Mar 12, 2012
I’ve been hearing a lot about Google’s privacy policy a lot recently. There’s been a lot of Google smoothing it over, and a lot of uninformed people telling me it’s going to result in mandatory computer chips for all newborn babies. I wanted to try and cut through the mess and get the actual details [...]
Mar 5, 2012
Password1. Thr article says this is most likely your password. 5% of all passwords are something similar; maybe a little different, but not different enough. This password is so common because it fits the requirements for a strong password: see the capital and the number? Clearly, that’s not enough. Brute force hacks happen frequently. This [...]
Feb 27, 2012
The journal linked below talks about development strategies for web sites. They term the default non-strategy “ad-hoc” development, which is characterized by a person-to-person development process where plans are made up on the spot between customer and developer. This method is messy, and a lot of problems can arise from thinking in the short term. [...]
Feb 19, 2012
The journal I read covered the basics on modern Javascript. We know that the language is a scripting language (rather than a coding language) that was developed more than a decade ago. As developers make better and better websites, Javascript has been relegated to a second-class language. It’s typically regarded as a toy, and non-essential [...]
Feb 6, 2012
Hot on the heels of America’s SOPA bill, some legislation from the European Union is polarizing web developers and law makers. Most controversial of this new legislation is the “right to be forgotten” rule. This rule states that, under certain conditions, it’s mandatory for companies and data mining industries to delete all information on customers [...]
Jan 30, 2012
The linked article explains that SOPA, the recent anti-piracy bill that got shut down before it could make any change, was driven by “old media” companies who opposed pirating. They used lobbying and similar tactics, to the tune of millions of dollars. In contrast, very little was spent from the anti-SOPA side. So what caused [...]
Jan 15, 2012
We keep seeing fancy gadgets for new cars. They rarely amount to anything useful, but they do tend to be interesting. An upcoming feature that several car manufacturers want to implement is augmented reality windshields. For those not familiar, AR takes images of the real world, and imposes computer images on top. So what does [...]
Nov 27, 2011
Data warehouses are large stores of raw data. They collect information relevant to a business and store them in a central, lesser-normalized database. The result is one big collection of data, that can be processed through queries. They’re used more for business practices, rather than keeping information on a business’s doings. The important components of [...]
Nov 20, 2011
The listed article goes on, in length, about how the access layer and database layer of a database application work together. Database applications have been in heavy use for decades, and DBMS have made their scripting increasingly more different. Over the long period of time, this has caused more and more separation between DBMS’s, and [...]
Nov 14, 2011
In the past week, we’ve seen yet another major database fall to hacking. This time, it’s Valve’s Steam gaming client. There hasn’t been much of any information regarding the hackers (if anything, they’ll probably get lumped in with Anonymous) or what methods they used. While Steam uses an e-mail based security system, critical information was [...]
Nov 6, 2011
Security and databases. If you scroll through the posts, you’ll see these are pretty common topics. This time, we’re talking about a database OF security. More specifically, YOUR security. Pwnedlist.com is a new database containing millions of e-mails that have been hacked. No, it’s not another text dump for hackers. The database was created by [...]
Oct 30, 2011
Cassandra was an open-source database program put together by Facebookers in 2008. Apache picked it up, and asked people what they’d like to see out of it. Three years later, we’re finally seeing Version 1.0. While the program has been in use for large companies (it’s especially popular with corporate giants), it’s only now going [...]
Oct 23, 2011
Google very recently announced their new database service, Google Cloud SQL. The cool thing about it is, it works entirely on Google’s servers. They provide database management, maintenance, and importing services. The service is only available to certain developers, but once it’s out of beta, they’ll set a price point, and Google will be running [...]
Oct 16, 2011
Climate Corporation is an insurance company that bases their insurance model on the weather; say, if a ski resort requires snow to be an effective business, they might rely on Climate Corporation’s insurance. The impressive thing about Climate Corporation is that the database used to determine insurance rates was created by two ex-Google employees, using [...]
Oct 9, 2011
Last year, Wikileaks (the wiki for any and all leaked information) came into possession of “hundred of thousands” of classified documents from the White House that revealed faulty security measures. After a long reviewing process, they plan on patching the associated security holes. As it turns out, the security provided for computers used by the [...]
Oct 2, 2011
Percona, a popular provider of independent SQL services, has recently announced a new version for their software. This new version entails a shift from disk-written processes to in-server processes. This means a small reduction in the use of RAM–a must for larger databases. Percona’s shift to server services has been due to the resulting increased [...]
Oct 2, 2011
Oracle is likely to unveil their noSQL servers next week. Oracle produces popular database software, but is one of the later adopters of the noSQL movement. The problem with SQL is that a database that incorporates its use are less flexible and also run slower; naturally, databases have been migrating to other tools. For Oracle, [...]
