Archive | September, 2008

Why Razuna is more then a open source digital asset management system

Managing your digital assets should not just be about storing and archiving your media library. It should be the base of all your digital media environment. That means it should be beyond storing versions of your media asset, it should be easy to integrate with any existing publishing system like a Content Management System (CMS) and any marketing application like a newsletter tool.

Did you know that Razuna comes with a full featured Content Management System (CMS) that tightly integrates with your Digital Asset Management (DAM)? The CMS part of the system even has a separate login so that only people who care about the editing side of your website never have to bother with the media content your company is providing.

Feeding your website with your media assets is a simple task within Razuna. All you have to do is to collect your desired assets into what we call a “Collection” and save that collection. Your CMS Editor can then edit a page and include your collection with a simple click.

We realize that you might have another CMS already within your infrastructure and thus you can of course access your collection trough the open API. Be it if you directly access the database or get a collection through a web service.

Razuna is a open source digital asset management system that is freely available at http://www.razuna.com/. The first version of Razuna was made available in July 2008 and has since then been downloaded over 3000 times within the last 2 months. Currently version 1.1.1 brings over 100 improvements and includes features that our customers requested. You can download Razuna today and deploy it for yourself within a couple of minutes. There are also introductions videos available for you to see what the buzz is all about.

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Infoweek security issues

Today, while I was surfing the website of InfoWeek, a leading IT magazines in Switzerland, in order to change my email subscription I was granted with the following error message:

At first I am happy to see that they are using CFML as their choice of deplyoment, but when looking at the above code I saw some poor coding techniques at work.

First off, one should never use the “*” for getting back all the columns of the database. This is slowing the database server down and is a poor man coding style. In todays tool environment there is no excuse for using the “*” anymore (I am talking for production use here).

The next thing is that the variable “MailAdress” is not scoped and far worse is subject to the famous SQL Injection, because the developers neglected the <cfqueryparam> tag. Sure enough, I was able to log in to my account with adding the variable to the URL. If I wanted to, I could even see and alter some other email addresses.

The solution to the above is so simply, one wonders why developers still chose to neglect it. With a simple;

<cfqueryparam cfsqltype=”cf_sql_varchar” value=”#post.MailAdress#”>

the variable is scoped and secured against SQL Injection code at the same time.

As long as I see applications like this on the web (believe me I see a couple of these things in a week) I am sure my company has enough to do :-) …..and yes I did call them and told them the error, but it looks like they are not in a hurry to fix it.

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More Microsoft ads that make sense

Here are other variants of the “I’m a PC” ads from Microsoft. I really like the first one, especially the end with the boxer :-) Wow, that is real aggressive. Cool catch.

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Finally some Microsoft ad that make sense

The other day, I wrote about that the MS add with Gates and Seinfeld (after two ads Seinfeld is no more) don’t make sense. Well, finally this ad makes a lot of sense. This is the “I’m a PC” and should/is a direct response to the “I’m a Mac” ads from Apple.

Thought, I like the Apple ads, I do have to say that I like this one a lot. Shows that PC’s are wide spread.

As a side note: A PC does not actually has to run Windows operating system and there is where MS (or the marketing company behind it) got it wrong. See Apple is Apple, since MacOS X only runs on Apple hardware the saying of “I’m a Mac” makes sense, since everything is a Mac over at Apple. On the PC side it could also mean, “I’m a PC and run Linux” :-)

Nevertheless, the ad is good.

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