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PHP and Apache 2.0
For as long as Apache 2 has been stable, the PHP manual has carried this strongly worded warning:
[... 274 words]Omit needless words, codified
I continue to try to improve my writing. “Omit needless words” is all well and good, but identifying needless words can be a difficult task for the untrained eye. Paul Ford’s Passivator bookmarklet highlights adverbs and passive verbs, both of which can indicate weak writing.
It’s only going to get worse
This analysis of the spread of the witty worm is fascinating for a whole bunch of different reasons.
[... 395 words]Conferences with Macs
Three reasons Macs make excellent companions to geek-centric conferences:
[... 226 words]Quicksilver
I found out about Quicksilver via Ted Leung a couple of days ago, and it’s already become an indispensable part of my OS X desktop. On the surface, Quicksilver is very similar to LaunchBar which I’d tried and liked but not enough to justify the price tag. LaunchBar lets you launch any application on your system by hitting CMD+space and typing enough of the name to highlight the application you want. Quicksilver takes the same idea but expands it to cover address book entries, iTunes playlists, documents, bookmarks and more. It’s incredibly slick, highly configurable and doesn’t cost a penny.
[... 173 words]Pydoc
Pydoc is awesome; I don’t know how I missed it for so long. Simply type the following at the command line:
[... 96 words]Zend PHP 5 Goodies
Zend have quietly released a veritable treasure trove of PHP 5 tutorials via their PHP5 InfoCenter:
[... 212 words]Democratised Namespaces
The New York Times: Get out of my Namespace (via Diego Doval)—a well-researched look at the huge problems (and frivolous lawsuits) being generated by the global quest for ownership of unique names.
[... 267 words]Avoiding protracted debates
I love Charles Miller’s Fishbowl. His latest entry introduces his rules for argument. Read them, follow them and save a truck-load of time avoiding protracted debates in the future. Heck, if everyone stuck to them the overall productivity of the internet would probably increase by a factor of ten.
Internet culture
In what could be the most significant internet cultural event of the decade, Strong Bad has answered his 100th email. Attempts to guess the URL ahead of time were futile.
[... 69 words]PHP 5 Release Candidate 1
I haven’t blogged much about PHP in a while because I’ve been up to my nose in mod_python and loving every minute of it. This news is just too important to miss: PHP 5 Release Candidate 1 has been released, bringing the first production-ready release tantilisingly close. While I doubt PHP 5 will tempt me back it’s definitely an exciting upgrade—my biggest complaint with PHP 4 is the brain-dead object model which defaults to copying whole objects rather than passing references, and this is one of the many things addressed by PHP 5. The new libxml2 powered XML features sound really powerful, and SQLite as an on-board database should be ideal for knocking out small stand-alone applications without needing to set up a mySQL database for them.
[... 173 words]SXSW 2004
SXSW 2004 was a blast: by far the geekiest weekend of my life. I was planning on writing a few updates from the conference but quickly discovered that laptops and socialising just don’t mix—there were just too many interesting people to talk to!
[... 270 words]SXSW on a shoe-string
So, in customary last-minute style I’ve decided to go to SXSW Interactive this year. I can get a student ticket on the door so all I need to sort out is transport and accomodation. The cheapest air fare I can find at this point is $700+ (Expedia quoted me $415, then at the last minute laughed in my face and told me I couldn’t book the ticket). The Greyhound is $220 and although it’s a 20 hour journey each way the timetable is actually pretty decent, getting me to the conference for Friday evening and back by early Wednesday morning. It looks like I’m going to experience America close-up!
[... 124 words]Lockergnome reverts
I decided to hold off commenting on the news that Lockergnome were dropping their CSS layout in favour of a table based alternative until I had seen the new design for myself. I figured that they were probably just going to move to a transitional tables/CSS combination design with tables used to bypass some of the more taxing cross-browser issues. I think the following code snippet from their new front page speaks for itself:
[... 182 words]We’ve found the weapons of mass destruction
At work while poking around the official website for Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority we stumbled across some interesting meta tags:
[... 85 words]Ghost town, sponsored by Google
Via Boing Boing, this fascinating and utterly chilling photographic journey through the abandoned ruins of the Chernobyl dead zone.
[... 61 words]Attribution
Via Kevin Fox, Wired are running an article that claims that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution
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Two handy FireFox extensions
Just a quick plug for a couple of FireFox extensions I’ve been digging recently. Chris Pederick’s Web Developer toolbar / menu extension combines ideas from a whole bunch of other extensions and bookmarklets in to one extremely useful whole. The usual assortment of validation and element outlining options are present, but the really useful tools are “View Cookie Information” and “View Response Headers”. I’ve used separate extensions for these before but it’s handy to have them all in one package.
[... 118 words]LugRadio
LugRadio rocks. It’s a collaboration between Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Stephen Parkes and Matthew Revell, all members of the Wolverhampton Linux User Group. They’ve just released their second episode after over 1,000 people downloaded the first one. It’s witty, laid back, saracastic and quintessentially English—in fact just listening to some genuine British banter is enough to make me a little homesick. Thoroughly recommended.
In praise of Apache documentation
I spent much of today upgrading a distinctly hairy Apache 1.3 server to Apache 2.0 as part of a routine OS upgrade. It certainly wasn’t plain sailing—I still have a few crinkles to iron out—but that’s more down to the weirdness of the existing configuration than any problems with Apache 2.
[... 180 words]Bizex
I’m going to try not to turn this in to a blog about Windows security exploits but this one is genuinely interesting in that it actively tries to steal financial information and important passwords. Bizex spreads itself by spamming messages over ICQ advising the recipient to visit a specific URL. When they visit it, Internet Explorer exploits are used to download and execute the main payload which then infects their ICQ program and uses it to message their contacts. The worm also scans their hard drive for information relating to a number of well known financial services which it then uploads to a server via FTP, and it apparently snoops on their browser for any passwords travelling over HTTPS connections as well.
[... 216 words]Crap marketing sites
i-am-asian.com is McDonald’s excruciating “I’m lovin’ it” site targeted at Asian Pacific Islander Americans. With gems like whether we’re sipping green tea or enjoying a Big Mac sandwich, we’re helping make the magic mix called America become even richer
you can’t go wrong. Meanwhile, the infamous beef industry sponsored cool-2b-real has rebranded itself as “zip 4 tweens”—for “tween” kids—not quite teens but definitely not children!
Where’s the raging platypus when you need him?
Novel security measures
An article on SecurityFocus led me to this site about Port Knocking. Port Knocking is an interesting security technique in which a box sits online with no ports open to connections and awaits a specific sequence of connection attempts. A user wishing to connect to the box must first attempt to initiate connections to ports in a specific, secret order. Once they do, the box starts up the required service (such as an SSH daemon) on a designated port and allows the user to connect properly.
[... 145 words]“I’m Brian and so’s my wife”
I’m subscribed to a whole bunch of mailing lists, mostly as a lurker as I have a hard enough time just keeping up with some of them. One of those lists is Bugtraq, which is pretty much required reading for anyone with sysadmin responsibilities for a server connected to the public internet. Bugtraq is the central hub of the “public disclosure” security community and is actually surprisingly low traffic with only twenty or so messages a day. It’s fascinating to watch the latest exploits for all manner of popular software packages tick by on an hourly basis.
[... 285 words]Recommendations for a cheap US dial-up provider?
I’m in the market for a cheap US dial-up internet provider. I’m connected via broadband most of the time but I really need to get a backup modem account. In the UK, dialup accounts are available for free with the cost of the phone call as the only charge applied. I haven’t heard of any similar deals in the states, so I’m looking for recommendations. I won’t be using it very often so the cheaper the better.
If foxes can learn Ruby, why can’t you?
Why The Lucky Stiff’s (poignant) guide to Ruby is shaping up to be a masterpiece. Trust me, you’ve never read a programming language guide that’s even remotely comparable. Even if you have no interest in Ruby you should check it out, if only for the cartoon foxes. Here’s Why’s explanation of Ruby’s array syntax:
[... 219 words]Catching up with Harry
I’m not sure how I missed this, but Harry Fueck’s new book The PHP Anthology was published by SitePoint back in December, as a hefty 2 volume epic. Harry is the guru behind PHP Patterns and really knows his stuff. While the book is at first glance a cookbook for solving web related problems, Harry also uses it as a platform for teaching sensible development practises:
[... 237 words]