William Cameron | Beyond the Keyboard

LinkedIn on Friday announced a new feature that members have been requesting for quite some time: the ability to block other members. It’s a feature that will no doubt be incredibly useful, especially on a social network where many can be relentless in their pursuit of making a professional connection. In a post on the matter , Paul Rockwell, LinkedIn’s head of Trust & Safety, said they built the feature not only because it was requested but simply because it’s the right thing to do. The feature is being made active as of today to all members, Rockwell noted. To enable member blocking, simply head over to your LinkedIn profile and navigate to the profile of the person you wish to block. Select “Block or report” in the drop-down menu located next to the Connect and Send InMail buttons. Pro tip – if you want to avoid an awkward moment, enable anonymous profile viewing before doing so. That way, you can visit and block the person’s profile without them knowing about it. Once blocked,

http://www.tomslabs.com/index.php/2012/01/php-refactoring-in-legacy-code/ The story we’ll talk about is a true story. It happened to be challenging and helped the team keep testing its beliefs in XP, iterative developments and code quality. Product elevator statement Imagine a well legac”ied” project you don’t know. Product is a web forum with millions of messages. We want to rebuild the categorization mechanism (messages are “categorized” meaning they are assigned to a category that best describes their content). Mission : fix all bugs “Short delay” and “no regression” are the words. Only few people share the knowledge of the categories system to be refactored. Numerous bugs (useless to mention that several generations of developers brought contributions to the project). 20 commiters. Background From the team’s point of view, here are the goals we anticipated we needed to achieve: Understand the expected behavior of the categorization mechanism Bring no regressi

Kali Linux Features Kali is a complete re-build of  BackTrack Linux , adhering completely to  Debian  development standards. All-new infrastructure has been put in place, all tools were reviewed and packaged, and we use  Git  for our VCS. More than 300 penetration testing tools:  After reviewing every tool that was included in BackTrack, we eliminated a great number of tools that either did not work or had other tools available that provided similar functionality. Free and always will be:  Kali Linux, like its predecessor, is completely free and always will be. You will never, ever have to pay for Kali Linux. Open source Git tree:  We are huge proponents of open source software and our development tree  is available for all to see and all sources are available for those who wish to tweak and rebuild packages. FHS compliant:  Kali has been developed to adhere to the  Filesystem Hierarchy Standard , allowing all Linux users to easily locate binaries, support files, libraries, etc

It can be easy to feel dejected when looking at a pile of code you inherited from four generations of programmer ago. None of the best practices or principles. No tests. Hell, you're lucky if you even have objects that don't rely on PHP 4 style constructors. You're in legacy code hell. But there's hope. Software as a long game Even though it can feel hopeless when starting at such a massive pile of crap, there is in fact hope. There is a redemption waiting for you. That redemption is found in a simple revelation: software is a long game. Consider: that steaming pile of detritus you're working on didn't get that way overnight. In fact, it took a long time to get a code base that big together in the first place. Code takes time to grow. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was your application. PHP has been around for a long time, over 10 years. Much of that time, PHP didn't many of the features that now make it a world class programming langu

Google have today announced an experimental Android-powered smartphone with powerful 3D sensors called Project Tango. The phone is the latest project out of Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group. "The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion," Johnny Lee, ATAP's technical program lead, wrote in a Google+ post announcing the project. The 5-inch phone will run Android and be equipped a series of 3D sensors capable of taking more than a quarter of a million measurements each second. Google envisions these sensors will have a number of applications from gaming to indoor navigation. The phone is still in early stages of development, and the first prototypes will only be available to a limited group of developers. The first 200 prototypes, which Google expects to be distributed by mid-March, will go to a group of developers hand-picked by Google. Google says many of those first devices will go to c

Last week I was chatting with a friend who was asking me about object oriented programming. He asked me a pointed question that I thought deserved a broad and public answer. His question? "Why do these object oriented principles matter, anyway?" It's a good question. You probably came to PHP writing procedural code, never caring about object oriented development. And maybe you've heard that object oriented development is the way of the future, but for now you haven't seen much of a need for it. You wonder, why does it matter? There are three reasons you should care about understanding and mastering object oriented programming. Object oriented programming is about reuse. Writing object oriented applications is about being able to reuse code that you've written elsewhere. For example, if you've developed a great database API, you may want to take that along to other applications. Rather than starting from first principles, this object gives you a st

There’s not much in the way of surprises for today’s announcement by Microsoft of the general availability of its cloud storage service OneDrive. The new name had already been previewed, and the product is largely the same as its predecessor, SkyDrive. New features include auto uploads from Android, adaptive personal video streaming a la Netflix and better document collaboration tools that don’t require a Microsoft account. But as with SkyDrive, the main advantages of storing your stuff with Microsoft is that it should work well with Microsoft Office (unlike Dropbox) and that it’s not wedded to a company that also controls the dominant mobile platform, so it has more platform independence (unlike Google Drive). Also, OneDrive doesn’t do dumb things like store new photos for only 30 days (unlike Apple’s iCloud). Other than that, the big advantage of OneDrive over SkyDrive is that the first 100,000 people to sign up get 100 gigabytes free for one year. That’s just one of many pos

For most websites,  natural search is the most effective free digital marketing channel. Except for the human resources, platform costs, and other mostly hidden costs required to plan and implement search engine optimization, it is free. As a result, I'm often asked for the best free ways to learn how to become an expert in SEO. The following are my five free go-to tips for learning SEO. Moz.com’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO.  The friendly folks at Moz (formerly known as SEOmoz) have developed this free beginner's guide  to teach anyone willing to read through it. With helpful illustrations and cross-linked concepts, this guide is well done and worth reading. If reading on your computer screen isn't for you, download the free PDF version to print or take with you on your tablet. Books.  The public library system is still a great way to get an informal and free education. Check out one of the many SEO books in paper form, or look for a digital version to read on your e-reade