Web Development Frameworks - The Survey

Usually, When I want to publish a survey, I do so on my Buzz stream. But this time it's different, as I want the broader exposure this blog has to offer.

In the past few years I got to develop web applications using various frameworks:

• JSP using both IBM WebSphere and Oracle JDeveloper, utilizing things such as EJB and struts.
• Oracle ApEx.
• ASP (yes, the original one).
• ASP.NET using both Web Forms (yuk) and ASP.NET MVC (yay).
• Django.

I know my list misses two big ones: PHP and Ruby on Rails. But that's not the issue.

It seems to me, just by reading web development blogs, that PHP, Django (or other Python based frameworks) and Rails has most of the web developers' minds. BUT, when I ask people "what framework are you using", I usually get either "ASP.NET" or "JSP". So perhaps I don't know enough people, or perhaps the web development community in Israel isn't connected to the trends. Or perhaps the "trends" aren't trends at all, rather just buzzwords being used.

I can't tell.

So this post is a survey. Please comment which web development framework are you using or used for the last project you had to develop.

Should the number of responses grow large, I'll publish a post summarizing the findings.

Leaving the Cable Company

For some time now I think: why am I paying for the cable company?

Most of the stuff I watch comes from the web, or comes for free. I'm willing to pay reasonable prices for the rest (VOD), but I find the cable company prices exaggerated.

Yet, I couldn't find a good alternative, until I saw Anona TV yesterday. A single product that doesn't cost a fortune, provides DTT, a streamer (I already own a Popcorn Hour device), and has the ability to order VOD shows. Should they over come geographical restrictions (the ability to watch Hulu only in the US), it's going to be a real blast.

Unfortunately, I'm not part of the beta, so I cannot provide a real review of this, and whether it provides the goods, but it does look promising. If anyone knows a way to get into this beta, or knows a different company offering a similar solution, I'd love to hear about it.

Switching ISP

So finally, after I complained about this topic over and over again, I finally switched from 012 to 018 as my ISP.

Few hours now, and I'm happy. I tried various protocols over various ports, and all seems to work perfectly well. And the price is better, too.

Just a minor thing that I also mentioned to their tech support: their site doesn't provide the configuration details needed in order to set-up the connection alone. Thanks to this guy I found this missing piece of information, which was the L2TP gateway: lns.018.net.il

Hope this would help to all of you who wish to make the switch.

Nice Exploitation Technique In PDF Files

Warning - security related post. Stay clear if you feel disgusted from Windows Internals and Security.

A friend of mine just posted a great piece about a clever shellcode technique called egghunting. If you're into this kind of stuff, I recommend reading it.

Also, if anyone is interested in some more details about the Adobe Acrobat Reader vulnerability described in the above post, please leave a comment, and I'll dedicate a separate post for that.

No Signal

So the Linkin Park concert was excellent. But I wanted to tell you about this two days ago, when I was there. Not now.

It appears that if 14,000 people gather around in the same park, none of them gets a cellular signal. Probably because the cellular towers around suffers from congestion. Not being able to handle the load, the cellular operators actually lose money. I bet that many fans like myself wanted to Tweet/Buzz/LiveBlog/SMS/Video-chat/whatever during the concert, but couldn't.

I wonder whether mobile cell-towers exists, and if they do - why don't cellular operators station those near crowded places when needed.

Build Errors With SubSonic

When programming in C# (MS or Mono, it doesn't matter), and the need for an ORM framework arise, I turn to SubSonic. I enjoy using this framework very much, as it is fast and intuitive, and free (as in speech).

So if you're like me, and you use SubSonic for your model layer, here's an advice: don't name any of your database columns/tables with C# keywords. For example: if you have a DB column named "private", you're gonna have problems.

When building a SubSonic project that doesn't follow the above advice, one would probably get tons of "Expected class, delegate, enum, interface, or struct" in Structs.cs. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Wireless, Is It Dangerous?

Just a while ago I posted about the fun of going cordless, and the benefits it bring to my work environment: much less clutter.

Today I finally got my BH-503 bluetooth headset from DealExtreme, and boy do I enjoy it. I use GTalk and Skype A LOT, and not being tied to a microphone makes life better. Sound quality is also very good, and it gets along just fine with my eye-glasses (not a trivial thing with other headsets).

So what's the problem?

The 2.4GHz spectrum near my desk is awfully crowded: wireless mouse, keyboard, WiFi router and two bluetooth devices (smartphone and headset). This gets me thinking: could this be dangerous?

All of the above products came with a disclaimer saying it is perfectly safe to use them, and none of them generates a bad kind of radiation or something. And still, just because I cannot see all those "waves" in the air, I'm a little bit disturbed.

What do you think?

See you all on the Linkin Park concert soon :)