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July 2008, a new limit reached!

I heard of Voyager 2 and the fact that it was still functional: 30 years after it left Earth! Just that is amazing to me.

The craft went through the termination shock several times now (5 if I’m correct). This is far. Further away from the Sun than Pluto. And Pluto is on average around 39.5 AU from the Sun. It is even further than Eris and Eris lies at about 67 AU on average.

Amazon Checkout and Simple Pay

This week, Amazon published a brand new set of tools for merchants. We already had PayPal and Google Checkout, now we have the same with Amazon.

AJAX, CSS, HTML, XML, SOAP, LAMP… and now Web 2.0?

Dear reader,

Yes. With all these terms, it is quite easy to get lost.

As a developer, my skills are quite extensive. I started with Logo, learned assembly language, BASIC, C, C++… and all these other languages in between, those that most people pass by such as Ada, Eiffel, Icon… And the languages you kind of have to learn because you’re in it: Bourne Shell, configuration files for 100 different software, Makefile, etc.

And once you know all of these languages, you think you’re done. Well… Not quite!

The web has got it’s own set of languages! It

Google Web Tools

Today, I stumbled upon a new link in Google. A link that brought me to a page full of tools a webmaster can use to know how their website is doing according to the Google Spider (the program that search all the pages on your website.)

https://developers.google.com/search

I was not aware of the fact that you could download a CSV file (spreadsheet file compatible with Open Office and MS Excel) with all the errors last generated by the Google spider. You can also look at the errors directly in your account.

So… did I have errors? Well! Many. In part because each page is duplicated 3 ...

RPATH not working in wxWidget

At my company we have the sandbox. This uses different free libraries that we compile within a specific directory (to not have problems with the system installation of a customer.) This means you need to include an RPATH in the binary (.ELF) files.

Most of the libraries that we use have a modern configure script that uses libtool. libtool knows how to automatically add the RPATH information to the libraries and binaries generated in a project.

70Gb of transfer!

This month, we’ll reach over 70Gb of transfer on our server. This is a problem since most of it is due to bad spiders. Robots trying to get emails off our websites.

So, we had to install an Apache security module called ModSecurity to prevent such attacks. It is sad that we have to take such measures for bad coders prevention.

If you also have an Apache server and want to protect your system, look at this website: https://www.modsecurity.org/

Security Issues with the US government

Some people, I have noticed, have been skeptical about the amount of care taken by the US government and agencies in the last few years. Companies are also catching up. The security measures change every year, when not every semester, every month and for some, probably every day.

For sure, making sure that the most wanted information remains top-secret, you need top level security features on your network. I do not know how much data is of interest, but I found out today that there are hackers attacking the federal websites quite a bit…

“The Pentagon last month acknowledged ...

Is the Open Source costing us money?

More and more, enterprises make use of Open Source software. Why is this a good idea for your company as well?

Many people are scared to do the move. The result is very costly. When you use proprietary software, each time you need an upgrade, you need to pay for it. And in most cases, it is not just once, but a number of times equal to the number of computers you own or the number of staff that use the software. A $200 software may sound really cheap. But if you have 1000 staff, it makes it $200,000.

This is of course very good business for the vendors. However, many small companies just ...

Pointers and proper exception handling...

Many C++ programmers have been C programmers first. Therefore, a lot of times, you find statements written this way:

ptr = new type;

if(ptr == 0) // handle error...

This is a C programmer that does not yet know that the new operator will throw an error if the allocation cannot happen. This makes a lot of sense, but what does that mean to the C++ programmer?

Order Made! v1.9 published

After adding the Menu Only option in version 1.8, we now fixed a couple of small bugs and published version 1.9 of Order Made!

At times, the toppings selection would wrap your entries in a rather ugly way. We added the necessary HTML code to avoid this problem. In some cases, your toppings sub-window will look a lot better.