10 Reasons to Write Unit Tests - Dot Technologies

It’s been bothering me for quite some time not being able to explain the people out there why they need to write unit tests. The most common responses that I got were “this is a waste of time” and “my application has no bugs”. Unfortunately, this overconfidence and cutting corners is hurting the developers (and the industry).

I compiled this short list of why I write unit tests:

Don’t let your customers discover embarassing bugs. Write tests to cover a multitude of scenarios and catch these bugs before they get into production.
Test complex scenarios quickly, without having to manually reproduce them in the application.
By testing often, you don’t break the application as you go. You can’t always know the indirect implications of what you’re writing, especially if you didn’t write the original application.
By testing early, you don’t write unnecessary code but only the strict necessary. This makes the codebase smaller and more maintainable. It also saves on development time.
You do not have to debug the same code twice. Once you have a test to account for a possible bug, you’ll pick up any wrong turns quickly.
You ensure readability. A unit test makes the purpose of your code easier to understand.
You ensure maintainability. Unit-testing forces you to better encapsulate functionality, thus making it easier to maintain and add new features.
Refactor without worries. Run the tests to make sure everything still functions as intended.
Save time on testing. You can test the entire application at the speed of your CPU.
Feel safer. How many times were you afraid to add a new feature or change something in your application’s core? No more!
Bonus: know exactly what is broken. Instead of hunting for an obscure bug, let the tests tell you what’s wrong and why. Example: the application will tell you when you add an item to a cart but the cart still appears empty. It will also tell you what item you tried to add for the cart to break.

Source : http://marxsoftware.blogspot.in

Bluestacks emulator runs Android apps on Windows PCs - Dot Technologies

The software can run the latest Angry Bird Android application on a Windows laptop


Software company Bluestacks is trying to close the gap between Microsoft's Windows and Google's Android OS with its App Player application, which was released in beta today.

App Player is an emulator that allows Android applications to run on Windows 7, Vista, and XP OSes. Users can install the software in Windows and then run about 450,000 Android applications, including Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, the company said.

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Beyond PCs, the App Player could also allow Windows tablets such as Hewlett-Packard's Slate 2 and Dell's Latitude ST to run Android applications. Bluestacks made headlines at last year's Computex trade show in Taipei when Advanced Micro Devices showed off an x86 tablet with Android running on top of the Windows 7 software stack. Android applications are mostly written for the ARM instruction set, but the x86 tablet was able to switch between Android and Windows without any problems.

The emulator has new Layercake technology, which exploits hardware accelerators to improve the performance of Android games in Windows. The layer was not included in the Bluestacks alpha version. Android applications typically use hardware accelerators found in ARM's Mali, Nvidia's Tegra, and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR graphics cores, but Layercake can take advantage of hardware accelerators found in x86 chips from companies like AMD.

The Bluestacks app is 3.6MB and can be downloaded from the company's website. The software installed without any issues on Windows XP, and on start provided the option to download software from Google's Android application market. Angry Bird Space, the latest iteration of the game, was released last week and ran on the PC through Bluestacks. However, resizing the window to full-screen mode required restarting the Angry Birds application.

The software also offered the option to sync apps and contacts with an Android device.

Article Source : http://www.infoworld.com

Does Having Good Content on Your Site Really Matter? - DotTechnologies.net

When it comes to building a business website, there are a lot of different elements that you have to think about. The content that you put on your site is going to be a lot more important than you might realize. People talk about content and whether it really counts, and the fact of the matter is that if you don't have solid information on your site, you're wasting your time with the investment in designing and creating a website in the first place. Content is everything and you have to make sure that you utilize it to create a site that is informative, engaging, and useful to your audience to keep them coming back for more.

The content that goes on your website will either make or break your success, in most cases. There are many different elements that your content needs to provide to your audience. In order to make the best use of your business website, your content should be:

-SEO-friendly. Make sure that you're using keywords so that search engines are able to follow and pick up on your website to rank it in search results. Just remember to follow rules for keyword usage and density so that you don't overdo it. It's better to have a keyword about once or twice for every 100 words than to stuff it in as much as you can.

-Brief. People are looking for quick, concise information. If your content is not to-the-point and easy to follow, your audience isn't going to stick around very long. Make sure that you get the facts out, get your point across, and be done with it.

-Informative. People need to know what you have to offer or why they are at your site. Provide them with all of the facts and information that they need to know about your business. Give them the chance to learn about your business, what you do, and how it can benefit them. This is what people want to know.

-Engaging. If you're not capable of producing simple, clean, engaging content on your own, you should hire someone to do the work. You content has to get people's attention and give them a reason to invest in your business, no matter what you are selling.

-Friendly. The last thing that people want online is to visit a website where they feel like they're being talked down to. Therefore, you have to make sure that your content is friendly and simple, not overly professional and 'better than thou' in its tone and style.

Content is king in the internet world, and your website is not going to be able to succeed without it. By taking the time to create useful, engaging content, you can rest assured that your audience will be much more likely to buy whatever you're selling and see your business in a professional light. 

Source: http://www.visualscope.com

Most Creative 404 HTTP Response Ever? - DotTechnologies

The HTTP 404 Status Code is one of the HTTP status codes that all web developers and nearly all web users are all too familiar with. It is an HTTP response indicating that an HTTP request was received by the intended server, but that the exact resource specified in the request URI cannot be found on the server. In the early days of the World Wide Web, it seemed like many sites did not bother doing anything in particular about this page. This meant that a pretty useless and nearly blank page would show up in the user's browser. Some browsers, such as Internet Explorer, attempted to provide more general details in a "user friendly" format.

These browser attempts at providing more details about the cause of a 404 response status were still not very helpful because there is no good general way to handle a 404 error response. Instead, it is preferable for a site to provides its own custom 404 response page. The advantages of a custom 404 are discussed in more detail in Importance of Custom 404 Error Pages.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of sites providing a custom 404 error response. This is especially true for sites that want to do whatever that can to retain the user's business and/or traffic to their site. These sites attempt to do their best to provide a search or suggestions for what the user can do next. Some sites don't try to fix the situation, but instead automatically redirect to the site's main page. Other sites perform a combination, providing a search box and acknowledgement of an unfound page for a few seconds and then automatically redirecting to their main page.

After seeing the reference on reddit Programming to Github's Star Wars Themed 404 Page, I wondered if there are any 404 error responses more clever than this one. The Github 404 page may not be the best at helping the user find what he or she was looking for, but it is funny and does provide links to other actions that might be taken.

I tried some intentionally unavailable URIs on some of my most-accessed sites to see how their 404 responses are handled. In the rest of this post, I look briefly at some of them and analyze the value each provides. Mostly though, I was simply looking for the most interesting 404 page I could find and so far I haven't found any more funny than Github's.

http://marxsoftware.blogspot.in

Adobe Launches Sandboxed Flash Player For Firefox, Hopes For Fewer Exploits - DotTechnologies

The design is similar to that of Adobe Reader X Protected Mode

Adobe has released a beta version of Flash Player for Firefox, which has better protection against vulnerability exploits because of a new sandboxed architecture.

"The design of this sandbox is similar to what Adobe delivered with Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and follows the same Practical Windows Sandboxing approach," said Peleus Uhley, platform security strategist at Adobe, in a blog post on Monday. "Like the Adobe Reader X sandbox, Flash Player will establish a low integrity, highly restricted process that must communicate through a broker to limit its privileged activities."

In secure software development, sandboxing refers to the practice of isolating a process from the operating system in order to minimize the fallout of a potential exploit. This type of technology has gained popularity in recent years, primarily because of its use in Google Chrome, a browser that has never experienced a successful remote code execution attack so far.

Adobe decided to implement sandboxing in Adobe Reader back in 2010 in order to counter the large number of exploits that targeted the product and its users. The technology was built into Adobe Reader X (10.0) and is based on the same sandboxing principles that Google used when developing Chrome.

Later that same year Adobe also launched a sandboxed version of Flash Player for Chrome and promised to explore the possibility of doing the same for other browsers. The new sandboxed Flash Player for Firefox, which works with Windows Vista and Windows 7, is the result of those efforts.

Critical Flash Player vulnerabilities have regularly been exploited to infect computers with malware during the past several years. Along with Java and Adobe Reader, Flash Player is one of the most attacked software applications because its vulnerabilities can usually be exploited by simply visiting a malicious website.

"Since its launch in November 2010, we have not seen a single successful exploit in the wild against Adobe Reader X," Uhley said. "We hope to see similar results with the Flash Player sandbox for Firefox once the final version is released later this year."

However, the success of this version at deterring cybercriminals from writing Flash Player exploits in the future will largely depend on how quickly it gets adopted. In order to speed up the process, Adobe is working on a new update mechanism, the company's senior manager for corporate communications, Wiebke Lips, said.

Having a sandboxed version of Flash Player for every major browser, not just Chrome and Firefox, is also important, if Adobe wants cybercriminals to lose interest in its product. "We are currently in the process of researching the best path to provide Flash Player sandbox protection for Internet Explorer," Lips said.

However, because Internet Explorer has a completely different plug-in architecture than Chrome and Firefox, namely ActiveX, developing a sandboxed Flash Player version for it requires a different approach, Lips said. Nevertheless, the current version of Flash Player supports Protected Mode in Internet Explorer 7 or later on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Article Source: http://www.infoworld.com/

PHP 5.3.10 Fixes Critical Remote Code Execution Vulnerability - DotTechnologies

The vulnerability was introduced by the fix for a hash collision denial-of-service flaw.

The PHP Group released PHP 5.3.10 on Thursday in order to address a critical security flaw that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on servers running an older version of the Web development platform.

The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2012-0830 and was discovered by Stefan Esser, an independent security consultant and creator of the popular Suhosin security extension for PHP.

SecurityFocus classifies the issue as a design error because it was accidentally introduced while fixing a separate denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability in early January.

That vulnerability is known as CVE-2011-4885 and was disclosed in December 2011 at the Chaos Communication Congress by security researchers Alexander Klink and Julian Wälde.

It affects a number of Web development platforms including PHP, ASP.NET, Java and Python and can be exploited in a so-called hash collision attack. The PHP development team addressed CVE-2011-4885 in PHP 5.3.9, which was released on Jan. 10.

"The fix for the Hash Collision DoS introduced a new directive (max_input_vars) to limit the number of accepted input variables," said Carsten Eiram, chief security specialist at vulnerability research firm Secunia.

"However, due to a logic error in the "php_register_variable_ex()" function in php_variables.c certain cases are not handled correctly when the number of supplied variables is greater than the imposed limit," he explained.

This error can be exploited by attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on a system that runs a vulnerable PHP installation. PHP 5.3.9 along with any older versions for which the hash collision DoS patch was backported, are affected, Eiram said.

Proof-of-concept code that exploits this vulnerability has already been published online, so the likelihood of attacks targeting CVE-2012-0830 are high. Web servers administrators are advised to upgrade to PHP 5.3.10 immediately.

 Article Source: http://www.infoworld.com/

Google Introduces Country Domains On Blogger To Aid Content Removal - DotTechnologies

The decision by Google appears to precede a move by Twitter to selectively delete messages in some countries.

Google is directing users to localized country domains on Blogger to provide it flexibility to comply with content removal rules in various countries.

 The move suggests that Internet companies are coming to terms with the need to follow local rules, as they try to gain users in countries where there are concerns about pornography, and certain political and religious content.

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Google's update on Jan. 9 came ahead of Twitter's controversial decision last week to withhold certain content from users in a specific country, when required by local laws, while keeping it available to the rest of the world.

Over the coming weeks, users might notice that the URL (uniform resource locator) of a blog they are reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or ccTLD, Google said on a support page on Blogger that was first noticed by the news site Techdows.

"Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law," Google said. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD, it added.

Google is facing legal action in India in connection with content on its sites that is said to be objectionable. The Indian government in January allowed a court in Delhi to prosecute Google, Facebook, and 19 others, after Vinay Rai, editor of a local newspaper, filed a suit alleging objectionable content on their websites. Google had meanwhile appealed the lower court order before the Delhi High Court.

The Indian government has also demanded that Google and others should evolve mechanisms to quickly remove online content considered objectionable under Indian law.

But the feature on Blogger is part of a global rollout, and has little to do with the current situation in India, said a source close to the situation, who requested anonymity.

Services like Blogger, YouTube and Google+ help users to express themselves and share different points of view, Google said in a statement on Thursday. Where content is illegal or breaks Google's terms of service, the company will continue to remove it, it added. Google did not respond to a request for comment whether the changes on Blogger were linked to the court decision in India.

Google's YouTube also restricts access to content by IP address, citing the requirement of some content partners to make their videos available only to certain countries. It also blocks specific content in order to comply with local laws in countries where YouTube has launched. "For instance, certain Nazi imagery is unlawful in parts of Europe," according to a YouTube support page.