When writing the article about performance improvments I originally plant to write a bit more about different compilers and perhaps do create kinda statistics. Finally I didn’t do it ’cause it would have been an overkill for the post.

During preparatory research about different compiler I came by KAI C++ compiler, its name amused me a lot

The project-page says:

The powerful features of KAI C++ will make programmers more efficient. The advanced optimizations allow programmers to take full advantage of object-oriented design and software reuse without worrying about performance, because KAI C++ makes objects almost as efficient as hand-coded C. Programmers will spend less time trying to correct performance problems, and instead deliver code that is intuitive and easy to maintain.

Afterwards I tried to collect some information about KAI:

• According to the copyright (says 1996-1999) the compiler seems to be an older one.
• Besides the project page and user’s guide it has a website www.kai.com that forwards to Intel website.
• It’s based on linux standards and owns a manage.
• It’s not very famous ’cause I wasn’t able to collect as much information as I’d liked to.
• It’s shareware - donno what a licence costs but they promise you comprehensive and extremely responsive customer support

In conclusion I can say that I’m definitely not interested in KAI C++ compiler. I’m not pretty sure how famous, professional or handy it is, additionally it being shareware makes it totally charmless for me to test it.

Yahoo’s administrative board recently announced that they are not willed to accept Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover bid. After a last-minute meeting yesterday, Yahoo’s board is said to have rebuffed the offer from Microsoft believing that the Windows developer is acting out of opportunism.

Although the offer of $31 per share is significantly higher than Yahoo’s stock value at the time of the proposal, the search engine firm’s executives reportedly believe that this offer is undervalued and are waiting for a bid of $40 per share or more, which could raise the worth of the bid to $56 billion.

As a result of the decision, Yahoo may still be willing to consider a Google alliance or a similar deal to sour the prospects for Microsoft.

Finally I think the move signals Yahoo management may be preparing for a long battle for control of the company.

The following pdf gives you a great overview of the possibilities to use the Google search.

Google Cheat Sheet.pdf

Hope it helps

With reports of Microsoft offering a $50 Billion buyout of Yahoo, and other reports brewing of a possible merger, the question is, would such a venture be beneficial to Microsoft or Yahoo?

Microsoft is wholly lacking in web-mindedness, and seems still most living in the downloadable app world. That might be the reason why they are interested in a web-giant like Yahoo.

What about Yahoo? Despite a great advertising campaign Yahoo wasn’t able to close up with its biggest competitor Google. But also Microsoft always does some test of strength with Google. So for who is that really an advantage?
In fact Google needs a competition but has the rival to be Microsoft? I personally would not prefer that.

Damn sure this is what Microsoft needs to be able to compete with Google in the future.

However, it will probably be quite bad for users, since it will (in the long run) mean that will only be two big players in search. I hope this will not go through…

In studying and/or promoting web-technology, the phrase Web 2.0 can refer to a trend in web design and development — a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services (such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies) which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users.

This sounds nice but what is it really all about?
Web 2.0 means openness that can mainly be explained due the fact that open-source in itself describes openness. Complex and expensive in production products are more and more deployed as open source software solution.

Open interfaces make it easy to share data and interact between different systems. For example Flickr, a currently well-known Web 2.0 product, makes it possible to access its data structure via an API (Application Programming Interface) from outside.
That’s why new services can be developed which use Flickr data. Finally that brings new users to Flickr.

Flickr is just a single example in a big “cloud” of platforms. I think Web 2.0 mostly is about connecting data from different platforms.
For example having blog with an plugin from amazon to publish your wishlist and additionally showing photos to your friends which are hosted by Flickr.

Another important aspect of Web 2.0 is the compliance of regulations concerning web-standarts like XHTML and CSS. This is significant ’cause the movement of the desktop application into the internet is straigt on forward. Nowadays websites are not just shown on our home-computers also on cellphones and palms. Also fancy frameworks like AJAX, for nice effects and better user-friendlyness, take place in Web 2.0.

But why not just calling it “Nice looking - interacting, independent platforms” - or something similar.
Let’s do a bit of time travel:

Web 0.5
Time before WWW: from 1988 to 1995, near the point the Internet became really popular and easy to use for everyone. The usage was restricted to the share of simple data and email communication.

Web 1.0
It was born in 1996: static html pages, one-way communication, classic websites.

Web 1.5
Web 1.5 came up in the time of the so-called dot.com-boom between 1996 and 2001.That as also the time when websites became dynamic. The major things were hits & eyeballs (pageviews) und visual eye-catchers. Interactive websites were for the most part shops, boards and other community places in the web. Their disadvantage was that they were always stand-alone solutions because the battle for users had began. The used technogies were huge and expensive (CMS, Community Software, E-Commerce) but users were strictly bounded to them.

Web 2.0 brings a broad variety of different applications all based on modern Internet technologies. But is everything new? I don’t think so. According to my opinion Web 2.0 is just a upgrade of 1.5 that is a bit more free than closed software platforms some time ago.

Is this the end of development on the web? Besides the fact that in computering there’ll be never an end, I think concerning the engineering progress Web 3.0 will not need a long time coming. But more about Web 3.0 soon…

Everybody knows well about the issue of SQL injections.
True, but why is SQL injection still occurring? Isn’t everyone validating all user input these days?

For example say you have a logon form that accepts a user name and password. Once authenticated against the database, the application then sets a session value, or some other token for allowing the user to access the protected data.

Take a logon form for example, here you have two basic form elements, a textbox for accepting a user name, and a password box for the password.

<form action="admin.aspx"> 
<input name="username" type="textbox" /> 
<input name="password" type="password" />
<input type="submit" />

The code behind might be something like

String sQuery = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Users WHERE UserName = '"+username.Text+"' AND Password = '"+password.Text+"'";

SQLCommand cmd = new SQLCommand(sQuery, Connection);

int n = cmd.ExecuteScalar();

When entering “‘ or 0=0 –” into the username field the query looks like that:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Users WHERE UserName = '""' OR 0=0 --

which always would return the number of users.

As you can it’s just minor effort to see data of a database you are not supposed to see.

But also more bad things can happen to your database for example the following can kill lots of data.

'; drop table users --

Also the report of errorcodes can be very helpful for attackers. There’s a whole bunch of lists on the net what error code is related to which area in the server/database structure.

sQuery = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Users WHERE UserName = '@username' AND Password = '@password'";

SQLCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(sQuery, Connection);

cmd .Parameters.Add ("@username", SqlDbType.VarChar).Value = username.Text;

cmd .Parameters.Add ("@password", SqlDbType.VarChar).Value = password.Text;

cmd .Parameters.Add ("@return", SqlDbType.Int).Direction = ParameterDirection.ReturnValue;

int n = cmd.ExecuteScalar();

This is only one way the secure your web apps - by passing parameters you avoid many types of SQL injection attacks.
Finally, ensure you provide very little information to a potential attacker when an error occurs.