On reddit, I found this article regarding a new law i Massachusetts that is to increase the security of personally identifiable information.

If you have personally identifiable information (PII) about a Massachusetts resident, such as a first and last name, then you have to encrypt that data on the wire and as it’s persisted. Sending PII over HTTP instead of HTTPS? That’s a big no no. Storing the name of a customer in SQL Server without the data being encrypted?  No way, Jose. You’ll get a fine of $5,000 per breach or lost record. If you have a database that contains 1,000 names of Massachusetts residents and lose it without the data being encrypted that’s $5,000,000. Yikes.

The idea is good (yay – better security for anyone registering on a website) and bad (expensive). As a consultant in a country not covered by the law I could care less, but is this in general a good idea? Securing data and sending sensitive information across secure connections is always a good idea, and it could hit the EU soon. Documenting how you secure the Personally Identifiable Information (PII)? Who can argue with that being a good idea? As an IT consultant you won’t hear me cry myself to sleep.

But the proportions of the legislation seem unclear. If you log on to my website (securely of course), and I feed you the following pages through clear text HTTP – can I be fined if your name appear on the page as in “Reader XYZ is logged in”?

I guess so.

It strikes me that there is no level of sensitivity defined – anything considered personal must be secured. As a legislator, it seems very easy to do this when you don’t have to pick up the bill.

If this kind of legislation should hit Europe, I hope someone would elaborate a bit on the do’s and dont’s:

• Are all kinds of data included? Can I be fined if you, as a Massachusetts citizen, post a comment to this and include your name? (the database is secured, but nothing is sent through HTTPS)
• Would it make sense to allow users to wave their rights, and thereby allow users to work with online applications that are not 100% secure?

This is not a complaint – it is the solution to an issue that has been puzzling me over the weekend.

IE8 has been out for a long time – which does not necessarily mean that corporations has implemented it yet. Some large corporations tend to make their business depend on current browser versions – not allowing them to upgrade the browsers on their pc’s without extensive testing and some time expensive application upgrades. I know of at least 5 danish companies who still doesn’t dare to take the plunge from IE6 (!)

I usually develop web-stuff having booted Ubuntu running Firefox – then once in a while boot Windows and test with the latest IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. I leave it to others to test on Mac’s. If I am unsure how something renders on other platforms, I can recommend browsershots.org – a cool service that renders a specific URL in any browser on any platform and allow you to see the screenshots after a while.

In this case the client is at IE7. The layout has a header, a content area and a footer – very simple stuff. It looks fine i all browsers – except for IE7. For this particular browser the content section wouldn’t display. Even IE7 displayed the area. The space was allocated but it was blank. This article on webmasterworld.com gave a few tips:

1. add

   * { zoom: 1.0; }

   to the css (this did not make a difference for me)

2. add

   position: relative;

   to the

   #wrapper

   in the css

Tip 2 made all the difference. #wrapper is a div that wraps around all the content on the page. Not knowing the inner workings of IE7, I can only guess why this fixed the issue – just hope Google finds this post for you if you run into the same problem.

Found this little test which gives an indicator as to Javascript performance in your browser.

On my system (Windows XP on two year old Lenovo T60p laptop) i tried to run it ten times on my browsers with all plugins disabled (lower is better):

Google Chrome: 297,7
Firefox 3.5 beta 4: 340
Firefox 3.0.10: 408,9
Internet Explorer 8: 631,3

As the score is time, lower is better. This is interesing because sites uses Javascript more and more, and as we work more and more online with more applications in the cloud, the Javascript engine has a lot to say about our perception of overall performance.

I got a bit disappointed about my Atom-based netbook – specifically Ubuntu 9.04 on that machine. It never went below 1800 (Firefox 3.0.10) and on the same hardware, the Windows-browsers gives me minimums of 1500 and 2800 for Firefox 3.0.10 and IE8 respectively. Gotta find some tweaks there.

Twitter explained by Evan Williams..

Also – at Overskrift.dk, we launched TwitterValg today – a site to track tweets from candidates for the EU parliament election on June 7th.

Actually there is no good reason for this tool not to be an independent piece of software – it doesn’t really need to be part of Firefox. But..

Somehow it just works for apparent reasons. Bloggers do two things a lot: Read blogs and write blogs and that is why ScribeFire is so cool – it’s right in the context where you want it. In Firefox:

1. Go to the Tools-menu
2. Choose Add-ons
3. Choose Get Add-ons
4. Type scribefire in the search box and search
5. Install the add-on

Once installed, Scribefire is running all the time but display/hiding is switched with F8. It works especially well with Wordpress blogs (such as this one) and configuration of one blog is done by entering the address of the blog + username and password.

If you feel inspired, click F8 and start typing. Something else came up, or the phone rang.. tap F8 and continue what you did before – and F8 it again to continue. So far it seems awfully nice.

Writing this on my Lenovo S10e netbook, I am furious. It’s before mid-day and yet I have had two experiences of software designs that did not consider netbooks a platform – or at least the new low screen resolution these computers imply. And before you call me a whiner (besides the fact that you’d be somewhat right), this is just a description of the changes I will make to include netbook users as an audience of software and website in the future.

Whine #1: Twice I’ve been cripled by software that saw the low screen resolution as a handicap – one of them on purpose. First I installed Pidgin - the cool cross-platform/cross-protocol IM and IRC client. I like it a lot, but on Windows some dialogs are too big and will not allow me to navigate to the OK/Cancel buttons at the bottomof the settings dialog. Fortunately this is Open Source stuff, so I can just participate and actively fix this myself.

Whine #2: I had to install a printer driver for my HP Photosmart 2575 printer – the install took over one hour because of some “ingenious” package system. That obviously poor user experience decision aside – the minimum requirement for the printer driver is a screen resolution of 800×600 pixels. My S10e runs at 1024 x 576. The consequence – I cannot print from my netbook in Windows because the printer driver won’t finish installing, as it has an irrelevant requirement. Fortunately I am dual-booting with Ubuntu, which has excellent support for my printer (without the requirement)

I’ve read somewhere that 20% of all computers that will be sold in 2009 will be netbooks. Some producers (including Asus) will stop production of 8.9″ -screen netbooks. The 10-inchers seems to dominate right now, and probably for the rest of the year (note: my guess only). Every company designing software will have to take this into account before they ship the next version of any product with a user interface.

I’ve worked on so many web projects with art directors saying: “Nobody runs 640×480 or 800×600 anymore”. Hey we know – but do you know how many users run with their browser maximized because a designer thought up a design that required it? Web designers don’t own the real estate of the users screen resolution – they can only hope to own the area the browser is sized to – and you have to count on users having at least one open history/bookmarks sidebar and/or plug-in and/or Google/MSN/Web developer toolbar enabled.

My point should be rather obvious: It is vital to include netbooks as testplatforms for serious UI-designers or your product will no longer be compatible with the equipment of the customers you want. The rules have changed – live with it.

You may argue that netbook users are asking for it, but if the competing website or software support the netbooks and you don’t – the users is no longer making the decision of leaving you.

Seems like a very cool plugin to enhance the userexperience – performance wise, plus it seems to prepare Wordpress blogs for high traffic spikes.

Bug found: Links to posts from archives seems to cache PHP-code – not the resulting HTML. There’s gotta be a simple fix. Was a bit quick there. The bug is in my theme – not in WP Super Cache.

Edit: Also – the issues may have to do with my host who seems to mess with their user database right now..

For a web project I needed to create invoices, to be downloaded or e-mailed to clients in PDF format. The platform is PHP and the documentation for this almost exclusively describe PDFLib for this purpose. I am sure PDFLib is fine, and the tutorials that come with the package looks really good.

But..

You pay for PDFLib – I don’t mind paying for software, you should pay for usable high-quality stuff, which I am sure PDFLib is. US$ 995 is a little steep though – compared to free. The FAQ however mentions a few free alternatives. Right now I am looking into FPDF – which seem to do the trick.

Actually I found out that my previous ISP (invoicing their customers only by PDF invoices via E-mail) use FPDF. This tells me that FPDF is more than ready for production. I’ll let you know if I something disappoints me – although I would hate to bash a truly free initiative such as this one. Oh – and by the way it has another edge to PDFLib – It is written in PFP and does not need server reconfiguration to work. If you want a head start, there are quite an extensive list of code examples available.

Wanna know how Mac og Linux users running rare browsers view your website? Then check out http://browsershots.org/. Queue up your URL and depending on the current load, the screenshouts will begin pouring in over the next couple of minutes. Why, oh why should we wait soo many years for a service like this?

The shots are of course static, so it is not possible for you to actually check how your site performs and functions without running the actual browser on the actual OS you want to test. It can however save you A LOT of time, getting rid of the most common errors early in the layout debugging process.

The site features quite a few languages, and more a being added all the time

Amazon profiles you by the books you buy. Google sponsored links are displayed by the contents of your gmail e-mails and general website interests. All “Big Brother” considerations aside – this is clever – or at least technically interesting. There are risks of evil marketeers profiling you down to the bone, but on the other hand you probably only see stuff that is interesting to you – as opposed to receiving a load of Viagra spam e-mails. I know – The fact that something really sucks, does not make something that sucks a bit less excellent..

A group is in the process of specifying the APML format. APML is short for Attention Profile Markup Language and will specify a fileformat to express your interests ranked. OPML can already be considered an APML subset describing your feed subscriptions, but APML i more of an aggregation of your interests also including e-mail, browser history and bookmarks.

An important thing about your attention profile is, that is has value – to you as well as to others. Check out AttentionTrust for more..

I am a Wiki-virgin. Not in the sense of being a wiki-reader/contributor, but today I set up my first Wiki which is about to go online. Wiki’s based on the MediaWiki software (which is also used for WikiPedia) are actually skinable, but as content usually is king in Wiki land, very few operators make an effort to change skin before going online. The well known default Monobook skin is used almost everywhere (you know – the one where the monochrome image of an book is the back-drop).

This has one obvious benefit: People recognize it as being a Wiki-type site immediately. Indeed a strong argument to keep things as they are. I may be running my mouth of as the green first day Wiki operator, and maybe I have actually used Wiki based sites that I did not recognize because it used some great unknown skin. But doesn’t the Wiki deserve it’s Kubrick skin – which was considered the defacto blog-look a few years back. People would look at the skin (which is beautiful) and say “Ahh – that’s a weblog”. These days I (and probably a few other) say “Yuck – It’s a Wiki”.

Michael Heilemann did such a great job with Kubrick. Isn’t it time for Wiki’s to have their own updated slick skin? Do you have it or know where to get it? There is one Wiki-skin I like: Cavendish. I would love to be able to create one myself, but my graphic skills are unfortunately only focused around my eyes – not in my hands.