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Today is the Safer Internet Day.

(12/02/2008) Today, 100 organisations in over 50 countries worldwide celebrate Safer Internet Day.*

Oh lord! What a bullshit. There is plenty of stuff to celebrate and enjoy. But for sure, it's not a safer internet.

To whom are we pointing when we speak about a safer internet? What are we doing to compete with the bad guys? The internet is on a all-time high in respect to fraud. And the trend is even worse.

Only 20 years back, malicious software was written to gather fame and to have fun. There where tons of viruses doing no harm at all. All this "you need a virus scanner" stuff dates back to this time. But times have changed drastically. The average virus is no longer the threat. Today we compete with botnets of thousands of PCs, using advanced peer-to-peer and encryption methods. Maintained by a single node and almost impossible to trace, they are state-of-the-art malware.

Governments and companies must have been in deep winter sleep over the past 2 decades, as the internet of today is no longer a place of fame and fun for nerdy people, but more of a gold mine for the average criminal. The business of internet fraud is highly commercialized and is said to be very lucrative.

Today it's just to easy to get rich by internet fraud. Go off to a country with real problems - a country which doesn't care about internet crime. There are enough of that! Then go on youtube and watch some videos on how to hack. I guess there are tons of videos for getting dirty work done. If not, google a bit. And finally, watch the whole day americans and europeans paying your life.

The world of tomorrow - the world of mobile internet - will be no better. At the time you just can't imagine what people will come up with. One can think of adhoc botnets and position tracking malware. They would sell as well as today credit cards do, when another 40 million credit card accounts were stolen. But I strongly belief that we will see even completely new malware techniques for this domain. The problem will evolve faster than the politics will do. The market is just to big, as some might say.

It's completely adorable to seek for a safe internet. But please Europe, do it! And don't celebrate something that generates more revenue for the wrong guys from day to day.

No more bugs. How many programmers out there may have this new year's pledge on top of their list? It's the same every year. You do bugs and you have to fight with them. Or even worse - you have to fight with other's bugs. Fortunately the last hasn't hit me very often or hard in my young developer life.

But how often could you have saved your ass by not writing this bug?

So you permanently aim to save your ass from yourself. It's not completely avoidable to write bugs. Everybody who has ever written more then ten lines of code can tell you this. But there are lots of tools and helpers out there that can help save your ass as good as you can.

Instead of telling you my non-holdable new year's pledges I will tell you what tools and helpers saved me in 2007.

Symfony

As 2007 was mostly marked with the development of Timicx - a soon to release time tracking web-application for german companies - the most of the credits goes out to the Symfony Project. Symfony is a PHP5 web-development framework which makes development an ease. When we had to structure our application, Symfony lead us to a clear and always open to extend way of doing it. When we had problems with browser's Javascript loading, the framework opened a clean mechanism for avoiding the problem. When we had to implement our quite custom permission models, Symfony was there to integrate. Symfony definitely saved me so much work in 2007 - I can't even credit this enough.

Eclipse

You are writing a batch script? Take Eclipse! Your are writing your crappy Java homeworks for university? Take Eclipse! Your writing a enterprise web-application? Take Eclipse! You can do so much things with Eclipse. Metaphorically spoken, the Eclipse Platform exploded in the last years. Eclipse is no longer a simple IDE. It's an whole platform, composed of uncountable plugins and frameworks. Although, I'm using Eclipse still as IDE in most cases. You can develop everything with it. I'm using it with PHP development tools, subclipse for subversion and JSEclipse Javascript integration. There are distributions of Eclipse also for C++ and other languages. Definitely the no. #2 time-saver in 2007.

Trac

The Trac project provides an integrated SCM with some touch of project management. Trac just looks good. It provides a ticket system and a wiki for your project. Trac easily integrates with subversion repositories letting any developer to have easily check for changes on the project. Let alone the timeline generetad by Trac. This piece of software is the candy on top of your open source web-development infrastructure (e.g. apache, mysql, eclipse, subversion).

Subversion

It doesn't need any words to introduce my next favourite. It's the Subversion SCM. A good SCM unquestionable saves lots of time on any project with more than one people involved. Subversion has become so familiar, that I don't even have something special to tell about..

Firebug

Firebug for Firefox is a simple debugging extension for Firefox. Firebug is the anwser to a problem being as old as browser's javascript is. Whenever you have to develop some javascript code, you will spend hardly debugging the code in different browsers. While this is still such a pain on IE, for firefox it's a pleasure to do. Firebug brings all the comforts you're expecting from a good debugging tool. It supports dynamic and static analysis. You have to add CSS properties on the fly? No problem. Debug code with integrated javascript debugger? No problem. Sniff your XHR traffic? No problem. In fact, Firebug is worth much more than being on the bottom of this list.

.. now what?

Maybe you already knew all this and the many more stuff out there. Obviously there is more software which saves you even more of your costly time. But this is simply the stuff that saved my ass a lot!

My best wishes for everyone in 2008..

.. and please stop writing those bugs!