Archive for the 'internet' Category

I love the idea of social software. Specifically, while it has been several years since I first encountered the wiki concept (Ward Cunningham’s c2.com), and I have been a Wikipedia contributor for a while, it is only since I checked out the emerging wiki hosting sites (see Google and social software: wikis) that I realize that wikis are becoming mainstream. Sites like Wikispaces, JotSpot and PbWiki are providing anyone with the tools to safely and effortlessly develop a body of knowledge.

On a seemingly unrelated point, I am currently developing some stuff in PHP (codeword ‘photcasting‘ but more on that later) and I realise my development environment is so amateuristic: I use a text-editor with FTP support (the last couple of years it has always been Editplus), and everytime I save some code, I overwrite the older version on the ‘live’ server. I also develop on different PCs in a typical week (easily 3) and so I don’t have 1 development PC with PHP running where I could stage everything before I deploy it to my ‘production’ site. With a bad broadband connection, when a ’save’ operation goes wrong, you end up with a ‘crucialstuff.php’ script file that is empty (0 bytes) and brings your whole site down. Unfortunately, I know this from (repeated) experience.

Earlier today, I was thinking about these 2 issues one right after the other and bam: they collided. I have a new development paradigm: the WikiRAD.

‘WikiRAD’ development

WRITE CODE

• you write your code with your browser in a Wiki-style editor, with syntax colouring added (haven’t seen that in a Wiki editor yet). The code resides on a WikiRAD server (with RAID5 disks, daily backups, …). You need no other software on your PC to be able to develop software.
• the Wiki system takes care of version management and comparing of sources (Wikis already do this). Check in, check out, rollback, branching, merging, several developers on 1 codebase, … all possible!
• you can search your whole codebase for certain keywords, jump to class definitions – just like normal IDE
• when you look at your code, the names of classes, templates, libaries, .. become clickable, just like in a … wiki!
• there are tools to make writing code easier (class wizard, sample code, forum for questions)
• there’s a Google-like crawler that indexes code so it becomes available for other developers – this is real “open source”!

COMPILE AND RUN

• the WikiRAD server lets you develop in a ’stage’ mode (separate from your real system) and lets you deploy it to ‘production’ once you’re sure. The production server can be your own server, with deployment via FTP or SSH.
• for the most popular languages, you also have a lint system that can detect obvious errors in your code before compiling.
• if the language you write in requires compiling (like C++, C#, VB.NET, …) the server takes care of that – probably faster than on your own Pentium III.
• you no longer need to set up a ’similar’ server to test your software, it will run on the same kind of system, behind the same combination of routers and firewalls, with the same libraries installed.
• you can add breakpoints, see the console output, view values of variables, …

So take Sourceforge, drop in a Wiki system for writing the code, a system for online debugging and profiling and tada: life has just become so much easier for a programmer.

All remarks are welcome!

Technorati: social software – wiki – software – open source

An image like the one on the right (using the standard <img> tag) can easily be copied by any visitor: right-click the image and select “Save Picture As” or “Copy Image”. In cases where the author wants to protect his images from copying, there are a couple of ways to make the copying harder. Not make it impossible, just less trivial.
The fact that you can get the image by checking the HTML (“View Source”) is something that is difficult to avoid, and in any case, the vistor could always take a screen shot and trim the result to have only the image. So I’ll just focus on disabling the “Save/Copy Image” functionality.

Remark: there are ways to make all Right-Click functionality inaccessible. I think this is a bad practice (for the reasons, check jeffdav), so I will not cover these methods.

Trick #1: Table Background

You use the image as the table background: <TABLE STYLE="background-image: url(...)">. If you do just that, the “Save Picture As” option goes away, but a new “Save Background” is created. So you cover up the image by placing a transparent gif before it, in the <TD> cell.

The end effect is that is looks like you can copy or save the picture, but you will be saving the GIF file.

Remark: you have to explicitly specify the dimensions of the table, it will not autoscale to the size of the image.

Trick #2: Div Background

You can do basically the same thing with a <div>: you use the picture as the background image, and you put another <DIV> above it with the transparent GIF.

You would again need to specify the exact dimensions of the whole thing, but wait, there’s another trick: put the image in an <IMG> tag inside the second DIV and give it a visibility: hidden. This way it takes up the size of the picture without actually showing up, or appearing right-clickable.

Trick #3: Flash image

The third is a no-brainer: using a Flash object. Almost 100% of browsers have Flash built-in, so compatibility problems are limited. For the exact OBJECT and EMBED, check the HTML source of this text or the Macromedia site.
Here also, you need to give the right dimensions to the Flash object, otherwise it will take a default (square) size.

Remark: using the menu="false" option ensures that the only options showing up on a right-click are: “Settings…” (disabled) and “About Macromedia Flash Player …”.

Conclusion
It is possible to use some simple tricks to make right-click copy or save functionality impossible. I wouldn’t go as far as to call this ‘copyright protection’, but it helps. At least no one can claim they just copied it because they thought it would be OK.
I used the last option (Flash) on my Tango Steps site, to protect the images I use from my teachers, Marisa and Oliver.

Technorati: css – copyright