What’s wrong with low version numbers?
In a presentation entitled “Why I hate Django”, Cal Henderson (head of engineering for Flickr) said, that low version numbers makes him suspicious.
Archive for Development
Setting up a FreeBSD socks proxy server for use with mIRC
I’m getting fed up with my current IRC BNC software. At the moment I’m using psyBNC, which means I have to connect to it like you would an IRC server, then issue commands to that to tell it to connect to the IRC server of your choice.
I no longer need the features of psyBNC and decided that there must be a better way.
At first I started looking at other, more basic BNC software, but then worked out that they work in very much the same way as psyBNC in the fact that you have to first connect to it, then tell it where to connect to.
So I thought… What about a socks5 proxy?
Tracking an IP address
In my job I have to manage lots of machines all over the place. Many of them are on windows.
I often find tracking IP addresses to be a difficult task if they do not have a static IP address.
So what can be done to keep track of an IP address?
How to extract photos from an exe
I wasn’t going to write about this, but I liked the solution (application) so much I had to shout about it.
I was provided with a 30 day cd preview slideshow of wedding photos, and was asked very kindly to attempt to extract the photos from it so they could be viewed beyond the trial period.
For VS While in PHP
Today I was coding a new PHP script, when I asked myself “should I use for or while?”…
It’s a question I thought I should know the answer to after I spent a very long time researching 50+ PHP optimisation tips.
One I hadn’t mastered was whether the for() function was faster than while() function, as both can be used for most types of looping.
suPHP and .phps PHP code highlighting support
Today a user on one of my web servers asked me why .phps files would only download and not show the highlighted PHP code as expected.
This is usually done by adding the following to your “httpd.conf”…
AddType ‘application/x-httpd-php-source’ .phps
We use the cPanel web hosting control panel and to improve security cPanel recommend using suPHP, which allows PHP scripts to run as a user rather than “nobody”.
This means that adding the above line to “httpd.conf” does not work with suPHP.
So what can be done?
OpenCart v0.7.8 released
OpenCart is an open source PHP-based e-commerce online shop website solution. Ideal for new or existing stores to start selling online.
OpenCart all began because (at the time) the leading open source e-commerce solution out there was not very good, to say the least.
The first notable release was OpenCart v0.5 back in late 2006 and has been gaining momentum ever since.
The project is lead by Daniel Kerr, and I have also recently joined the team.
If you need any assistance with OpenCart, you can find me on the OpenCart Community Forums, and on the OpenCart Google Code project site.
Enjoy!
longip script
I wanted to create a script that would convert a normal IP address to a long IP, just like mIRC Script’s $longip alias.
$longip(address)
Converts an IP address into a long value and vice-versa.
$longip(158.152.50.239) returns 2660774639
$longip(2660774639) returns 158.152.50.239
What I was originally trying to do was increase an IP by 1, but due to the octets only allowing up to 255, this became increasingly difficult to do.
What I decided to do in the end was convert the IP to a “longip” then increase it by 1, then convert the IP BACK to normal IP.
This required a way to convert an IP to and from longIP, I was told it could be done purely using shell script, here’s what I did…
Friendly URLs (revisited)
Turn dynamic URLs into friendly URLs
I’m sure we’re all familiar with URLs that look like this:
http://www.example.com/?nav=page
These type of URLs aren’t particularly “friendly”, they are known as dynamic URLs. As a rule of thumb search engines such as Google don’t like them as much as “static URLs”.
However, Google has recently released an article on this very subject entitled Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs, I recommend you give it a read so you fully understand what we’re talking about.
What is a valid email address?
With the on-going abuse to email based systems, we are in need of ways to validate the email addresses we’re handling.
We all know what an email address looks like, we see them and use them every single day. But how do you know if it’s valid or not? The next obvious question should be, what defines a valid email address?
This is what I intend on investigating.