Design Frontier

Short Circuit and the Javascript IF statement

2012-01-28T07:07:31-08:00

A quick javascript tip that lets you eliminate small IF statements

Toward a More Responsive Future

2011-11-04T10:23:18-08:00

Let’s face it, ultimately the ideal solution for responsive images does not exists yet. Honestly, I am not sure that browser makers really have a dog in this fight so it will likely be a while before it gets done on their end. Hopefully the W3C will see all the discussion and decide to include something in the spec that would prompt browser makers to tackle this in a semantic way. Until then we are left with a variety of options that are not necessarily awesome.

Don't Call me. I'll call you. Single request responsive images

2011-09-29T08:59:16-08:00

We’ve been talking about responsive design around the office a lot lately. It’s kind of a big deal these days. The holy grail seems to be responsive images, or a system that allows you to determine the correct size image for the users browser. This reduces the amount of data being downloaded by mobile devices while still providing a higher resolution version for desktop, and tablet browsers. By images I am talking about image tags, frameworks like 320 and up and media queries can take care of the layout images in css.

11

2011-09-13T17:31:29-08:00

Today on the 10 year anniversary of September 11th I thought I would reminisce about my memories from that day, far from New York City. I am working to compile my families’ stories and may expand beyond them to collect the stories of others who were far away from ground zero on that day. I pray that these stories and days will remind us that we are “One Nation Under God, Indivisible with liberty and justice for all”.

Hide the admins!

2011-09-13T17:31:21-08:00

This morning after reviewing the hackmycf.com* scan results for ansble.com I noticed that the only major security issue that turned up was that the railo admin was accessible from a public IP address. “Hmm...” I thought, “I wonder how you lock that down properly, using the reverse proxy setup I am running.” I figured I could do it in tomcat, but that would get ugly fast if when I start scaling out my application servers. So after some googling I found several other posts on securing the railo admin.

Wishing for CSS: Styling Lists in cfdocument

2011-09-13T17:30:32-08:00

Over the last week and a half I have been working on a bare-bones internal reporting tool for the organization I work for. If you want to take a look at the interface... It’s coming along nicely and has been a the fun kind of project that let's you try new things, like writing a custom RTE.

Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS

2011-09-13T17:28:49-08:00

I am working on a little side project (ansble.com) which is going to require scalability, and a layered architecture that I just couldn't reasonably build in a physical environment. So I started toying with Amazon Web Services and realized that there wasn’t a lot of documentation on the server combination I was planning to use.

Nancy: 100 Songs 100 Days

2011-05-19T08:09:45-08:00

My wife, Nancy, is writing 100 songs in 100 days. Yes you heard that right, 100 songs in 100 days, and no, not just a new riff, but a new song. Even for the most gifted song writer, and I think that's probably her, this would be a Herculean task, requiring perseverance and patience. And now 62 days in that is exactly what she has done.

Current Projects Update

2011-05-09T20:14:13-08:00

I realized tonight that I have a whole bunch of projects lying around that aren't mentioned anywhere here on designfrontier. So to remedy that I decided to put together this quick article.

Tokenizer: for one of your security needs

2011-04-15T13:02:56-08:00

I promised Richard Davies an article about the use, and purpose behind Tokenizer the token (if you think of them as nonces and not tokens just substitute nonce everywhere I say token...) management project I released a few weeks ago. Since then it has been picked up by OWASP’s ColdFusion resources page and viewed over 900 times. So this may actually be a little late...

Now Serving: Obsolescence

2011-01-15T11:53:52-08:00

This article is part of a series, “Now Serving,” that takes a look at the changes in design, and consumer culture, that are happening right now.

Water For My Birthday

2010-12-07T13:50:15-08:00

My birthday is just around the corner! In fact it is now only 3 days away and counting. They seem to come faster every year...

TRUST AND THE BOX

2010-10-08T04:13:22-08:00

Last Friday I was in Historic Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center(jsc) listening to Milt Heflin, one of jsc’s Associate Directors, describe some of the history that happened there to a group of educators from across the country. Sitting at one of the consoles preserved from the Apollo days I was amazed as he unfolded story after story about the people who had worked in these seats decades ago.

Cameron Moll's Crazy Contest

2010-04-15T20:18:29-08:00

Ok so in an effort to win an iPad I created a page here on design frontier targeted at these key words: cameron moll colosseo martian ipad giveaway. I think that the idea behind the contest is one of the most clever promotions I have ever seen.

A Tale of Two Cookies: Securing ColdFusion Session Cookies

2010-03-05T04:19:03-08:00

Recently at work we went through a security review. It was a great learning experience to have outside contractors try and break into the web application. Found several things that I didn't expect and some others that I had never even considered. One of the last vulnerabilities that they identified was that the CFID and CFTOKEN cookies had an expiration date set too far in the future, 2040 or something like that, and that they did not have the secure flag set.