I recently found myself babysitting a certain web application project as it went live. It was besieged with many performance problems as it scaled up to meet real-life usage. This is a pretty common problem. I deliver a guest lecture from time to time on the topic of building scaleable web application infrastructure, and although this is something pretty familiar to me, I can see that many people are bewildered by the complexities of real-world production web application infrastructure.
I recently found myself leading an application system project: CodeCrunch. This is an online system for automated assessment of programming tasks. It is designed to help students learn computer programming by providing a web-based system to retrieve programming tasks, submit program solutions, perform automatic assessment, and obtain feedback of testing results. CodeCrunch originally began as a student Final Year Project, until we inherited the system in early 2010, and rolled-out to go-live in July 2010.
Ever since I signed up for broadband data on my mobile phone, I’ve been trying to make it easy for me to access information on the go. One of the things I’ve done is to write a simple widget to fetch little bits of information from different sources and mash it up into a tight little display area. For example, I have displays to show information from work, webcam feed from home, etc. One page that will probably find general…
I’ve been evaluating a couple of software lately. I’m looking for a nice platform to do tons of documentation. I talk about “nice”, because things need to be beautiful for people to want to use. But at the same time, they have to work. Actually, having to work is even more important. It is such a dilemma sometimes when you have to choose between what’s beautiful and what works.
Yes it keeps us busy even during the festive season. A number of critical security issues were identified with WordPress 2.3.1 (may apply to older versions too) that necessitated an urgent security release. WordPress 2.3.2 is now available. One of the problem is a SQL Injection Vulnerability that exposes internal information about your WordPress installation. These are common problems that plague web applications. I did a brief presentation on Secure Web Programming a few moons ago. It was primarily intended…
