I was finally able to get the dogs together to show you why I don’t need to lock my doors at night. They didn’t want to pose nude, but hey, I have a website to run. Click for a larger image:

The sexy man on the left is Timber (Pitbull, 90 lbs), middle is Capone (Pitbull puppy, 35 lbs), and right is Harley (German Shepherd-Pitbull mix, 65 lbs)

It takes a real ego to turn down $2 BILLION dollars. That’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder/CEO of Facebook, did when Yahoo and Viacom offered to buy him out. I was reading this in Fast Company this morning and I was couldn’t believe that two of the largest marketing firms in the world would want to buy a MySpace wannabe. I can’t really blame him for turning it down, though…since in a couple years his little business might be worth twice that much. According to Fast Company, the worth of Facebook is based these facts:

• It consists of over 47,000 college, high school, employee, and regional networks
• It handles over 600 million searches and mor than 30 billion page views a month
• It’s the 6th most-trafficked site in the U.S.
• It’s the biggest photo sharing site on the web, with 6 milling being added daily to it’s database of over 1 billion
• It grows at an average percent of 3% a week, which is a lot faster than my boobs grow.

Even though this kid could probably buy all the pocket protectors he wants, I’m still not sure of what he was deserving of a 7-page long article in FC. There’s nothing interesting enough about this kid to hold my attention for 7 pages, considering that in high school I ordered the cliffs notes for the Joy Luck Club, then ended up hiring some guy to write my paper because it was still too long.

You can read the online version of the article here.

I found this out after troubleshooting a few sites a couple weeks ago. Unlike all other previous versions of PHP, with 5.2.1 you can no longer use a URL to include files, even if you have allow_url_fopen enabled in your php.ini.

Just a quickie about what an ‘include’ is, it’s a php function that lets you include the contents of a file into another. It usually takes the form of this:

include('page.php');

This is a local include, and is usually the preferred method. A remote include is that of a URL:

include('http://google.com');

Most people would agree that remote includes are a major security issue for novice coders who don’t have any kind of file validation in place to protect their scripts, but if you’re convinced that your code is down, you can add this line to your php.ini file to allow remote file includes:

allow_url_include On

Now, this directive did not exist until php 5.2.1 was released so Cpt. Obvious says that:

1) you cannot use it with versions prior to 5.2.1

2) You’ll need to add it to your php.ini, as you probably won’t find it in there already

3) allow_url_fopen has to be enabled

4) This has to be in the php.ini server-side, and not the .htaccess

If you’d like to know more about remote file inclusions (the bad kind), read my article.

By: Jason O’Connor

I believe some people create and publish websites for the sole purpose of tormenting their visitors. Browsing various websites and navigating the Web can often be like trying to read on an airplane while a kid kicks the back of your seat and the baby next to you alternates between screaming, crying and drooling on you. There are some excellent websites out there to be sure, but there are also a lot of dreadful ones too. The latter are the bane of so many people’s existence, especially those who use the Web regularly.

The Net continues to grow in popularity and importance for consumers and businesses alike. Therefore, the quality of sites needs to keep pace. Creating and maintaining high-quality websites is more important now than ever. Higher quality equals more revenue.

The following lists the top ten ways that a website misses the boat and contributes to hair loss and nervous breakdowns. Notice the common thread that runs throughout each of these. Namely, a bad website neglects to consider the site visitor’s experience in some fundamental ways.

I received a note from a friend that on April 30th, participating blogs are supposed to do a blank post with nothing but a single graphic, as a way of honoring the people who were shot at VA tech earlier. I’m not usually one to bathe in tragedy after it happens, but since I have a lot of friends and former colleagues from ECPI that go there, I doesn’t seem to be a bad idea.

http://www.onedayblogsilence.com/OneDayBlogSilence.com.html

Yes, I turned twenty yesterday and my liver is still reminding me. The picture below is really the only one that came out, mainly because the person taking it was the only one who wasn’t plastered. So enjoy it, print it out, tape it to your ceiling, and grab yourself a paper towel.

 From left:  Kristy, Shanon, Me, Torie (sis) Tisha, Jesaka, Melissa, Tabi

I noticed a vague mention of Sohosin on a PHP blog that I read on occasion and I decided to give it a whirl to see if it’s as sexy as is sounds. So far my server hasn’t crashed, so I’m willing to recommend it to anyone who’s interested in hardening their PHP. Ok, sorry. I really can’t say that without chuckling. Yes, welcome back to third grade.

If you check out the developer’s site you should pretty much get the idea of what it does, but basically closes some of the security holes that we see with PHP all the time. Not to say that it will make your php 4.3/MySQL3/globals on/port 22 open server any more secure, but if you’re running any of the latest stable security releases you might be somewhat interested.

I’m currently running PHP 5.2.1, which is the latest release of PHP5 at the time of this writing. You can essentially install this on any PHP4+ server that you have root SSH access to. I opted to install the DSO, as I absolutely hate recompiling PHP. Installing Suhosin as a dynamic shared module will not require you do recompile anything, and is therefore the preferred method for lazy people.

Note: I’m using the latest (and only) release at the time of my writing, but head over to the download page to see if there is anything newer:

http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/download.html

cd /usr/src
wget http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/_media/suhosin-0.9.20.tgz
tar -xvzf suhosin-0.9.20.tgz
cd suhosin-0.9.20

Now to install:

phpize
./configure
make
make install

It should return a line something like this:

Installing shared extensions: /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/

Now, all you have to do is add this line to your php.ini and restart Apache. Of course, the path should be what the installation output gave you:


[Suhosin]
extension="/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/suhosin.so"

**If you are running eAccelerator, this should be above the eAccerelator configuration

When you load up your phpinfo file you should see the module loaded near the Zend section. Everything should be fine as-is, but it you’re one of those people who has to reconfigure everything, knock yourself out.

I wrote an article a while back on PHP optimization, but it was pretty lacking in most aspects, probably because I’m a lazy poster. I’ve revisited that article and reposted to hopfully have it be a little more helpful on the area.

This was just a little code addon that I put together as part of a tutorial I wrote on a friend’s site (and copied on mine) about PHP optimization. Added to a page on your site, it will calculate how much time it took for a page or script to execute using PHP’s microtime() function. I only added this to my main page, but you can easily create a plugin or include file to show the generation time of all your pages.

First, add this code to the very beginning of your PHP file:

<?php
$stime = microtime();
$sarray = explode(" ", $stime);
$stime = $sarray[1] + $sarray[0];
?>

Now, add this to the very end:

<?php
$etime = microtime();
$earray = explode(" ", $etime);
$etime = $earray[1] + $earray[0];
$ttime = $etime - $stime;
$ttime = round($ttime,3);
echo "This page loaded in $ttime seconds.";
?>

That was easy, wasn’t it? You should now see a little line at the bottom of your page that shows how long it took to execute. There is an example on the bottom of my home page.