I have seen a few estimation nightmares in my time and have been unfortunate enough to be in some of them. Let me narrate a few anecdotes first
Anecdote 1:
I used to work with a re-insurer. This company had a legacy application that was written in fortran. Yes fortran. It did some very important things. It was capable of making estimations for a given market and it crunched a lot of numbers into meaningful data. Because this application was written in fortran, finding the right engineers to maintaining it was difficult. So they decided to shift the application to a better supported platform / language.
The work came to IT and a manager said ‘Lets convert it to VB’. This person, did not know fortran and was not a master of VB either. No developers or architects were asked for advice. It was simply decided that the application should be converted to VB from fortran.
I joke with a friend about this all the time. ‘We are surrounded by Google programmers‘ he said, and I couldn’t agree more.
There is a difference between a ‘Google programmer’ and a ‘programmer that works at Google’. Google programmers simply search Google for a piece of boiler plate code and stick it into their app. It wreaks havoc later and causes trouble for a lot of people.
I chanced upon this blog post a while back that was complaining about lazy developers at stackoverflow. The complaint being that some developers ask silly questions, the answer to which a Google search will easily reveal. It seems some people are so lazy to use google that whole websites are dedicated to Google something for you 
If you are a web developer, you would have encountered one of the following challenges.
- Ensure that your web page contents are not cached by the browser.
- Check if your clear text componenets are gzipped by the web server.
- Add additional request parameters / headers for testing.
- Determine if a stolen cookie can be used to login to the site.
- Analyze request / response times.
- Verify web server response status / headers.
Well, I could go on and on and the list is certainly large. Do you see anything common in the list mentioned above ? They all require a tcp monitor / web debugging proxy to solve. There are several that are available out there. If you have never used one before, its never too late. I was able to save several minutes of time when programming java web apps after marrying them with a debugging proxy / monitor.
The RSS cloud and the pubsubhubbub (PuSH) way of notifying RSS feeds has gained some interest of late, thanks to wordpress supporting the former format. If you have never heard of these protocols, heres the low down. The RSS feed works by having a client ‘pull’ data from a feed. That is, clients keep nagging at the server every X minutes saying ‘Hey do you have something new for me ?’. The server responds with a no about 99% of the time. This leads to a lot of inefficiencies. Instead if the clients were to use a push model, the data is actually ‘pushed’ to a client automatically without the client asking for it. This is great since the client no longer makes unnecessary calls to the server. The diagrams below illustrate this.
Classic update:
Rss Cloud update:
I have been researching captchas recently . The goal being, to understand how to make captchas better. I spent some time trying to determine the various forms of catcha available out there. There were quite a few and some were innovative (innovative does not necessarily mean easy to use ). Here are some that will interest you
Recaptcha:
The most common form of captcha is recaptcha. Recaptcha does a good job of displaying some sort of cryptic letters and numbers to its users. But it is far from the captcha solution that an end user might want. An image based approach promoted by captcha.net is also available, but some images are thoroughly confusing. I am currently researching better ways to categorize and display images. There are more problems to be discussed in image based captchas, which I would rather cover in a seprate post with an implementation.