Is the Government ready for an Internet attack?
An interesting simulated test is being done by the CIA and other government officials. They are running a simulated cyber attack that is based 5 years into the future and testing their skills on preventing it. Very interesting, if you ask me. Not sure what exactly this will tell since it is all simulated and may not have the randomness of a true hack but it will be interesting to see how the government responds to it.
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,102065,00.html
Assignment 4: Article Review
Writing Secure Web Applications
http://www.advosys.ca/papers/web-security.html#log
Based on what we have learned about the majority of the web using the lamp architecture, the security problems that this article points out is a very useful resource for everyone to go back and read. Even with these risks being documented across the internet and have even caused damage to sites, it is still very easy to just be a lazy programmer and not make sure that every security hole is fixed. Perhaps one reason these security flaws are not always on the front page of one’s to-do list, is that with web applications, an individual can quickly make the change if someone finds the flaw. This way of thought though is obviously not correct as financial lost could be a hard hit to face. I feel that the article best sums up this fact in its summary regarding closing the “barn door” Security needs to be covered on all fronts from the roof to the floor so that the barn can be completely secured on all fronts. Why even bother with the rest if your going to leave the door open to do what every a hacker would want to!
How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation
http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_evaluation.html
This paper is a very interesting read and discusses how Heuristic Evaluation improves the evaluation benefits in both cost and finding usability issues. Usability issues the paper says can not all be discovered no matter how good an individual evaluator is or how many evaluators you have. It comes out to be a fine balance of cost and usability improvements on the web site in the evaluation process. The number that the paper noted where the cost benefits and issues found was with 5 testers. I am interested if other research shows different results in this balance based on different test groups. Still though, I see how the balance of more people looking at entire website and not being stuck in one spot would allow more issues to be found as each person would be able to see the site from a different view point. Once the numbers of group members grows, from my own team experience the results become a much slower process, so I do agree with the concept of this balance
Oh google, when will you stop amazing me
This is big news even though it is old to yahoo and other portal pages. Google has unleashed its next small project at www.google.com/ig If you already have google mail, you already have an account to cusomised a homepage [its what google is calling it]. It allows you to add your gmail account, misc news feeds, weather, stocks etc... It offers a nice clean interface with out all the yahoo clutter. Once you have the homepage set up, try clicking and dragging one of the sections to another part of the sections, and it will allow you to place the section layout where ever you want them.
-very nice must be another example of AJAX as an early post I made references the architecture.
Well I like it, so you may want to give it a try.
MidTerm Completed Last Week
Last week, our class held the midterm exam. I have mixed feelings about the exam as for the most part I recalled the topics but not sure how well I put my thoughts into words. I ended up finding myself spending much longer on the exam then I should have since I rewrote most of my answers a few times... I really do need to get visio on my home machine. Its alright doing some simple drawings during lunch but it doesn't help when I want to do a quick drawing for homework at night.
I hadn't posted anything in awhile and just felt like posting :)
LAMP Diagram
Lamp Architecture with Outside Sequence 
Lamp stands for Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP. This achitecture is a common architecture for e-commerce sites and web sites in general. Based on my own background, I would the area in grey is the true software diagram of the Lamp architecture which the grey area represents one server [but can just as easily be multiple servers depending on need] The Os of the server is Linux that has the three other software application running on top of it. The three applications communicate with each other on the same level hence they are shown to be next to each other on the diagram. The communication between each of these will be done through http requests that was orginated from the home user requesting service.
