Gadget development on mac and windows

We have been developing a gadget for both mac and windows. Its been an interesting experience to say the least.
on the mac we developed on safari/firefox and it worked flowlessly as a mac widget. On windows it was a teeth pulling exercise.
of course the mac widget code did'nt work at all. we developed the code on ie 8, hoping it work as the gadget.
ofcourse it failed miserably. getting css to work on the windows gadget was painfully hard

we wanted to have the exact same codebase for both mac and windows. with same css that works accross both.
it was painful process.

wonder when the day would come when life will be easier for us developer.

personal security measures for everyone

I am at the security/hacking talk by Ken Sipe at the Uber Conf. It was an very interesting talk. Learned about some of the cool tools availble to hackers. He also some good guidelines that i think we all can/should use. Specially in light of how easy it is for hackers to do "bad" stuff.

• We should all use different browers for general browering/browsers for financial transactions. i.e use chrome exclusively for financial transactions, firefox for general browing


• When browsing to a site where you do financial tramsactions always have ONLY One tab open. to the site you are at.


• never do business with site ( as a policy)
  
  
  
  • that will return your passwd in email/over phone
  • will ask you passwd to another site


• do a simple xss check/sql injection check

interesting rules. I hope to use them

thoughts on Uber conf

I am attending  the uber conf  this week. Its been an interesting experience. I mainly attended sessions around a few themes  architecture and performace. I also attended a talk on scala.

Looks like everyone wanted to bash java and push their new fav language of the week. Scala does look good and I am looking fwd to using it, The functional language and concurrency seems very appealing.

The architecture talks were very intersting. Most of them focused on soft skills. architects also need to be hands on coder. cant get too far away from where rubber meets the rocks.

On the performance talks, there wasnt anything earth shattering, looks like the caching, reducing latency etc

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experiences with Design Firm

At my work we decided to hire a design firm to develop a free mobile app with approx a few thousand potential users. It was an interesting experience. They did have some great ideas. They thought of interesting ways of integrating our services with other services, like google apis on android.

What I found missing was understanding of our target userbase. They did go through the motions of trying to understand our userbase. But most of the ideas they came up with were targeted towards young techie gen. At Qwest our userbase is mostly older non techie population. who has landline these days ? Also I wonder if they even understood the role of telephone at home ? Its a shared device. Its ment for the family. Its the number that you call to check back with the babysitter, or reach your family when you are travelling. These designer are from mobile generation. they think of landline as their "own" personal phone just an extension of mobile phone.

Anyhow I am not sure if some of the services that they came up with that got our product team all excited are that cool : geo based call forwarding. Syncing contacts between mobile phones and land line are good thing. ( contact syncing : will ending up syncing contacts between multiple cell phones tied to accouct as a side affect, geo based call following will lead to "phone" hijacking)