Have you ever troubleshoot for your customer and ask (or really want to) their credentials to check their settings if the fault is there? Our solution to this is to implement impersonation feature to login as any users and have access to everything users do. In this case, a mail application. Although we don't need the password to imperso...
Something I've wondered about for a while now and would like to get a general opinion on: Advanced apologies if this has been asked previously, I did a search and couldn't find anything similar. This question is related to questions like, "Correct location to save a temporary file in Windows?" , but not quite the same. I've noticed ove...
I'm writing a tool in our web app to allow our users to tweet certain things about our app via the Twitter API. In all the documentation I've seen the Twitter API has you submit the user's username and password via XML or JSON. It would make sense from a usability standpoint to save the username and password for easy reuse (so they don't...
I'm always trying to become a better software developer and programmer, as I enjoy it. I do read a lot of books on the subject but I lack people to sit down and discuss my versus their interpretation of said books. I've been thinking that having a blog could be a solution to this problem. However I've also been thinking about the ethical...
If there's an existing website that has the exact feature I'm trying to implement and I can see the implementation by viewing the page source or viewing the included JavaScript files, is there anything wrong with copying it? ...
My company has a web analytics package which we use for our own and customer marketing campaign tracking. It uses a combination of server logs, JS & image web bugs, cookies, unique cached files, and ETag headers to collect and collate user activity. Recently we have found that a certain (unnamed) privacy-guard application which plugs in...
Is there an offical way to give reference to some part of the code that does not belong to us? For ex. while posting it to some blog or using for a contest or using on homeworks or in real projects etc etc. PS: I can do that with comments but I need the official practice. (sorry for my bad english) ...
I was going to crawl a site for some research I was collecting. But, apparently the terms of service is quite clear on the topic. Is it illegal to now "follow" the terms of service. And what can the site normally do? Here is an example clause in the TOS. Also, what about sites that don't provide this particular clause. Restriction...
If the new product is an extension of the old project with cool new features? Or if the new project is a code converted from PHP to Python ...
I'm trying to get an idea of how often my software is being installed. I was thinking about just including a simple URL call in the background the very first time the software is started. I am not trying to gather a lot of information. I really just want to get the date and time the software was installed. Is this unethical or commonly d...
tinyMCE itself is under LGPL but is it allowed/legal to make a closed source plugin for it to one of my projects? ...
I know this is an odd question but I need to ask it to get information to present to a client. Their lead network admin wants me to work on 30 day trial servers like Sharepoint & SQL Server to develop projects for their clients. While I will do as they ask, I'm not convinced this is the best way to go about developing software or trouble...
I'd like to get a community view on this, as I was personally very offended at the way some software I have used for a long time recently changed in behavior. In this particular case, it's the .Net Reflector now updated by RedGate. I've used it for years, I'm sure many of you have as well, however in their new versions, 6.0+ (6.1 at th...
My company makes an extremely specialized piece of software which costs a lot of money for those few who need it. On our current release we have no choice but to use a few libraries which are released only under the GPL. Releasing the code is not an option and it would take months, if not years to implement the functionality the librari...
I'm currently in the progress of making a url shortening service that will let the creator see the http request headers that the browser has made when visitors visit the url. The visitors won't be made aware that they are being tracked, but obviously nothing is personally identifiable. Is there anything I should be made aware of ethica...
I need to run a web crawler and I want to do it from EC2 because I want the HTTP requests to come from different IP ranges so I don't get blocked. So I thought distributing this on EC2 instances might help, but I can't find any information about what the outbound IP range will be. I don't want to go to the trouble of figuring out the e...
My company is trying to pass a policy forbidding distribution of any application (even free) in any appstore for all developers. Their reasoning is that "outside work activities create a conflict of interest". They don't want that "you use your spare time to work on your app, and once it takes off you quit your job" (quoting the Head of...
Hi First I can understand it is not programming related but you are welcome to Re-tag it as appropriate. This question is purely targeted to those who are in a position to make hire or fire decisions. I am a bit confused about taking the following action. I have the third and final interview with the senior management in a few days ...
I was on a underfunded pro bono software project that was pretty much to make something for a client who didn't really know what they wanted. Anyway the requirements kept changing because the client continually agreed to requirements and kept changing 'em anyway because our company wanted to just make the client happy however we could, a...
I'm currently building a web-based file upload/download hub for a company that wanted an easy way to send files to customers. My question revolves around which parts of the site really need to be SSL encrypted. Is it good practice to only encrypt the login forms, but leave other parts of the site (like the file transfer process) unencr...