Semi-regular web-link clearance – March 2010

Five Pervasive Myths About Older Software Developers

I recently celebrated my 40th birthday. A friend joked to me, “Hey, guess that means you’re too old to program anymore!” I laughed on the outside, but it gave me pause. Age discrimination is nothing to laugh about in our field. COBOL guys faced this problem years ago as Java guys like me were ascending the ranks, and we laughed heartily about legacy code and their inflexibility with new technology.

The Art of Negotiation According to Pawnstars

The other day I caught a marathon of the show Pawnstars. On the surface, it’s kind of a blue collar version of Antiques Roadshow and at first I thought it was a pale rip-off of the original. But after watching a dozen or so episodes and a couple Antiques Roadshows, I’m convinced I like this Pawnstars show more, mostly due to the more modern items being discussed that I can recognize versus the Roadshow saying an ugly broken victorian chair is worth $250k which makes no sense to me.

Download YouTube Videos the Easy Way

There are some programs and browser extensions to do this, but we’ve found that the easiest and quickest method is a bookmarklet that was originally posted on the Google Operating System blog (it’s since been removed). It will let you download standard quality and high-definition movies as MP4 files. Also, because it’s a bookmarklet, it will work on any modern web browser, and on any operating system!

Firefox: Massive Extender 0.9.1

Extends the Mozilla Add-on Collector with batch actions making it possible to install, uninstall, enable and disable entire collections or personalized selected items en masse.

SQL Injection Attacks By Example

A customer asked that we check out his intranet site, which was used by the company’s employees and customers. This was part of a larger security review, and though we’d not actually used SQL injection to penetrate a network before, we were pretty familiar with the general concepts. We were completely successful in this engagement, and wanted to recount the steps taken as an illustration.

Semi-regular web-link clearance – March 2010

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