Quick tip for Chrome Users
Chrome has quickly become my browser of choice for reasons that I won't go into detail about here. However, I like many other self-proclaimed power users like to do things fast, and I will say that one of the many reasons I like it is for its unsurpassed speed. That's why I was happy to find out today that there is a quick shortcut to jump to the address bar. Just hit ctrl+l (cmd+l for mac)and you're there. Even better than that if you want to do a Google search just hit ctrl+k (cmd+k for mac) and it starts you off with a question mark.
You would think as much as I use chrome I would have found it earlier, but better late than never I guess. In other news I've been working on an interactive map using jquery that's almost reached completion. I'll have a post up here with all the details once I'm done.
I’m back, or at least I Hope to be.
Hello World. It's been far too long. There were some tragedies that unfolded in my life that kept me from updating my blog, but this is not a blog about my life but rather a blog about all the things that I'm learning and working on in the world of technology. Since I last wrote I have on occasion found time to explore some different things, which I will be detailing in future posts to come. I also plan to start a redesign of cpitt.com which will include a new blog design, so I can move away from this free theme. That's all for now, stay tuned for more to come.
On Hiatus Again
I started writing a post about collaboration platforms over a month ago, but things in my life got difficult, and I haven't had time to devote anytime to my blog or personal pursuits since. Because of everything that has happened in my life lately I imagine that I'll be needing some distractions, so expect some posts in the next few weeks.
Sherpabooks is Social!
As I mentioned a few day ago I've been working with two other college students on a project called Sherpabooks. To quote our site, "Sherpabooks is a textbook price comparison service designed specifically for College students that are tired of paying for overpriced textbooks at their local bookstore." In order to start to get the word out, and get some feedback before we make an official launch, we've decided to try build a small community using Twitter and Facebook pages.
Creating a Twitter account for our company was really straight forward. I initially thought that a company wanting to set up a twitter account would need to go through some sort of special hoop, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that creating a Twitter account for a company is the same as creating an individual Twitter account. While I was glad that I didn't have to go through any extra hoops, it did make me wonder what Twitter has done to prevent abuse. I imagine that they must have some sort of policy in place to prevent username squatting. I imagine if I did some digging in their TOC I could probably find out, but that's besides the point. If you would like to follow Sherpabooks you can find us on twitter @Sherpabooks .
Creating the Facebook page on the other hand, while still simple, had a few more hoops to jump through. While creating a page was relatively simple, in order to get an official Facebook name for that page so that you can have a url like this, http://facebook.com/sherpabooks, required you to have at the very least 25 people "like" the page. Which anyone who is familiar with Facebook knows isn't a difficult task at all. Anyways, feel free to check us out on Facebook at http://facebook.com/sherpabooks, and like us. Another cool feature I found while setting up our Facebook page is that you can link your Facebook page to Twitter so that every time you post something on you're pages Facebook wall it automatically gets tweeted. If anyones interested in finding out more about that you can do so at http://www.facebook.com/twitter/.
So why are we doing all this? Well, to quote Jesse Stay, who's presentation I had the opportunity to listen to last week, you need to fish where the fish are. We know we have a great service and we're already hooked. Now we just need to get everyone else hooked.
The only step left is to start a blog for our site, and that leads to the question to use WordPress or not to use WordPress? WordPress has always been a great product and honestly it's a much better than I remember it being 3 years ago when I last tried it, but I save those thoughts for another post. I guess the question is should we use an existing OSS solution or should we build something new on our existing platform? I hard question that's going to need a little more thought and research.
Hacking Myself!
So as I mentioned yesterday I have a group current event presentation in my Database Management class. My group is going to be reporting on several articles about sql injections that have been published in the last few months. My part in this project will be to explain what a SQL injection is. I thought it would be more interesting if we could show the class an actual SQL injection attack, so today I took some time of writing a very simple and very insecure login script in PHP.
It's actually quite surprising how easy a SQL injection attack can be. If I ever get back into PHP it's definitely something that I'll need to learn more about. I would hate to write something just to have it get compromised by some no good script kiddie.
On that note I did find it interesting that the SQL string I was injecting that allowed me to bypass my simple login script, " ' OR '1=1 ", stopped working all of a sudden. Luckily I was able to find another string that worked. Hopefully it still works tomorrow in our presentation! I wonder if my web-host has some kind of security measures implemented that detected my simple SQL injection attack? For the life of me I can't figure out why else that string stopped working.
A lot to learn!
I have recently have been working with Marcus Lobendahn and Mike Wynes on Sherpabooks.com, a textbook price comparison website. Unfortunately my programming is a little rusty so we outsourced our development, first to India which failed miserably and set us back a few months, and then to a Maui based Company by the name of Bumpnetworks. In contrast to our India experience working with Bump has been the difference between night and day, and I really have no complaints.
However, working with such a professional company has made me realize I have a lot to learn! It's hard to know where to start, but seeing that I can't even make the most minor of changes to the site until I learn about subversion I imagine it's a good place to start.
I also have a current event presentation in my Database Management class about SQL injections so it looks like I'm going to be programming a very simple, and insecure login script in php, for the sole purpose of exploiting with a rudimentary SQL injection
A New Beginning
Hello World! It's been a while. Here's just a quick refresher for those of you who have forgotten me. My name is Cameron Pitt, and up until 2007 I was an aspiring web developer. However, in Sept. of 2007 I put my life on hold, disconnected from the internet and went forth to serve a mission for the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints. I served for two-year in the Ulaanbaatar Mongolia mission teaching English, giving service, and most importantly sharing the gospel. While in Mongolia I learned the Mongolian Language, and fell in love with the Mongolian culture and people. If you would Like to hear more about my mission feel free to head over to my mission blog, and take a gander. I returned home from my mission Oct. of 2009, over a year ago, and have been meaning to get back into web-development ever since. However because of a busy schedule I've hardly had time.
That being said this last week Jesse Stay, the Social Media Architect for the LDS Church, came to BYUH and spoke and suggested that a great way to get started in the tech field was to start blogging, and so taking that advice to heart I've decided to start blogging. Hopefully, in doing so I will be able immerse myself in web-development again.
First thing on my to-do list is to design a nice WordPress theme.