math was required for programmers that was sparked by this article by Sarah Mei Programming is not math. While it is an interesting topic, and, surprisingly, I mostly agree with Sarah on this issue, that is not the most important portion of her post. The important part is instead a quote from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs from MIT Press, and is as follows:

The Easiest Way to Create A Solution That Works

The easiest way to create a solution that works…is to do it right the first time. Yes, this is a bit of a cop-out, but it turns out to be an important factor to keep in mind when you are tempted to come up with a quick and dirty solution for a problem that does not follow established best practices and is likely to have code quality issues later.

I have run across many sections of code that I or other developers have written in the past that we thought were “good enough” at the time it was written, yet, I was revisiting the code because we discovered a bug in it. Many times, this code had an issue that would have been trivial to fix at the time it was written, if it were only found. It seems that as a developer, we tend to find the least sufficient solution that will solve the immediate problem we are experiencing instead of finding an optimal solution that will be easily maintained months and years after it was written.

Performance Testing with Siege

One of the most important things to consider when evaluating a website is how well the site performs under load. For many eCommerce websites, there is a higher volume of traffic to the website on Cyber Monday, which is the Monday after Thanksgiving. One of the sites I work with typically sees traffic to its site quadruple on this one day of the year compared to the average traffic. However, when you anticipate something on your site making it to the front page of Digg or Slashdot, your site can easily see a jump of an order of magnitude (10X) or more.

Estimating Software Development Projects is Hard

As a software developer, working with non-technical management and end users to define a deadline for when a project will be ready to use or how long it will take from start to end of a project is an extremely complex task. Unfortunately, the non-technical audience thinks that it should be simple to give some sort of estimation on the fly without detailed analysis of the project and what it involves, as it seems simple for them to estimate tasks that are like ones they have done before.