Viewing by month: September 2005
Firefox Still Tops IE for Browser Security - EWeek
Posted on Sep 30, 2005
A couple weeks ago I blogged about Symantec's claims regarding the vulnerabilities of Firefox versus IE. As a follow up, a friend sent me a good opinion article by EWeek's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. In it, he debunks the 25 (FF) to 13 vulnerabilities comparison in part because of the speed of patching I mentioned previously, but also the numbers themselves appear to have been false. According to his source at Symantec:
"In the last reporting period, the second half of last year, Microsoft had acknowledged 13 vulnerabilities. We've now revised it to 31. The difference is that now Microsoft has acknowledged these vulnerabilities."
Well, that is a significant difference, and, if true, I take issue with Symantec's reporting altogether for spreading false perceptions. As with many things, the original number is widely reported while the revision goes generally unnoticed.
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Boston CFUG Where Are You?
Posted on Sep 27, 2005
A long time ago I posted about the inactive Boston CFUG. Shortly thereafter Steven Erat volunteered to start the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group, but that hasn't hosted a meeting since July. Still, even though I enjoyed the online meetings, they tend to be impersonal. Then today, I happened back to the Boston ColdFusion User Group page and notice it said the following:
The Boston CFUG is starting up again. Keep an eye out for a September meeting!
Now, being that it is currently the 27th of September and they still don't have any details about that September meeting, I am not very hopeful. Nonetheless, this isn't the message that had been there for many many months. Is that a pulse I detect, however faint? So, there is some life left in you after all CFUG Boston?
sIFR, Flash and Unicode
Posted on Sep 27, 2005
As part of my larger globalization project I am internationalizing one of our brand sites. In order to do so, I am using the sIFR 2.0 tool that I have previously raved about. In doing so I came across something that is obvious once you see it, but not so obvious until you run into the issue. This is that the fonts you use must be Unicode fonts in order to use this tool in a globalized site. I ran into this in adding a header with the Ä character. The font choice in this case (percolator) has that character but isn't Unicode. Since Flash converts all characters to UTF-8, this character will not show up no matter how many Glyphs I export (system.useCodepage doesn't seem to fix the problem either). The point is to be careful of your font choices when globalizing your application if you need to render these characters in Flash...unless someone has any ideas on a way to get around this?
The Frameworks Debate - My Take
Posted on Sep 26, 2005
I have been reading Simon Horwith's posts about frameworks with interest. I am probably one of the biggest fans of ColdFusion frameworks not to have actually used one. I studied FuseBox starting with version 3; bought (and read) the book for version 4; studied the Mach ii Development Guide and most recently began researching Model-Glue. Yet, in all that studying, I never actually built any serious application using any of these frameworks, and Simon's posts have gotten myself asking why that is, because my reasons seem to differ from his.
PNG Transparency Rollovers in IE
Posted on Sep 26, 2005
I came across a solution for handling PNG transparencies that doesn't have the one major drawback that the prior solutions I blogged about have. Namely, that you could not add javascript to the PNG images, thereby preventing you from using them for rollover images. The latest solution I located is called Sleight and it is pretty simple to use. Simply place the slight.js and x.gif in your directory and just unclude the script: