Today, I have done my first code commit to the Zend Framework. I recently joined Shahar in the development of the Zend_Http_Client component. The first commit is nothing spectacular, just a bugfix in the existing code. My first “real” commit, with code I’ve actually written myself, will follow shortly, when I finish Zend_Http_Client_Adapter_Curl, the Curl adapter for the Zend_Http_Client.
This morning, I got the shock of my life when I opened my laptop. I was surprised enough that for some reason, the laptop was turned off, I had used it 30 minutes before that moment, and had only closed the laptop. My wife had heard a weird sound but thought it came from her PC. Unfortunately, she was wrong.
I opened the laptop again to find my screen having some weird spots on it. So I turned on the laptop to find that these spots where actually some kind of cracks in the screen. The soft outside was not damaged at all, but something on the inside must be really damaged, because the screen now looks like broken glass. I let out a quite loud curse when I saw this.
My “luck” in this is that I also have my work laptop at home, so I can at least do some basic stuff. But all my data is also in there. I’ll have to connect it to a regular screen soon I guess, so I can at least get some important data from the machine.
Right now, I’m looking at either finding a similar used laptop, or find a similar but broken laptop so I can switch the screens. I don’t want to/can’t spend a lot of money on this, so let’s hope I can find something affordable.
It actually seems to work. A few months ago, I signed up for Text Link Ads, an advertising program for websites that sells simple text links for your website. The only thing you need to do is place a small piece of code on your site. And so I did for Electronic Music World.
In the first months, no ads were sold. I was about to give up, when the first advertiser decided to buy a link on my site. After that, things were going very fast. Another ad was sold. Earlier this month, the first advertiser renewed his ad, and a new advertiser came in. And just now, a 4th ad was sold.
I am now in doubt. Should I try this one on my weblog as well? Of course, Electronic Music World has a very clear topic, is a very specific site. My weblog is less focused, and advertisers just need to like the site. So for now, I’ll wait a while. Maybe I’ll try it in the (near) future.
I just read on PHPDeveloper that there is a new security problem that needs urgent attention of any php developer. It’s RFI, a way for evil crackers to run their code of choice on your server, exposing such information as passwords, or even enabling them to get shell access to your system and maybe become root.
LWN has a good article describing the problem, offering simple solutions that every developer should already be using but sadly not everyone actually does. They also link to the code that crackers are actually using, as taken from their logs where attempts to exploit the RFI vulnerability are being seen at a rate of some 1 attempt per second.
In response to Greg’s post (as I can not seem to comment to his message), and because I think this information is useful:
Ive recently tried to install my version 4 ZDE to my new workstation, an AMD64 machine, and ran into the same problem. I found a URL with a solution, though for a different Java application, worked for me.
First of all, you need to comment out all occurrences of LD_ASSUME_KERNEL in the installer. That should get your installer to work. Then, do the same on the installed ZDE binary. I got it to run that way.
Yes! Signups are open for the new CSS Reboot! I have just entered this site for the reboot. The design is nearly done, I only need to finish some small details. But I’ll keep you guys in the dark for a while. I promise the colours will be completely different 🙂
Through Aaron I found out about Yahoo! opening up their user authentication to third parties. The ease of having just a single log in for various sites worldwide is very userfriendly. I applaud the idea. However, not the implementation.
As Aaron also notes, it can be confusing for users to be able to sign in with a Yahoo! account, but then if your site needs more information from the user, having to go through some kind of “registration” process. Single sign-on would be much better if it can be done in the background, using webservices. I can imagine though that Yahoo! would not like this too much, because that would mean the username and password would pass through the third-party application. Not good either.
The effort from Yahoo! is good, but again I don’t like the implementation. I don’t think I’ll support the Yahoo! login any time soon on any of my websites.
Soon, the new website for CSS Reboot will be launched, or so it looks from the current state of their website. There is a message about their site currently being rebooted. The main page works, and the rest fails at the moment.
So I was thinking: If you have the CSS Reboot to refresh the design of your website… would it not be fun if there would also be a code reboot day: A single day where all participants would add new functionality to their website. Call it: D-Day (Deployment Day) or some such. For Open Source projects, it would be the ultimate day to release a new version, and for websites, it would be the ultimate day to deploy their new functionality.
Would be fun. Anyone going to set it up? 🙂
Standardization. This is one of the things where PHP still falls behind, big time. In a recent thread on the Zend Framework general mailinglist, this topic was touched in an informal proposal to get a module in the framework for Portlets.
In this thread, a reference was made to a Java specification (JSR). This is something I really miss in PHP. There is no standard for specification of API’s in PHP. This is something we really need! Having standard specifications for API’s will really make PHP much better:
Now, the question is: who should attempt to start such a system. Obviously writing the specifications is a community thing, but to really get one central specification system up and running, I think a central, credible party should set this up. There’s two parties that immediately come to mind:
Since lately, Zend has been really active, and is extending it’s contacts to include companies like IBM, I think Zend should be the first choice for this.
I am still in the process of moving the sites from my old host to DreamHost. One of the sites is one I host for a fellow artist. After doing the regular MySQL dump, and loading this dump into the new database, all unicode characters were, to say it in proper english, fucked up.
Luckily, MySQL has some options to set the character encoding for the queries. It didn’t completely solve the problem, but at least helped. I ended up using the following command to import the database:
mysql -usomethingorother -p –default-character-set=UTF8 –host=databasehostIwantedtoimportto databasename < backup.sql
This solved 99% of the problems. There were still some small problems with specific characters, but overall, everything worked fine. Long live MySQL 🙂