Silverback - Usability Testing
August 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I have always been very interested in doing serious usability testing of applications or web sites. However, it is complicated and associated software to make it easier is usually quite costly.
Silverback appears to change that.
I have yet to have a chance to put it through it’s paces, but watching the video demo, this has great potential. With only a $49.95 price tag, this will be easy to justify with our next major project.
Described by Clearleft as:
- Capture screen activity
- Video the participant’s reactions
- Record the participant’s voice
- Add chapter markers on the fly
- Control recording with the remote
- Export to Quicktime
Tags: clear=left, development, programming, quicktime, silverback, test, testing, usability, usability testing, web development
List of Great Web Dev Optimization Tools
June 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Six Revisions has a bunch of great web development tips and tricks. Today he put out 15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages, which is a great list worth reading. In addition to the standard fare (YSlow, Firebug, etc) he also lists some good stuff I hadn’t heard of like Cuzillion and DBMonster.
Tags: cuzillion, DBMonster, development, firebug, optimization, optimize, six revisions, web, web development, yslow
PHP 5 readfile Problem
April 26, 2006 | 3 Comments
In PHP 5.0.x there is a known bug that can cause large (2MB+) files to be handled incorrectly by the readfile function. We first discovered this while working with Tiki Wiki. Today we ran into it again with the way we stream secured SWF Flash files off the file system.
Luckily, I found this great function on PHP.net in the user comment section. Simply drop this function definition in place and use it instead of readfile and the problem is gone!
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<?php
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function readfile_chunked($filename,$retbytes=true)
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{
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$chunksize = 1*(1024*1024); // how many bytes per chunk
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$buffer = '';
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$cnt =0;
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// $handle = fopen($filename, 'rb');
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if ($handle === false)
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{
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return false;
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}
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{
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echo $buffer;
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if ($retbytes)
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{
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}
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}
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if ($retbytes && $status)
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{
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return $cnt; // return num. bytes delivered like readfile() does.
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}
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return $status;
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}
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?>
Tags: code, development, file, file handling, flash, large file size, php, programming, readfile
Leveraging CAS with Luminis
March 28, 2006 | 4 Comments
In SunGard Higher Education's Luminis product one of the many add-on packages you can install is CAS support. CAS is an acronym for Central Authentication Service. This WebISO solution is one of the most common in higher education. CAS was created originally by Yale, but ongoing support has been taken over by JA-SIG. When the CAS package is installed in Luminis, it makes Luminis act as a CAS authentication provider. Coupled with this built-in Luminis support, we use a CAS library called phpCAS that adds to the simplicity of deploying this within our environment.
Time and again, CAS has been proven an effective and simple way for us to quickly drop authentication ability into our homegrown PHP applications. Once a function was developed, this was easily reused across dozens of applications within a few short months. The ease of deployment made it easy to convince various developers to switch from custom authentication schemes.
In a PHP application on any of the servers in your environment you can do something like the following:
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<?php
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function casify()
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{
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// import phpCAS lib (http://esup-phpcas.sourceforge.net/)
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include_once($GLOBALS['INCLUDES'].'/cas/CAS.php');
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// initialize phpCAS
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phpCAS::client(CAS_VERSION_2_0,'luminis.institution.edu',443,'cas/');
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// check CAS authentication
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phpCAS::forceAuthentication();
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// at this step, the user has been authenticated by the CAS server
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// and the user's login name can be read with phpCAS::getUser().
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return phpCAS::getUser();
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}
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$username = casify();
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// nothing past the execution of casify() would occur without acquiring a valid CAS ticket
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?>
Note: the preceding code is an example. There is more sophisticated functionality that can be accomplished using CAS, this is merely a starting point for people interested in this WebISO technology.
Tags: cas, development, education, higher education, identity management, jasig, luminis, php, phpcas, security, sungard, sungard higher education, web development, yale, yalecas
Cheat Sheets
August 5, 2005 | 40 Comments
I love cheat sheets or euphemistiically, quick references. I find myself becoming quite familiar with something, then not using it for 6 months. After time away from something like that a cheat sheet is the best way of getting back up to speed quickly. Also, good cheat sheets sometimes show me features or functionality I wasn't previously familiar with. Consider this Cliff Notes for technology.
JavaScript, MySQL, mod_rewrite, CSS, and PHP(Thanks Casey)
VI (PDF)
Perl Regular expressions (PDF)
Java (PDF) (Not so quick...)
Update 2/20/06:
Prototype JS Library - from BorkWeb.
Still looking for a good one on Oracle and always looking for better ones. Also check this site for some more, though I'm not real excited about most of them.
Tags: cheat sheet, cheat sheets, cheatsheet, cheatsheets, cliff notes, css, development, java, javascript, mod_rewrite, mysql, oracle, perl, php, quick guides, quick reference, regular expressions, vi, web, web development