John

Ever since the web has ventured into its newest phase known as Web 2.0, one of the attributes web developers have started to focus on is the interface in which users interact. Gone are the days of static web pages built in html, table based layouts, and infamous page refresh. Developers have made every attempt to drift away from the old look and feel and have started to concentrate on the “sexiness” by making the user interfaces more rich and application-like. This is still primarily done in JavaScript ...

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 algorithm (there is no way to convert the md5 hash in the database back to your plain text ...

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
[code=php]$name = "John";
$john = <<<EOD
Hello World!<br />
EOD;
 
$world = <<<EOD
Hi $name!<br /><br >
EOD;[/code] Would output

Hello World!
Hi John!

Notice $name was parsed as a variable not as a literal. Until PHP 5.3 the only option ...

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 lazy Windows users, and thus forces us to use a restrictive package manager or install form source. Moreover, ...

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 packages a host offers for $5 a month is 1 GB of storage and 10 GB of transfer. Physically, ...

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 decision.” More than likely, your conversation sparked some conscious relocation which resulted in the person ...

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 myself), uses the MVC enterprise pattern. The model querys the database and generates/manipulates any ...