I’ve been meaning to cut back on the amount of new technology I’m studying because you can’t learn everything. You will have no time for your regular life if you try to keep up with changing technology. However, I have been doing some brief investigation of various things. I installed IIS 7.0 on my Vista computer because that is the only operating system that it runs on and I wanted to check out some new features. Internet Information Services 7 will be able to use modules written using any .NET Framework language which may be a concept stolen from Apache.
I haven’t done much with PHP but recently I did a lot of experiments with its CURL library, Client URL Library Functions, in order to better understand how form bots work. Form bots cause me a lot of grief because they submit spam to every form they can find on the Internet. I discovered that my countermeasures would not be effective because a form bot sends a POST request directly to the form handler, i.e. the script the form submits to, and bypasses the form itself so you should not waste time trying to validate the form on the client side.
Then I spent some time messing with Perl which is always a matter of installing countless packages that are missing. I did find the Perl Package Manager provided a nice GUI but I still needed to search CPAN for packages that were not listed. I had to manually download and install 9 packages which was not fun.
I’ve been hearing a lot about Silverlight which is Microsoft’s Flash killer. I’ve done some preliminary work with that but nothing more than creating a few sample XAML files which I test using XAML Pad.
