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“Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All” - an article about statistic and programme testing. You know, load testing and all that jazz that you know you’re supposed to do.

Recently I was tasked with doing a heap of load testing, and we had all sorts of problems - all related, really, to confounding. I didn’t (and don’t) feel I know enough to design a load test, and the tools we were using were, well, limited. It’s interesting to note that I came to the same conclusion - that the data throughput was the most important metric.

However, the reason all these things talk about the number of users isn’t because programmers want it - rather, management and customers want to know how many users will it support. Telling them that you got an average data throughput of whatever is a better measure, but it doesn’t really mean anything to them - whereas could support 25 concurrent users does.

Peterned has a good idea for getting the :Hover of an element to work properly - use HTC files.

Good browsers (Mozilla, Opera and the like) allow you do define a style for hovering over, well, nearly any item. Naturally, Internet Explorer only supports a:hover - that is, hover for anchor tags. This sucks, and Peterned has written an HTC file that will, if the client is IE, rewrite the styles dynamically and assign the appropriate functionality to them.

Pretty cool.

Securing MySQL at Sitepoint. Particularly relevant, and something I need to refresh on - here’s an article at MySQL AB, and Securityfocus. Bit Unix-y (we use all Windows at work) but lots is still pertinent…

A whole range of tools at onlinetools.org for doing all the normal JavaScripty things - fly out menus and the like…

Ook - And it should work…

Dynamic Select Boxes from Bobby van der Sluis - for when you have two select boxes that need to relate to each other. Neat idea, works nicely, and I think I have a use for it…

I had a play with Rico then. Pretty good, generally. Some neat effects, and I like the way they do rounded corners - clever. Doesn’t work too well with boxes that have outlines, but hey! Can’t have everything.

Also, I found a bug in the way their Drag and Drop functionality works. If you click a node in the DOM beneath the node that is draggable, you get a Javascript error. I emailed them with a fix for that.

My only complaint about this Library - I’d prefer to have it as a selection of different Libraries. It seems a shame to have to lump them all together for some small bits of user interface. For example, I’d be willing to have Drag and Drop that doesn’t neatly ’slide’ back to it’s original position if not dropped on a Drop Zone. Having that in the UI means including LOTS of extra code. I pulled the Drag and Drop code out into a seperate file - I’ll publish it and the fix at some point soon.

Here’s an interesting attribute in CSS I didn’t know about
-moz-border-radius
The style below is :
font-size: 12px; background-color: #ffffff; -moz-border-radius: 8px;
border: 2px solid #3366cc; padding: 7px;

A box with a border! Of course, this only works in Mozilla

Another box with a border!

Venkman Javascript Debugger - All sorts of useful things, like breakpoints and watches. I like it!

Rico looks like a very promising library of Javascript. I’ve downloaded it, but not had a play yet.

An interesting validation technique

Encryption in Javascript. I’m sure I’ll think of a use eventually, but it just seems a neat idea to link with Ajax philosophy. I mean, with AES and the like, you can get the user to enter password, and there are uses for symmetric key algorithms.