Byte Club by Nick Gibson

Nov 06

No, you can't have private attributes in Python

Is the lack of privacy a real shortcoming of the language, or is our judgment clouded by the old conventions of C++ and Java? Why do we need private variables anyway -- at what point does defensive programming become paranoia? In my last Python article I wrote a short implementation of a read only attribute in a Python class, whilst noting that if you were determined enough you could still change [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 8 comments

Tags: private, attribute, python

Oct 18

Web survey confirms the obvious

Web Design blog A List Apart has published the results of their first annual survey of web professionals, and the results should surprise absolutely nobody. I'll take this opportunity to break down the results (Warning: statistics ahead). The survey was comprised of 37 questions and receiving 33,000 responses and paints a graphic picture of the modern web designer: White male in their twenties [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 0 comments

Tags: design, survey, industry, gender, profession, web, salary

Oct 09

Schoolgirl builds SecondLife Web app

A new web application AjaxLife allows interaction with the online virtual world SecondLife. The cool part? It was developed in just a week by a fifteen year old English schoolgirl. AjaxLife's primary, and only, developer is Katharine Barry, who writes on her blog that she begun the project out of "boredom [and] wanting to talk to people in SL", but also to learn more about the technologies that [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 0 comments

Tags: web, ajax, development

Oct 04

Blogger declares shenanigans on advertisers -- piracy or plagiarism?

You might have heard about the recent controversy over a certain ad for electronics manufacturer Ricoh (YouTube) and the similiarities between it's dialogue and the lecture notes of MIT physics professor Scott Aaronson. If not, you can see it all unfold on his blog and the Sydney Morning Herald report on the matter. If the dialogue is indeed stolen, and this is not all some freakish coincidence, [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 0 comments

Tags: plagiarism, ip, blog, law

Sep 20

PowerBuilder hitches wagon to .NET

The recent release of Sybase's PowerBuilder rapid application development tool allows users of the toolkit to deploy applications on the .NET architecture. Will it be enough to regain their footing in the enterprise tool space, against the behemoths of Visual Studio and Eclipse? Potential targets for deployment now include both native windows applications through Winforms, and Web applications [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 1 comment

Tags: wpf, powerbuilder, rad, winforms, silverlight, .net, microsoft

Sep 13

QuickTime and Firefox combine for insecurity

A vulnerability in Apple Software's QuickTime media player can be exploited to execute remote javascript code, or by tapping into Firefox's chrome engine can execute remote code of any kind. This vulnerability has been described as being similiar to the QuickTime vulnerability that was behind the automated MySpace worm attack late last year. The vulnerability involves a flaw in the way QuickTime [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 0 comments

Tags: quicktime, vulnerability, worm, firefox, security

Sep 03

Ruby needs a facelift

The Ruby Association has announced a new competition to redesign the logo for the Ruby programming language. Contestants have until the end of the month to design a new logo that best represents the language. The current ruby logo, a cut red gemstone complete with web 2.0 style reflection, is simple and to the point. Personally I like it -- at least it's clearer than some others I could name (and [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 0 comments

Tags: logo, ruby, competition

Aug 27

Up to your eyebrows in free Lisp textbooks

If the internet has done anything, it's made people used to the idea of accessing information whenever and wherever they are, for free. There have been plenty of attempts to sell information -- or it's new incarnation, intellectual property -- over the internet, but consistently the market leaders in any category are the ones willing to give it away for free. The same is true of learning a new [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 1 comment

Tags: learn, lisp, textbook, resource, free

Aug 14

'Tis the season for Python hacking

Python founder and benevolent dictator Guido van Rossum, now of Google, announced on the Python developer lists the second annual Python Sprint at Google. The coding workshop is to take place in both the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California and in their Chicago offices over the weekend of the 22-25 of August. "The primary goal is to work on Python 3000, to polish off the first alpha [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 0 comments

Tags: 3000, sprint, python, google

Aug 10

Free AntiVirus beats all comers in AntiVirus fight club

A rare AntiVirus accuracy competition was conducted at Linuxworld this week, and the results should come as a blow to the paid antivirus industry. Run by delegates from the untangle network gateway, the competition should provide ammunition to critics of the idea that good virus protection cannot be provided for nothing. The results (with pretty graphs) can be found here. The test benchmarked ten [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 13 comments

Tags: antivirus, kaspersky, clamav, norton, benchmark, test, open source

Jul 23

We don't need an eBay for security holes

It's been likened to an eBay for hackers -- new security site WabiSabiLabi is a market place for auctioning security vulnerabilities. If you visit the market place right now you too can bid on a remote code vulnerability in a linux package, or a buffer overflow in OpenOffice for just the low, low price of 2 thousand Euros. Does this make anyone else out there really uneasy? It strikes me as a [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 0 comments

Jul 16

5 reasons restricting hacking is not like gun control

If you're not aware, in late May the German government passed a law making the possession of "computer programs whose aim is to commit a crime" illegal -- a crime punishable with up to a year of jail time. Thereby treating computer programs in just the same way as guns. One translation of the law is as follows: Whoever prepares a crime according to §202a or §202b and who creates, obtains or provides [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 12 comments

Tags: hacking, law, security

Jul 06

Just how much memory is Firefox using?

It's a fact of life that whatever you do in I.T. chances are you'll be spending a fair chunk of your day in the browser - checking your email, browsing for technical info, checking your email, scanning the top stories on digg or slashdot and checking your email. The tool of choice for many (just over 40% of you, according to our logs) is Mozilla's Firefox browser, variously because it's free, [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 14 comments

Tags: ram, memory, cache, mozilla, firefox

Jul 03

iPhone root password cracked in three days

It's been out just three days, but already the Apple iPhone has been taken apart both literally and figuratively. The latest: inquisitive Apple fans have hacked into the firmware and discovered the master root password to the smart phone. The information came from an an official Apple iPhone restore image (rename as a zip file and extract). The archive contains two .dmg disk images: a password [...] Read more »

-- posted by Nick Gibson | 53 comments