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November 30, 2005

cookies, internetexplorer, technology

Yesterday I left work at 8PM. Usually I leave at around 5:30PM. The cause of this? Some friggin unbelievable bug, or just plain weird behaviour, of Internet Explorer.

For some of the bigger file downloads, we cooperate with a distributed download network. To authorize users to download certain paid content, we need to set cookies.

For some inexplicable reason, setting the cookies failed on certain versions of Internet Explorer 6. We kept narrowing down the problem until we had a working testscript which did exactly the same thing as our live script, except for one thing. The expiry time of our testscript was 1500 seconds in the future, and the expiry time of our live script was 300 seconds in the future. You’d think this could not cause this problem (which is why we ignored that part of the script for so long I guess) but when we changed the expiry time on our live script to 1500 seconds, it all of a sudden started working.

So, for the record: If you are having trouble with cookies on Internet Explorer 6, check your expiry time.
CSI: TV beats book

November 27, 2005

books

CSI is one of my all-time favorite TV shows. Simply awesome. Of course, for a lot of successful things, all kinds of other material is also done. CSI also has books. Being the bookwurm that I am, I recently had the opportunity to get me a CSI-book through BookCrossing. So I got the book, and I finished it this week.

The book was good. It definitely had that CSI-atmosphere to it. However, it can’t beat the TV show. By far, the TV show is better. This might, in part, be because the TV show was there first, and the books are based on the TV show, but still, books are most of the times superior. Not this time. The books fail to make use of the full potential of a book, of the power of imagination. Also, there are passages in the book that basically describe what you’d usually see in a TV show where for instance DNA is being processed etc. This works in TV, not in written form.

I might read some more CSI books, don’t get me wrong, it was a nice book, however, this is a perfect example where the TV show is much better than the book.
Security in phpBB

November 24, 2005

php, phpbb, security, technology

The following is a reply I wrote to an article by Filip de Waard. Unfortunately, commenting was turned off on his weblog, so I could not comment on his weblog. Here is my comment:

buggy PHP scripts like PhpBB

Of course, being part of the phpBB team, I want to respond to this. Though I definitely agree that there have been bugs (hard to deny that), I must say I’ve never seen it being blamed on PHP. On the other hand, I have seen, a year ago or so, a PHP bug being blamed on phpBB.

It’s easy to bash phpBB for containing bugs, but I have yet to encounter software that is completely bugfree. And especially when software is as popular as phpBB, people start actively looking for the bugs. This helps, when the bugs get reported to the team before being made public, but more often than not people who find bugs are more interested in their own 15 minutes of fame than the security of users worldwide, and they publish the issues without reporting them to the phpBB team first, so the team gets no opportunity to release a patch.

And of course, there’s a whole shitload of users that don’t regularly update their phpBB software, rendering them open to all kinds of attacks that they need not be open for if only they had kept their software up-to-date.

That said, security *is* an issue and I try to write my code as secure as possible, but sometimes when I see code I wrote 5 years ago, I shiver.
Problem

November 21, 2005

linux, technology

OK, and now I have a problem.

I want to reinstall my laptop, probably get LinSpire running on it. But how am I going to back up 26 gigabytes of data when you don’t have a DVD burner in your laptop?
The quest for the perfect design

November 21, 2005

design, weblogging

I’m still not completely happy with my current design. It’s still too much like the original template. Though the original template is quite nice, I like something with a more personal touch. However, creating a whole new design… well, let’s just say I’m not a designer. My wife is, but she’s busy enough as is.

Does anyone have any good tips on template sites that contain good, high quality templates that are lighter than this current one (less images is good, I want something that is as much as possible css-oriented). Or is there anyone willing to donate some time to creating something like that for me? I’d be very grateful 🙂
Kratarknathrak

November 5, 2005

music

I know it’s been silent around my netlabel recently, but finally there’s a new release available. The artist that was responsible for the very first release on the label is back! His new release, Dogun Teatime, is beautiful! Slightly darker than the first release. Check it out!
IDM continued

November 3, 2005

idm, music

After publishing my Essay on IDM earlier I got contacted by the editor of Igloo Mag, a quite fine Internet publication. He wanted to publish the essay as a feature on their website. I was quite honored, so I said yes.

While you’re there, also check out the rest of the site. Igloo rules.
Interview

October 30, 2005

interview, meta, technology

Hey, what’s this? I got interviewed by Marko from mcville 🙂
Silverfall

October 29, 2005

books

Ever since it was first published, I’ve been wanting to read Silverfall. However, it was at first only available as hardcover. Though I do have quite a few hardcovers, I buy most books as paperback, simply because I’d have to be filthy rich to have em all in hardcover version, and also of course because reading a paperback is much easier, especially when reading on the train and such.

Anyway, today, we were in Utrecht, and visited the Elf Fantasy store. And wow, there it is. A single paperback copy of Silverfall. I of course immediately bought it. Finally I can read this book 🙂
SimpleXML, simple but limited

October 26, 2005

php, technology, xml

After playing with it for a while, I actually had some work this week which would be a good project for using PHP5’s simpleXML functionality. I had to work with an existing standard which I had no control over, and which proved to become a bane of my existence though.

The main problem of this standard was that the root element of the XML strings contained the type of the XML call that was being done. When you load an XML string into SimpleXML, though, you can not easily access the element name of the root element. Any attributes are easily accessed, but the root element itself is harder.

So I decided to write a little SimpleXML extension. Or really, a simple class that would instantiate and return a SimpleXML document, but with a new dummy root element.

<?php abstract class mySimpleXML { public static function loadString($strXml) { $strXml = str_replace('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>', '', $strXml); $strXml = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?><myDummyRoot>' . $strXml . '</myDummyRoot>'; return simplexml_load_string($strXml); } } ?>

This is still version 0.1, there are definitely things that can be improved (such as introducing regular expressions in the xml tag to allow for other versions of xml and other encoding types) but for now this does the job.