Yesterday I started receiving messages from microsoft security essentials that it had detected a virus called PWS:Win32/Zbot, a password stealing trojan.
The infected file was Chrome.exe !!! yikes. A trip to Microsofts Malware Protection Centre reaveals that Chrome is not as evil as MS would have it be and that some overzealous virus hunter has left Microsoft with a bit of an apology to make (fair play to Microsoft for that)
This from Microsoft …
Information about incorrect detection of Google Chrome as PWS:Win32Zbot
On September 30th, 2011, an incorrect detection for PWS:Win32/Zbot was identified and as a result, Google Chrome was inadvertently blocked and in some cases removed. Within a few hours, Microsoft released an update that addresses the issue. Signature versions 1.113.672.0 and higher include this update. Affected customers should manually update Microsoft Security Essentials with the latest signatures. After updating the definitions, reinstall Google Chrome. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our customers.
Worrying thing is, although I asked security essentials to remove the hazard (Chrome.exe), it didn’t …
Output42 was recently contracted to create a line-of-business application by one of its largest customers. When we saw the spec we knew this was going to be a difficult one. The task was to replace a spreadsheet-based system. One of those, which users would have pried from their dead, cold hands before they gave them up. When faced with such a challenge the only way to succeed is to outdo the competition in every possible way. At the same time it is important to deliver a clean, well engineered solution that will be easy to maintain and extend in the future.
The customer had a strong preference for the user interface to be implemented as as Windows desktop application. After much deliberation we decided to give WPF a try. Some of the principles behind make it easy to design an application well. That’s of course if you follow the recommended design pattern: Model-View-ViewModel. It is a concept which derives from the ages-old Model-View-Controller pattern, and modifies it to work with perhaps the most important new concept in WPF: the binding.
If you delve deeper into the WPF design concept, you will find out that it is significantly different from Microsoft’s previous UI frameworks. Or anybody else’s for that matter. Whether you’re coming from the MFC or Windows Forms world you need completely change you way of designing desktop applications if you want to use WPF’s new capabilities efficiently. Ivan Towlson probably describes it best:
Windows Presentation Foundation isn’t just a new control library – it’s a radically new architecture.
The other very important concept, which builds on top of binding, is commands. Granted, there are many other important concepts in WPF, like events, triggers, resources, etc. In fact Christopher Estep has got them nicely catalogued for you. But between binding and commanding WPF helps to solve the most important problems of business software design: clean design, clear interfaces, separation of concerns and encapsulation. It does that mostly by making it easy to separate the UI design from the underlying business logic.
In fact not only do WPF and MVVM facilitate clean design. They encourage it. To me as a developer it is a big deal. It allows me to design well and use the the UI framework the way it was intended to be used, rather than work against. It also directly affects hundreds of tiny decisions we make each day as developers when we write code, steering us towards a better design and better software in the end. Very much the way Jeff Attwood and Brad Abrams talk about it as the “pit of success”.
Next time: is it really all sunshine and roses?
The following list is unashamedly borrowed from the blog associated with Assembla , our web based project/collaboration tool ( www.assembla.com ).
1) Release on a fixed schedule ( often as possible )
2) Share a daily or continuous build ( warts and all )
3) Write it down in tickets
4) Daily report and chat
5) Watch a team activity stream
6) Recruit good people
Assembla covers 1) to 5) very well… no. 6 we have defintely got right.
We’ve dipped our toe in the wild west world of mobile App development and so far have got out with our sanity and bank balance intact. Jquerymobile has proved to be incredibly good at delivering very rapid, clean interfaces for straightforward data input for one of our web based projects.
What we have ended up with is a mobile App that runs in any browser…any browser… PC / Smartphone / Linux / bingobongo. We havn’t gone for any fancy graphics or swish looking gimmicks – just good old Labels, buttons, lists and data entry boxes and our current Alpha version all hangs together very nicely.
Michal Morawski took JqueryMobile by the horns just under 2 weeks ago and left us with a very useable APP before heading for the Polish costa brava for a few weeks.
Output42 are now officially APP-sperts 
We are looking for great software developers.
As a programmer at Output42, you will help design, develop, and implement the code for a variety of systems and applications, including some of our innovative products.
We do not hire based on a specific list of buzzwords, technologies, or popular acronyms. Right now we use C#, XSLT, JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS and SQL. Tomorrow we may be using something completely new.
Requirements:
- Excellent coding skills. Your programming ability is above average, as demonstrated by successful projects.
- Good command of written and spoken English.
- We expect that you will be able to master any technology, language, or development environment that we need in the future.
If you’d like to join our team please e-mail your resume to info@output42.com.
Maybe someone in the skypekit beta program happened upon our blog and took pity, maybe they needed my 10 dollars or maybe the beta program is opening up, whatever it was we are now officially part of the skypekit beta program. For the developers at output42 it means we can finally knuckle down and get on with coding rather than trawling google for the next best thing.
Skype went down again yesterday. They claimed it affected only a small number of users and only in Europe. However contacts of mine in Australia reported they could not connect either and there have been reports from around the world of similar problems. It wasn’t a minor outage as they claimed, so why pretend it was ?
As a result of this output42 is going to start using Google Talk as its backup communication system, I suspect many others will be doing the same.
Oh and don’t blame MS, they don’t own Skype yet !
The saga of video conferencing for the assisted living application at output42 goes on. We found out from a nice chap at ooVoo yesterday that they don’t actually have an API, well to be more accurate we should not have been able to find their API. Odd that since when googling “oovoo API” it takes you straight here , a set of developer pages with an API download, sample app and the like. It seems that these pages exist but are not browseable to from the main website. If they don’t want to have folks fool around with their API then they should do the decent thing and take down the related pages.
A little more clarification required, to be continued ….
Output42 is developing an application in the sphere of assisted living, aiming to help those with Dementia, Alzheimers and similar mental impairments. A feature of this app is extremely simple video conferencing and the ability to make calls out to landlines. Skype has an API that is usable only for voice calls, SkypKit Beta is not easily available and certainly it would seem not to a precocious upstart like output42. So what to do? We have currently implemented a solution from wowza which works well over broadband but has latency issues and requires the latest Flashplayer Beta to overcome echo problems, but it works and we are grateful. Other issues are that there is no land line calling and it is only available to be installed in a web client, we overcome this by embedding a browser in the app, messy, but for a prototype acceptable.
Recently we have stumbled upon ooVoo. Its a skype-a-like app that has really good fast free 1 to 1 video conferencing and has what looks like a very usable developer API, both for web and windows. It claims to have a million users currently so its are not going to fold overnight, we hope…
So off we go down the road with ooVoo, wish us luck and if anyone out there has a “why dont you use this instead” moment, share it please and we will try it.
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why I will never ever hire a social media expert
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