Web-Sites of the Month: The Best of January 2007
The best web-development sites, articles, references and tutorials published in January. Lots of great stuff here.

Codefetch
A specialized search engine that searches only within code samples from programming books. May be a great way to find the right book to buy to tackle a specific problem, or if you’re lucky, to find the complete code solution without buying anything.

Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords
The title says it all. My favorite error message in Windows 2000.

O’Reilly Open Books
About 30 full O’Reilly books were published with various “open” licenses, making them free to read and, in some cases, redistribute. They’re available here for reading online as PDFs. They’re not all incredibly recent books, but that doesn’t diminish the value at all. I would’ve liked to have the Mason and mod_perl books when I was rewriting old Mason programs in Java for a company two years ago.

Is it a pen? Is it a webcam? No… it’s a PC
A pen with a display projector, virtual keyboard projector and sensor, and a computer in between. A gadget I’d like to have in my pocket.

Programmers are brain surgeons
A blog entry discussing why programmers aren’t treated with the respect they deserve and what to do about it.

Then I met with someone that did more technical work for MSIT who went through my experience more in depth. He was great too, I got to talk a lot about myself which doesn’t always happen with some interviewers, but it stayed conversational. We spent some time talking about Vista and the bugs in the RCs and even into Microsoft Hardware — he promised to let me know if he can find out why nobody has the keyboard I’ve been drooling over since September in stock even though the ship date for the 7000 series was supposed to be 1/8.

A couple hours later I met up with some manager types from DuPont where I worked last year and talked about coming back if I didn’t get an offer from Microsoft. It’s always good to have a backup plan. The two Microsoft interviews went well but I don’t honestly expect an offer — I have no recent work experience developing in the Visual Studio environment, with .NET or anything that’s come about in the last 4 years or so since moving off to C++, Java and PHP.

My direct manager, who offered me his job before I left, already left the company for another position, but he made sure everyone else knew I was the best programmer on the team when I was there, so they definitely want to re-hire me.

The Microsoft group that flew in got an e-mail out to everyone that interviewed with them through Drexel’s career development center to let us know they were having an info session type gathering in the evening which I just got back from. It was real casual and they and a student from Drexel that worked there last year (and is going back to join the Xbox XA team) talked about life at Microsoft and in Seattle.

About half an hour into it they pulled out a brand new Xbox 360 with a bunch of games and had everyone throw their names in a hat and raffled it off. I won! I haven’t owned a game console since the Nintendo 64, which my parents had paid for so many years ago. I’ve never spent my own money on one, but now I get to try out everything I saw when Bill Gates gave the CES keynote address last week — Xbox Live, Xbox TV, Vista Ultimate’s media center integration with Xbox Live, using the Xbox 360 controller to navigate MS Live Virtual Earth. I’ll have a lot of fun with this.

A great day in the end. I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on so I’ll stop writing here, but I also got to meet Richard Stallman in person, the man behind GNU and the free software movement. He gave an hour and a half talk at Drexel about software patents that I managed to get to between interviews and classes. Very interesting guy.

Here’s the problem:

• Mozilla-based browsers make available an array called navigator.plugins which contains the list of plugins in the browser.
• Internet Explorer in Windows has this array, but it’s always empty.
• Internet Explorer 5 on Mac has the array and fills it like Mozilla.
• Opera on Mac and Linux, and iCab, don’t have this array, but do potentially have the Flash mime-type listed in a mimeTypes array.
• With Internet Explorer 4+, you can detect Flash by instantiating a Flash object with VBScript, but you’ll produce an error message when Flash isn’t there.
• Internet Explorer 3 and 4 on Mac don’t support VBScript (or the plugins array).
• Java can also be tested for with a navigator.javaEnabled() method, which kinda sorta works in most browsers, but is broken in at least most versions of Netscape for Mac, and sometimes returns false in IE6 on WinXP if a non-Microsoft Java plugin is installed (such as one directly from Sun).

This is the code I’m using now; I haven’t added a search through the mime types yet which should improve accuracy:

flash_versions = 10;
flash_installed = 0;
flash_version = '0.0';
java_installed = 0;

// Netscape style plugin detection
if (navigator.plugins && navigator.plugins.length) {
	for (x = 0; x < navigator.plugins.length; x++) {
		if (navigator.plugins[x].name.indexOf('Shockwave Flash') != -1) {
			flash_version = navigator.plugins[x].description.split('Shockwave Flash ')[1];
			flash_installed = 1;
			break;
		}
	}
	for (x = 0; x < navigator.plugins.length; x++) {
		if (navigator.plugins[x].name.indexOf('Java(TM)') != -1) {
			java_installed = 1;
			break;
		}
	}
}

// The other way to check if Java is enabled
if (navigator.javaEnabled()) {
  java_installed = 1;
}

// ActiveX style plugin detection
else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
	for (x = 2; x <= flash_versions; x++) {
		try {
			oFlash = eval("new ActiveXObject('ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash." + x + "');");
			if (oFlash) {
				flash_installed = 1;
				flash_version = x + '.0';
			}
		}
		catch(e) { }
	}
}

Here are today’s counts from W3Counter.com itself:

I have a hard time believing only 50% of the site’s visitors have Flash installed. Is it a logic error in my JavaScript (not one of the languages I’m more experienced with), or is attempting to detect Flash with only JavaScript futile?

I’d appreciate if anyone that’s tackled this problem before could share their experience, as I’d rather not drop those reports from W3Counter.

Once I took on a job working on a PHP application larger than one file in size (Contact Administrator), the single file per window, single undo abilities of notepad didn’t cut it anymore. I upgraded to TextPad. I gained the convenience of a single window for all open files, syntax highlighting, multiple levels of undo, and the ability to replace patterns in all open files. My routine still consisted of opening all the files in a project in TextPad, writing code, saving, uploading by FTP to the server, and testing the changes live.

It wasn’t until 2005 that things changed significantly. I discovered vim, starting the third phase. I had been managing two servers to run my websites for a few years by now but had only known vi as a text editor that was hard to quit out of. Then I met Amir while working at The Math Forum, a “vi guru”. His copy had color, syntax highlighting, edited multiple files at once, transformed huge blocks of text at a time, ran regular expression replacements in a flash. Watching him code got me hooked. For nearly a year I worked directly on my servers over SSH in PuTTY, editing code on the server with vim.

Then W3Counter came along. It was my most ambitious project yet – a full-blown web statistics service, a competitor for Google Analytics and the likes, to support thousands of simultaneous users, and I wanted to finish it in under a month. It ended up taking around two. This project was bigger and more complex than the PHP scripts I had worked on before, and my knowledge of the language had advanced much past when I developed Contact Administrator. I had gained experience in Java, MVC, frameworks, ORM. I wasn’t going to tackle something like W3Counter with huge files of procedural code.

That’s when I moved on to my current environment. My editor of choice is Eclipse with the PHP extensions, released as the Eclipse PHP IDE. It gives me a view of my directory hierarchy, a browser for my class APIs, code completion and an internal browser.

I combine that with WAMP5 for a local copy of Apache, PHP and MySQL. I keep my development environments up-to-date, and deploy to my live servers with Subversion. Eclipse has TortoiseSVN plugins for easy integration. I set up the Subversion repository after reading Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion.

What I’m currently working on is a project on top of the Symfony framework. I found it easiest to start off with the sandbox copy rather than linking in Symfony externally from the project. One hitch with this is that the Symfony CLI requires PEAR, which WAMP5 didn’t come with installed, and the included installer script didn’t work correctly (on Windows Vista at least). This go-pear copy worked fine when run from the php directory of my WAMP installation.

When I do still need to transfer a file to a server that’s not under SVN control I’m back to the same software I used in 1996: WS_FTP LE.

About a half hour drive west from my apartment in Philadelphia, getting there would be no problem (compared to the nightmare of traffic trying to get to Unisys, Siemens, and a couple other big Drexel coop hirers). My first impression of the place was good: a campus much nicer looking than Drexel, a parking garage with only a few open spaces, and a shuttle to move people between buildings throughout the day.

I was told I’d be meeting with David, who I had met before at an information session on Drexel’s campus, and Lenny, who I’d be working with if I got the job. Unfortunately David was too busy to take part in the interview, so it was just Lenny and myself. Lenny was a very soft spoken guy without a whole lot to say. He let me know what the job was, that he’d be the one assigning the day-to-day tasks. He asked a bit about what I’d done before and I briefly described the application I worked on for The Math Forum as it was written in Java, and this position would primarily be Java work as well. He also asked if I had any database experience and I tried to get across how much I do have, both from job experience working with Oracle and Postgres, to my own database intensive web apps.

That’s where things seemed to get a little awkward. He asked several times what I thought I’d get out of an internship for SAP, what I thought I’d learn there. The way he asked each time gave me the impression he might think I’m a bit overqualified for the job and couldn’t get much out of it. He let me know that I wouldn’t be doing a lot of database design, but more writing small apps to add to Enterprise Portal and modifying what’s already there. I tried to be clear that I just enjoy web development over other software development so working on Enterprise Portal would be a good fit, and that I’d like some experience with SAP’s solutions, such as Web DynPro and NetWeaver.

The interview was pretty brief, I was in and out in about 20 minutes, taking the shuttle back to the parking garage. I’m not sure where I stand with SAP; Lenny was pretty hard to read. I’m also not sure if SAP is a good match for me, as the job did sound pretty simplistic compared to what I’m used to. On the other hand, it could be a way into a company I might want to work for after graduating in a more challenging position, or at least a good way to get SAP’s software onto my resume. I’ll follow up with a thank-you letter as another chance to get across why I’m right for the job.

I mailed Google Friday morning with my available times for the phone interviews they want to do, and I’m still waiting to hear back about that.