Posted by: John in Untagged on
Aug 18, 2008
Passwords are our digital fingerprints. Shouldn't they be as secure as we want them? Apparently some websites don't think so.
How are our passwords stored?
Most websites store users passwords as an md5 (message digest 5) hash. Essentially, your plain text password is passed through a function that hashes your password. That hash is stored in the websites database. Since md5 is a one way hashing
Posted by: John in PHP on
Aug 17, 2008
A few weeks ago Jordan blogged about the heredoc syntax. The point I want to raise in this blog, is the heredoc syntax parses PHP code, similar to double quotes around a string. For example
Would output
Hello World!
Hi John!
Notice $name was parsed as a variable not as a
Posted by: John in Linux on
Aug 15, 2008
Recently I have been working on some shell scripts to aid in the installation of applications. One of the scripts I have been working on is a LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, and php) installer. For almost two years I ran a local WAMP server (same as LAMP but the operating system is Windows) which was installed by clicking some executable (XAMPP / VertigoServ). However, Linux shows no sympathy for
Posted by: John in Hosting on
Aug 08, 2008
What is overselling?
Simply put, overselling is when a host offers to more resources to their clients than what they physically have.
I would venture to say, all hosts oversell. Overselling for the most part is a legitimate practice. Most owners of dedicated servers who specialize in web hosting receive, say, an 80 GB hard drive and 8000 GB of transfer from their data center. Lets assume one of the
Posted by: John in Programming on
Aug 05, 2008
Have you ever been in a conversation where someone blurts out something completely off topic? You say to yourself, “well, that was random.” Chances are, unless that person suffers from a mental disability, that spew of “random” verbiage was not really random.
What is randomness?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines random as “made, done, or happening without method or conscious
Posted by: John in PHP, ionManager on
Aug 01, 2008
A few months ago, in one of the php articles / books I was reading I stumbled across something called variable variables. Essentially, it lets you create a variable whose name is defined by another variable. I thought to myself “where the hell would this be useful?” A few days after Jordan bloged about
variable variables I actually found a use for them:
ionManager (a framework and CMS built
One of the many annoyances of programming is a variables scope. Generally variables can be declared within the global namespace or the local namespace. When working with methods and classes global variables appear to be a good idea, however overuse of the global namespace can cause variables to clash, it also undermines encapsulation. Moreover, a class which depends on a global variable is
Posted by: John in Untagged on
Jul 08, 2008
All developers at one point or another test their code. Although it generally takes the forum of an echo to make sure your code is being ran or the correct data is being processed – it is a test. The unfortunate side effect is, all those tests will be removed. Therefor, when a piece of functionality breaks within your code, you sit at your desk manually sifting through your files once again
Posted by: John in PHP on
Jun 28, 2008
As a college student I am required to use different programming languages depending on the class I am taking. My first two semesters I used Java (while the professor attempted to teach us object oriented programming) and my last semester I used C++. Nonetheless, both languages have vast support for object oriented programming. Several days ago, while working on my php database structure I
Posted by: John in PHP on
Jun 27, 2008
In one of my previous blogs I showed you how to create a PHP-Gtk window you might use for a Tic-Tac-Toe application. In this blog I intend on showing you the logic needed to finish the application. Lets start off with the code we created in the last blog:
