The Byte Stops Here

Interesting...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Adobe-4Q-profit-grows-revenue-apf-13848640.html

In case you guys missed this, a new study finds that with each keystroke on a wired keyboard the electromagnetic waves can be read to recover the keystrokes.That means nothing you type, including passwords, is a secret.

Read more @ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10072967-83.html.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to perform an early access review (unedited) of Tariq Ahmed's Flex 3 in Action. While I read through the book, I was side-tracked, and its definitely my bad I didn't get this review out earlier.

The version I have is 648 pages. Yes, its massive. While this can be a bit overwhelming to newbies, the "in Action" part of the title should give you an indication that this book is full of example, and thats a good thing.

The book does a good job of covering some of the history behind traditional web development and where Rich Internet Applications are headed. As Ray Camden mentions in his review of the book, that its also "to see many comparisons between Flex and ColdFusion concepts". Ray's review can be found here.

Take for example, Chapter 1: Introduction to Flex. Some of the topics this chapter covers is:

• The problems that Web developers face
• What Flex is and how it solves those problems
• What are RIAs (Rich Internet Applications)?
• The difference between RIAs and RWAs (Rich Web Applications)
• How Flex differs from the competition (i.e. how to sell Flex to your boss)
• The Flex Ecosystem

As you can see from just the first chapter, that this book lays some solid groundwork for the developer.

Plusses:

• Its written by developers for developers
• Tariq Ahmed's written several great books in the past
• Lots of examples and diagrams
• Provides good foundational and historical background
• Provides a step by step approach
• Talks high-level AND low-level, like Chapter 3: Working with ActionScript, which covers variables, operators, conditions, etc.
• Covers end to end development, from basics to reusability to customization to testing to deployment
• Appendix points you to dozens of forums, intiatives and developer resources

Minuses:

• Size, it may take a while to get through it.
• There is some incohesion between writing styles between authors (typical complaint), which I'm hoping would be resolved in the final version

So go out, and grab a pre-order of the book. More details here.

Download: http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.3.zip

Version 1.5.3
(10 Oct 2008, from /branches/1.5.x)
http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/tags/1.5.3

 User-visible changes:
  * Allow switch to continue after deleting locally modified dirs (issue #2505)
  * Update bash_completion to be compatible with 1.5 (r32900, -11, -12)
  * Improve 'svn merge' execution time by 30% on Windows (r33447)
  * Reuse network sessions during 'svn merge', improving performance (r33476)
  * Improve temp file creation time on Windows (r33464)
  * Greatly improve merge performance (r29969, r32463, r33013, -016, -022, -112)
  * Improve file IO performance on Windows (r33178, -85)
  * fixed: merging files with spaces in name (r33109, -121, -369)
  * fixed: incorrect relative externals expansion (r33109, -121, -369)
  * fixed: 'svn mv' hangs and consumes infinite memory (r33201, -12)
  * fixed: correctness regression in 'svn log -g' (issue #3285)
  * fixed: current early bailout of 'svn log -g' (r32977)

 Developer-visible changes:
  * Allow the tests to run as non-administrator on Windows Vista (r31203)
  * Allow out-of-tree build of bindings on BSD (r32409)
  * Translate messages in svn_fs_util.h (r32771)
  * fixed: bindings test for Perl 5.10 (r31546)
  * fixed: building bindings and C API tests with VS2008 (r32012)
  * fixed: svn_ra_replay API over ra_serf (r33173)

The PCI Security Standards Council has released a new version of the Data Security Standards today; namely version 1.2.

To download the doc and a list of changes:

• PCI DSS Version 1.2
  
• PCI DSS Summary of Changes (Between 1.1 and 1.2)