Javascript Mandelbrot generator using canvas
When I was little and first learning how to program in QBasic, one of the first things I made was a Mandelbrot set generator called the Mandelbrot Window. A few weeks ago I decided to revisit it using a new language and environment. I reimplemented it in Javascript using the HTML 5 canvas element. It was a great learning experience and I encourage any curious developer to build it in their language of choice. It’s a simple algorithm with plenty of reference implementations and offers lots of opportunity for expansion. This requires one of the latest browsers to run. Take note of the set generation time in each browser, some interesting numbers there.

Das Wiener
Sarah and I always wondered what our dog did when we were out of the house. What started as a simple idea of setting up a webcam to watch his cage kinda’ got out of hand and has turned into daswiener.com. I built it for Sarah and I, but others are enjoying it as well so that’s pretty cool.

I’ve also been tinkering with a shared grocery list application and an automatically synced notepad widget for OS X. And I’m learning Python. Woot.

In the past I’ve ran a server running either Media Center on Windows or TwonkyVision or MediaTomb on Linux. However, there is a lot of additional overhead with maintaining a whole machine just for media streaming.

Fortunately, the My Book is up to the task. It just needs a little tweaking to unlock its full potential as a Linux-based machine.

The first step in enabling media streaming functionality is to gain access to the internal Linux system. I followed the instructions provided by Martin Hinner to enable SSH access on the My Book. However, I got hung up for a while on the first step:

“First of all you have to create a new user using standard web interface. SSH will not allow you to log-in as root without password.”

The instructions “create a new user using standard web interface” were a little unclear to me at first. The user that is referred to here is not the web interface user that you create the first time you log in. Rather, the user is a file sharing user created in the file sharing section of the web interface.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why that is the case. The web interface login credentials would not be the same as a file system user and you need a file system user to log in using SSH.

I decided to document this in case anyone else runs into the same confusion and hopefully they won’t spend as much time as I did figuring it out.

It’s a constant cycle of nap, eat, pee, huge burst of energy then nap again. He loves to snuggle and prefers to sleep wrapped up in his favorite blanket in someone’s arms.

You can view all of the pictures we take of Guinness as he grows up on Flickr.

Here are 3 easy steps to creating a PHP form that is completely vulnerable to a SQL injection attack:

Step 1: Get the posted variables.

Step 2: Put the posted variables into your query.

Step 3: Execute the query.

Sample code:
$sql = "INSERT INTO table (column) VALUES ( $_POST['data'] )";
$result = mysql_query($sql);

And there you have it. A completely injectable query in only two lines of code. This code even works when you are using client-side validation! That’s right, you can keep using Javascript-based form validation and this code will still work, all the user has to do is turn Javascript off. Easy!

This code is released into the public domain. Feel free to use it in any application where outright SQL injection vulnerability is required. You are encouraged to implement it without attribution.

Otherwise, things have been calm.

Don’t forget you can keep up with me via Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious.

I am now freelancing full time which is an adventure all by itself. I am spending time making connections here with what seems to be a strong developer community. It’s exciting to meet people who speak the same language I do and are passionate about some of the same things. That’s something that was very hard to find in upstate New York.

Free Speculative Fiction – http://www.freesfonline.de/rssfeed.xml

Speculative Fiction, a superset of science fiction, is a latent passion of mine. When my Xbox died I spent a lot of time reading lots of short stories that I found through this great feed.

Wil Wheaton: In Exile – http://feeds.feedburner.com/wwdn

The actor, well known for playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, is an accomplished writer and all around geek. His site features a lot of life stories from the point of view of a geek father and husband. It is at times inspirational and always entertaining.

TorrentFreak – http://feed.torrentfreak.com/Torrentfreak/

A news site which covers issues related to the BitTorrent downloading community. Its viewpoint is decidedly pro-torrenting.

GameAI For Developers – http://aigamedev.com/feed/

A site that does a wonderful job of bridging the gap between professional and hobbyist video game programmers and the topic of Artificial Intelligence. The site is a mix of practical articles describing AI techniques and thought provoking articles that generate discussion in the comments. Commenters range from individuals who are still learning to code and seasoned developers who have shipped multiple commercial games.

Okay, so it’s not a mega-ton announcement. For me it’s a good thing because it has been nagging at the back of my mind for a few weeks. Now it’s one less thing I have to think about.

For those for you who are using a feed reader already then I think you get it. (Yes, I’m talking about that one guy in the back)

The ones who aren’t excited by this are the ones that I want to talk to.

The web is a big place. You are a busy person. You don’t get paid to sit at a computer all day, like some people.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t make the web work for you.

There is a treasure trove of valuable content on the web. There is entertainment, education, news and ideas and it’s all being created by people like you. These people understand your hobbies and interests. 

• Like making gourmet confections? Try The Chocolate Gourmand.
• Like poetry and politics together? Check out Sillman’s Blog.
• Like building your own stuff? Go to Instructables.
• Those don’t suit your tastes? Don’t worry, there’s more.

So, yes, the Internet is this great magical thing with all this interesting crap in it. But, you still don’t have time to go to twenty different sites. How can you possibly keep up, especially when they keep making more everyday?

Some people solve this by just not going to all of those sites. You don’t miss what you don’t know right? But, whether you care or not, you are missing something cool.

What if there was a way to fit some of that cool stuff in among all of the other things (read: life) that want your attention too?

Watch this film by the creative guys at Common Craft. They explain in English what feeds can do to solve this problem.

So let’s sum all of this up and get to the final point:

• The web has lots of cool stuff
• Feeds help to manage all of that cool stuff
• GloryFish.org now has full text feeds

Now, if you are subscribed to Gloryfish.org’s feed, you can read the entire article in your reader, without having to come to the site to read the whole thing. You couldn’t do that before. Sorry it took so long. ;)

1. The Website is a novel - It is carefully designed to be read and understood completely. This is how the website builder thinks.

2. The Website is a billboard - It will be glanced at quickly, stripped of the required information, and forgotten as soon as the visitor moves on. This is how the website’s visitor thinks.

Krug asserts that as designers, we need to build better billboards.

It can be a tough step for a designer to take. We tend to labor over design decisions like font sizes, colors, and placement of elements on the page. It’s painful to think that the hours spent crafting an aesthetically pleasing website will go unnoticed during the three seconds that a visitor spends on it.

However, that is the reality that we live with. To become better designers we have to understand more than color wheels and grid layouts. A good web designer needs to be concerned with interaction as much as presentation.

Just now I had an experience on a PopSci.com that made this point very clear.

I arrived at an article about videogame technology through a link on Digg. The article is presented as series of images with accompanying text.

I briefly glanced at the image of a computer chip and decided to save that for later. My eyes moved quickly to the right to find the article proper. I read through the text under the heading “1. Processing Power.” The numbered heading told me to expect more sections. My brain subconsciously stored that away.

When I got to the end of the first section I was hooked.  I quickly clicked the “next” link and the page disappeared.

Wait, what? Where did that interesting article go? I pulled the page up again. Looking closely, my mistake immediately became clear. The “next” link I thought I clicked was actually a “X Close this Window” link.

It was the right color (orange) and in the right place (lower-right of the article) which turned out to be just enough information to make a “click commitment.” Experience on the web has taught me that multi part articles tend to have their navigation in that spot. That was a mistake.

I completely missed the “Previous | Next” links that appeared above the image. Those didn’t seem to apply to the article anyway. And I was initially confused as to why the article would have a “Close this Window” link anyway.

Further investigation on the PopSci.com revealed that the article appears in a pop-up window when accessed from their homepage. The Digg link made it appear in a full browser window. That distinction does very little to affect the layout of the page. However it had a huge impact on how I interacted with the it. I don’t normally expect a normal web page to offer me a close link in the middle of an article.

You may be tempted to write it off as user error and go about your business. However, in the real world these split second judgements occur every time someone visits your site. In this case it spawned a blog post. A less positive outcome would be me giving up when the site disappeared and moving on to one of the other myriad things demanding my attention. 

Your job as an interaction designer is to help your visitors fall into the pit of success. Make it easy for them to succeed when they are on your site. Succeeding can mean finding a piece of information, posting a comment easily, updating a personal setting, or going to section two of the article they are reading.