Dream to Be A Freelancer?

Sometimes people think being a freelancer is really fun as we get to decide our own working hours, we get to work from home, we get more freedom than most office workers do.

Yes it’s good in those sense. But sometimes, like now, when we are working for long hours, it makes us wonder had our lives could be better if we just took up office jobs and don’t have to be under stress 24 hours a day.

Well, for me, I hate the routine of office workers’ lives, that’s why I am taking this route.

But I still hope that someday I can rely on other business to earn a living and thus reducing the reliance of working as a freelance web developer.

Don’t get me wrong, I love programming. I grew up programming. I love the challenges. I love technology. It’s just that sometimes I wish I only have to think about them from 9-5, and not for 24 hours a day.

iLOL @ Steve Jobs

With all the hype about iPhone, I guess if your blog doesn’t have an entry about it, it is not really a blog, or an already dead blog.

Yes it’s smart, it’s pretty, it’s black, it’s apple, it’s cool, yada-yada. Most of us have been really upset over the so-claimed smarter than smarter phone and running a full-fledged operation system (OS X) (so-claimed by Jobs), yet would not be programmable by third parties. All softwares would have to be from Apple and Apple only.

And now I finally know the reason why,

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

- Steve Jobs

Source: Ars Technica

That is so extermely genius of Apple to protect their partner telco’s network.

Now let me get back to programming my PDA so I could take down Singtel.

2007 - End of Javascript and AJAX?

Happy New Year!

We’ve seen the massive growth of AJAX in year 2006.

Could year 2007 be the end of it?

There have been a lot of security issues regarding javascript reported for the past few months. And today, right on the first day of January, someone has discovered a javascript flaw that enables any site to obtain your gmail’s email address and contact list. Unfortunately at the time of writing the sites demonstrating the flaw is down, but you can read the discussions about it over at these two [1] [2] pages on Digg.

With the rising security concerns in Javascript and AJAX, 2007 could possibly be the end of them. It’s tough that this statement is coming out from a web developer like myself who has done quite a few projects using the neat AJAX technology but with the increasing of security issues revolving around Javascript (which forms the ‘J’ in AJAX, thus is an essential component of AJAX), security concern web surfers might be turning off Javascript soon. Or worse, web browsers could be forced to ship with Javascript turned off by default.

One scenario which I predict might happen is that security companies or Javascript safety certification companies might start issuing certificates ensuring safety of Javascript of sites after check has been conducted on the safety of the scripts. Browsers would then only turn on Javascript when such valid Javascript safety certificate is present.