It has been a while since I last posted anything that has to do with the web. One of the main reasons that I started this site was to have a place to experiment and play with the latest stuff which I really have not been doing too much of.

I started working with Flickr and its API to import my photos onto this site’s photo section. I was able to import the most current photo, its comments, other meta data related to the image as well as the thumbnails for the 4 next most recent images. However, I know there is some work that needs to be done with it since I would like to enable some caching functionality and do more with the photo sets that I currently have hosted on Flickr. I will make a point to come back to work on this section of the site.

I am also working on a new application gathering some weather data, starting with monitoring weather information for the city of Scottsdale. The application should scale to other cities but I am starting with just one to test some concepts that I have in mind. I am in the process of collecting data right now but I should be able to start working with the display pieces in the near future. I am planning on integrating some AJAX functionality into this project as a learning experience. It should be a lot of fun although nothing too earth-shattering.

I am also looking into a couple of projects at work which will give me the biggest exposure to multiple technologies. I am going back to an ASP project, while looking into Java Struts and a little Ruby on Rails. I will be looking into RoR because of the hype that it is currently being raised and see how we can leverage its RAD properties for our office projects.

One of the things about open source projects like Eclipse is their fast development cycle. When you download and install a stable release you are already behind because of the activity taking place on the nightly builds. I usually install the stable release on my machines but when a new version is released, I spend way too much trying to configure things again.

Eclipse 3.1 has been released to the public which means that I will be upgrading at least one of my machines to document the experience. However, this time around I might change some things around to facilitate any future upgrades to my Eclipse installation and the management of the plugins I commonly use. What am I changing? well, I found an article posted to Java Lobby with information about how to manage multiple Eclipse installations. The article also points to a couple of blogs for more information on the same topic. The discussion forum also provides some links to other user’s commentary.

I’ve read that some plugins have not been updated to work with Eclipse 3.1 so I will spend some time reading over the article and research a little more about how other developers setup their Eclipse installation(s), while development on the plugins is complete for the new version.

Despite the collection of font links I have been putting together, I realized I wanted a couple of pixel fonts for my powerbook. I had bookmarked Fontleech back in February but I just rediscovered the link to this great site. I am now able to easily find new fonts for my mac in an easy to find location.

Just a quick side note, I cannot believe how easy it is to install a new font on an Apple. Not that it is hard to do it on a Windows machine, but having a font manager installed by default certainly makes a big difference when it comes to the user experience.

I’ve started doing some work on MySQL again and needed to have an easily accessible reference to some of the documentation. The reference manual, numeric types, date and time types, string types

I also came across this tip with regards to MySQL security and something to keep in mind when dealing with authenticaing users.

For instance, suppose a user keys in the value for USERNAME as ##” and for PASSWORD, he keys in anything. Because MySQL interprets the character “##” as a comment, the query is terminated when the “##” character is found and there definitely will be a record matching just the username. The query thus returns a record and allows this user to login. Always be sure to check whether the username contatins a character like “##” and throw an appropriate error before even sending it to the database.

questionable query:
SELECT 1 FROM <USERTABLE> WHERE USERNAME="<USERNAME>" AND USERPASSWORD="<USERPASSWORD>"

I recently bought a $5 t-shirt from an online store, add another $5 for shipping and all together I spent $10 for an item that I liked but did not need. Yesterday I bought some coffee, which has become a favorite in our house, also from an online store.

On the other hand, I was going to donate $10 to The One Campaign which attempts to fight the emergency of global AIDS and extreme poverty around the world. The $10 donation was actually a purchase of a 10-pack of their white bands, which I thought I could share with other friends and raise the awareness of the campaign. Unlike the situations above, to this day I have still yet to but those bands and make my donation.

What was the difference from a t-shirt which I did not need to donating money to a very good cause? The checkout process for their online stores. In the case of the t-shirt and coffee retailers, I found what I wanted to buy very quickly and it was very easy to identify what I wanted to buy. The same can be said to the ONE Campaign store but the checkout process where completely different. I was able to buy my shirt in a matter of seconds, or as fast as it would take me to enter my address and credit card information. Just as fast I had received my confirmation email and I returned back to my activities.

What lead me away from donating to the ONE campaign was the fact they required that I created an account with their site before I could start the payment process. Since I was working on something else, I quickly returned back those activities and thought I could come back later. A few days have gone by and I am still have not gone back to spend my $10. If I want to give you my money, please make it easy to do so. I just wanted to enter my address and card information and know that a few days later my purchase would arrive. I probably would’ve also had checked off the little box asking me if I wanted to receive more information from them.

Although I have not been part of an eCommerce project in the resent past this is certainly a lesson learned for future projects. Lately, I’ve become more aware of the importance of making things easy for the user in any application. Now, I need to find another $5 shirt ;o)