Recently while Googling “Olla de Carne” (Costa Rican beef stew) my browser (Chrome 3.0) was hijacked after taking a search results link. Rather than receiving a list of ingredients, the link redirected the browser to a bogus antivirus site that mimicked Windows and faked an integrated Explorer virus scan (see screenshot below or watch the video).
The user agent string, a piece of data transmitted in the HTTP header during a web request, contains information valuable in determining browser type and often basic system information.
Example user agent string sent from a web browser during an HTTP request:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.89 Safari/532.5
The above example, for instance, provides information such as browser and browser version, user locale (language), OS, system architecture and the layout engine used. When authoring documents for the Web, information from the user agent string can be valuable in determining how best to mark-up documents.
Getting the information is easy.
Screenshot of a Lightview modal dialog
Though modal dialogs are not a new concept in UI design, the number of homegrown Lightbox clones appearing on the Web since major JavaScript libraries like Prototype and jQuery hit the scene has been staggering. Unfortunately, many of the clones developed leave some key usability considerations unaddressed, and struggle with common problems in accessibility. Some key usability features that should be considered during creation of a Web-based modal dialog include (1) manage focus and allow tab navigation (2) disable elements outside the modal dialog (3) give users an out and (4) provide graceful error recovery.
Firebug > *
Following is a cross-browser/platform list of web development and debugging tools useful for client-side development and front-end debugging.
After recently losing a USB flash drive with all my passwords, I was grateful for the precaution I took by storing all my password data using Brad Greenlee’s PassKeeper password manager.
PassKeeper is a Windows utility that allows you to keep a list of accounts with usernames, passwords, and notes. This list is stored encrypted.
The utility is freeware and has been available for public download since the mid-90’s. Data are encrypted using the 56-bit DES cipher and stored in an DAT file in the application’s root directory. The size of the application (189 kilobytes) and the data file (~400 bytes/entry) are lightweight and can easily be carried around on any USB flash drive.
iTunes users opting not to allow the program to automatically keep their folders organized (the default setting) may be well aware that iTunes does not respond well after changing locations of or renaming files. In fact, any change in the file name or path renders the item inaccessible from within iTunes. To make matters worse, there’s no easy way to have iTunes relocate files moved. iTunes prompts the user to relocate missing files but only one at a time with a dialog that says:
The song|movie “name” could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?
Not so useful when a lot of files are moved at once. But if a directory containing hundreds of files needs to be moved, to a larger hard drive for example, locating files individually becomes too much work.
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