Back from Lanzarote

We got back from Lanzarote on Thursday, it was great fun and really interesting as we explored an island formed entirely by volcanic activity that is still active. The idea of life on the island especially when there is not a drop of groundwater, all the island's water is desalinated or shipped in from the other island which do have ground water.

We visited the lava flows and the Timanfaya volcano which has a restaurant at the top where they will cook your food off of the natural volcanic heat. We went for a camel ride, and visited a number of caves which were really interesting, namely the green caves and the boiling pot (I can't remember the real name) which gets its names from the fact that on days with high tide and stormy weather the sea can fill the cave bubbling out the holes in the roof.

On the last few days we did a tour of the cultural parts of the island in the north where most of the island's agriculture has formed. Lanzarote has been accredited for its ingenious and innovative approach to farming on an island which has no ground water which would kill most plants. We visited the home of Cesar Manrique a modern artist who convinced the government to not destroy Lanzarote's natural beauty, and actually convinced them that the green and brown coloured doors and widows was a characteristic feature with great meaning that all houses that were built from then on had the flat roofs and doors and windows of those colours. In reality this was simply because these were the only colours that the people living there had and the flat roofs was the only method the islanders had to gather rain water in the few months when it did rain before the desalination plants were built.

While we were there we also visited city of Arrecife where we tried to follow the guide book only to find the bus dropped us far off to the left hand side of the map, eventually we found our way to the first waypoint and off we went before finding that the church we were supposed to turn at wasn't there anymore, other than these minor irritants the day was beautiful even if our discoveries were purely by accident. On another day went to the market in Playa Blanca which wasn't nearly as impressive as we thought it would be and we wandered into a shop before realising that the items they were selling were way, and I mean way out of our price range even if we were looking. Seriously I didn't see an item in the shop with a price tag (those that were tagged) for less than €1000 for a watch. In between these days out we explored Puerto del Carmen, and snorkelled in the sea. It was really amazing how close to the shore the fish actually came. It was great fun and I would definitely go back.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-07-16 15:53:59

Apple ‘Carpet-Bomb’ Safari bug

This morning I have been reading the Register about a story that has been known about for a while. From the story that you can read, it appears that a researcher has developed a proof of concept site that reveals a serious bug in both safari and windows where safari will download (without prompt) content from a site which could be malicious software.

The sample software, then when internet explorer is loaded opens a non-existent file in notepad. Though this is not a bad problem, it doesn't take a lot of creativity to make the user download a more dangerous program. Not only this the browser will download as many as sent, so a site could send thousands of files, how about every virus it can find, hw would you like that on your desktop, and would you like fries with that.

Though this is shocking in its own right, it is not as shocking as Apple's response, it doesn't consider it to be a security bug and as a result it will take a while before they consider fixing it and they may not fix it at all.

Check out the articles yourself:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/10/...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/15/...
http://liudieyu0.blog124.fc2.com/blog-entry-1.html

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-06-11 8:27:27

Redesign of site

I have worked on the structure of this site which should make it more accessible on more devices by completely removing tables and inserting many div elements with unique id's which means that I can drastically redesign the site just by changing the style sheet for the page. The style sheet has also been cleared up removing quite a few redundant styles which were used for the image gallery that no longer exists on this site. Next stage work on a template system and finally a content management system.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-05-30 01:24:39

Working on CSS and game scheduled for Wednesday

The redesign of the home page is going ahead, and I am almost happy with the resulting page though I have lost the right hand menu in the new version and am currently working on getting it back but hopefully with this framework I will be able to deploy multiple style sheets for the different versions of the site in addition to the future vision of the templating system, which I will look into building once this stage is done.

Also as little stu is busy on Wednesday I will be running a tester session of the dark heresy campaign setting that I have been working on, it should be interesting but I have a lot more work to do. This happened a lot sooner than I had planned but you take what you are given to work with. Also as this is a tester session, when I finally run it for real I can always ret-con anything that does not work. I just need to think what they will be doing in the first pre-imperial days. Should be fun though.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-05-25 22:39:57

Fix a bug and add a feature

I have come to realise that this site seriously needs an update, so I decided to make a start tonight by adding a paging system and making the database call more efficient, in the process I noticed that one of the variables was not being checked as far as I could see to deny special characters and as a result could have resulted in an SQL injection attack. Luckily this is patched now, so that avenue for entry is now closed, it is amazing the little bugs you find in code you wrote many years ago.

What is also interesting is the way my coding style has changed. Tables to construct the layout was a method which sufficed when I was building the site but I have realised that what it makes in ease of design it lacks in accessibility, this will probably be the next enhancement, to remove the table structure which will hopefully make the page render better on a small screen browser on which it currently looks really bad.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-05-25 02:20:40

ASP.NET 2 course complete

For the last week I have been going through to Glasgow to attend a course on ASP.NET which was a real eye opener. I had the preconception that asp was like a more complicated version of ColdFusion, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Though technically I learned a working level of C# and VB because ASP.NET uses these and many other languages to do the applications, I chose to complete many of my projects using C# because I found this language far easier to understand and cleaner by far. VB seems to be very text heavy and ends at line breaks unlike the languages I am used to which end with a semicolon.

What I was most amazed with was how easily I could build a dynamic application by simply dragging and dropping elements from the side menu, and very little if any coding required. A fantastic example of this was building an AJAX update section to the page, it was very simple but I built it by dragging and dropping, completing the application in about 5 minutes, a task which if I was hand coding in PHP and JavaScript would take all day. ASP.NET 2 is a fantastic language though I will say the learning curve on the course was very steep which was only made easier by my experience in coding this style of application so I understood what it was trying to do and the basic structures in c# are very similar to what I worked with in PHP.

Some of the structures would be very handy in PHP (the main language I use at work) such as the caching features especially the multi-user global structure which allows with a couple of lines of code the ability to store database calls in a temporary space that all users can gain access to so when they visit the site from any browser, in different locations only the first person to visit the site would see the delay of the database call, the rest would see the cached version of the page, which can then be updated based on certain events happening, i.e. the source being updated. Though you can somewhat achieve the same thing using sessions in PHP, that is on a per user basis so any update by another user would not be shown to all visitors to the site. I also must say the master page and templates system which screams of the system used in macromedia dreamweaver and contribute is fantastic and it is built into the language.

I also have noticed another problem with this language. That it is a very JavaScript heavy language, so if a user turns it off, has a script stopper application installed, or simply access the site from a browser that does not support JavaScript, such as a mobile browser it will simply break. Above these problems it is a fantastic language that can be very easily implemented and has me brimming with ideas for applications and converting its features into PHP and ColdFusion.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-05-24 20:09:25

Finished work on the STGA pages

The Scottish Tourist Guides Association (STGA) at the University of Edinburgh has had a makeover of its site which I was largely responsible for. The original concept design was done by our new Graphics Designer Stephen Hay but I had to alter and add to this design to make it fit the purpose of the site which was to make the information about the STGA more visible and appealing.

I have also had to rebuild a system which was used in the university but with the redevelopment of the university homepage became un-usable, this was a small application which read in the POST variables from a script and then emailed it after doing a few checks, while the script I made does perform most of the duties of the old script it does lack the ability to handle multiple fields with the same name, that addition will surely come in the next version. I was thinking about how I would implement it on this site eventually as it is quite useful even if it does lack the CAPTCHA features and hammering resistant features of the current version implemented on this site. To see the source code for the email application I have been building click here.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-05-09 16:16:19

Just finished the OLL conference system admin

For the past 2 months I have been building an administration system for the Office of lifelong learning's conferences that they run on a regular basis and just this afternoon I have successfully completed the administration system for the site.

This proved to be quite difficult as the requirements for the site included encryption which I had not deployed for a site before, reports in various formats collected from the database, as well as a plethora of different things the clients could be doing, submitting abstracts which can have multiple authors which need to be ordered, being a part of a discussion panel which can include multiple people presenting multiple abstracts.

Both text only and file versions of the abstracts needed to be uploaded securely predicting the use of incorrect mime types, i.e. really_scary_virus.exe being renamed to really_scary_virus.jpeg which the server if no protection was applied would interpret as a jpeg image, which while this would not work as images are not allowed other formats might have been, so the files had to be confirmed to be the correct file format which was complicated.

Some bonus features for future releases would be an easier templating system, as the current system is a bit clunky, which for it's use is not that much of a problem as it generally is not going to change style, only when a new conference comes along.

Though this may bore or go over the heads of most readers I am quite proud of what I have accomplished in such a relatively short time considering I am also working on many other projects for multiple departments, and especially proud that I could live up to my promise to the client that I would have it finished by the end of the week, even though it did require quite a few long nights in the last week slaving away to past 6pm.

Yay!

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-04-18 18:11:37