Miles Associates LLC

My friend Clarke Bishop told me about the Flex language for web sites. It really intrigued him because it leverages the ubiquitous flash player plugin to deliver a media-rich user interface that is profoundly consistent across platforms and browsers.

Back when we worked together, Clarke was my internal customer, and he always set a high bar for usability and functionality. This is longer ago than I want to admit, but let’s just say we wrote phenomenally functional database applications in character-cell VT100 terminals in a powerful application environment called ALL-IN-1. ALL-IN-1 could have been widely used if it had been marketed as an application platform but DEC wanted to keep it as an “office automation” platform. Oh well, Microsoft probably would have killed them anyway…

On the web site, Adobe says this about Flex: “Adobe® Flex™ 2 is a complete, powerful application development solution for creating and delivering cross-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs) within the enterprise and across the web. It enables the creation of expressive and interactive web applications that can reach virtually anyone on any platform. Enterprises can use Flex to quickly build and deploy applications that improve the user experience, boost the bottom line, and analyze data to enable better business decisions”. Clarke seems to agree.

So, I’m a novice web designer but I’m going to install and try out the free version of Flex. I just need to think of an application I’ll prototype in Flex. Take a look at this really cool site in Flex: Better book browser.

Here’s news of another widespread compromise aimed at attacking unpatched systems. Stay patched! There is no other defense for an attack like this if you are the user browsing the Internet.

10,000 web sites compromised, infecting those who browse there…

It will be interesting to see what vulnerability was exploited on the infected web servers and whether the site operators have been slack in updating the servers or not.

These are normal commerce servers, not porn or gambling or other sites serving the vices.

 It might be time to become really afraid about “Botnets“.  They are becoming more and more ubiquitous.  This article today highlighted these facts:

• The Department of Justice and FBI today (June 13, 2007) said ongoing investigations have identified more than 1 million botnet crime victims.
• Gartner predicts that by year-end 75% of enterprises “will be infected with undetected, financially motivated, targeted malware that evaded traditional perimeter and host defenses”.
• Google researchers (in Ghost in the Browser)* recently said at least one in 10 Web pages is booby-trapped with malware.

Most times the victim does not even know they are infected.

*  This paper is quite interesting, in that basically a Google query can predict to you if a web server is serving Malware — this might be on purpose or the server might be compromised. Either way, the security manager in charge should be very attentive to the potential problem.

I have a lot of thoughts about SAAS – software as a service – especially as a replacement for office applications on “fat PCs”. I invite everyone to read Negroponte’s “Being Digital” for a very lucid discussion of “utility computing”.

I think Google is on the right track. Their applications, at least the apps I’ve tried, are good, functional usable applications (the usability is the most key part). The one issue is the network: it is still too unreliable. (My broadband was down for 45 minutes while I was working here tonight).

Google obviously recognizes the problem, they’ve just released Google Gears as a future platform for offline access to applications. The below article and the blog post it references are pretty good reading on the importance of the offline solution to the long term for each company.

Microsoft Watch – Developer – Can Microsoft Be the Wrench in Google Gears?

This week I ran across the concept of the Semantic Web. The Semantic web can be thought of as a way for computers to use the web instead of humans… that is, a computer program can browse information (structured, of course, to allow for computer queries [which are more precise and limited than human queries; humans can also filter the unstructured results properly while a computer often can't]) from other sites and use it.

For example, a shopping site that offers products from many sources and gathers its catalog dynamically from the source sites.

The semantic web has been envisioned and pursued by, among others, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Here is the eWeek article that caught my eye (new window).

Here is Wikipedia’s article (new window).