Saturday, December 29, 2012

Why change passwords regularly?

Why do some websites like bank websites and such require us to change our passwords regularly? I fail to see how that makes our account more secure. If a hacker is able to figure out someone's password, they will immediately hack in and do their stuff. So How does changing our password every month make it more secure? It does not. It only makes our lives more difficult.

To make our accounts more secure we should make up strong passwords.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Facebook and IE8

FB stopped working on IE8 on my XP laptop some time ago. What a shame. IE8 is still in use. In fact, most of the hits on my site at are from IE8.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Useless Comments in Code

How many times have you had to review and change code that someone else wrote, and you get frustrated by the lack of comments in the code, making it a frustrating and time consuming task to figure out how the code works and what it does?

Even more frustrating are comments that don't tell us anything. They just waste more of our time, time that we spend reading them, which becomes totally wasted time.

Here I will add actual wasteful comments that I came across while reviewing code. I have changed the names of variables, etc to preserve confidentiality. I believe that the authors of these comments should be provided with a free noose to hang themselves with.

Useless Comments

//BUG#8741, 10-03-00, some logic is required here
err... doesn't the whole code consist of "some logic"??? hello???
//BUG#8760, 10-11-00
This is great! Now all I have to do is go look up that bug... oh wait, we don't have that database anymore... aaargghh!!!
// BUG#8741, 10-03-00, added bool parameter
Oh ok. Its... like.... I blinked my eye... I turned my head... I peed in the toilet...
memcpy(pDest, pSrc, nCount); // copy data
hmm... really?
// If no data is found
if (tempstr.IsEmpty())
duh!

Thursday, March 22, 2012

PHP file read methods

This web page is, like, total coolness itself, in describing all the ways php can read a file. check it aaowwt:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-readfiles/

Problems downloading a large file over wifi

My wife's friend had a lot of trouble downloading a large (125MB) mp3 file onto her laptop from an online class website. I copied the file to my dropbox to see if that would work for her but she still could not download it. Then I suggested she try downloading on a wired computer instead of downloading it on her wireless (wifi) laptop. I suspected that the slower download speed over wifi may be causing timeout problems somewhere in the network route. Guess what, it worked! Now she just has to get her husband to transfer the huge file from her desktop to her laptop.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

gif animation speed problem

animated gif files contain a delay specified after each frame. Unfortunately some browsers tweak the frame rate because they think it is incorrect. Here is helpful informatino for those making animated gifs and want them to animate at the same rate in Mozilla based browsers (FireFox, Chrome, etc) and IE:


Nearly all browsers change 0 ms and 10 ms delays to 100 ms. If a GIF uses delays of 0 ms or 10 ms, it will look identical in Firefox and IE.

IE currently changes 20-50 ms delays to 100 ms. Firefox does not change them.