Alton Brown.com Rants & Raves!: "3.5 Cups Cheerios 3 Cups Rice Chex (small box) 3 Cups Corn Chex (ditto) 1 Pound plain M&Ms 2.5 Cups mixed nuts (salted, no peanuts) 2 Cups small pretzels (Eagle Snacks work well) "
(Via Alton Brown.) - I love this guy. If your into sticky chex mix take a look at this.
This will be old hat for all you pro's out there but for people new to PHP this might be helpful. If your developing an application that has library files, class files, or included files you should always secure these so that they cannot be called from outside your application. The best way is to keep them outside the web servers document home path, but sometimes you can't.
If that's the case then you can use the code below to secure them. I'm assuming you have some type of config.php file which is always included (as most do for holding database username,pass,etc). Those variables in the config should be created using "define". ex: define('dbusername','cooluser1');
Now to secure your included files put this at the top of each one:
if (!defined('dbusername')){
exit;
}
So if the constant "dbusername" doesn't exist, which it wouldn't if you call an included file directly, then exit the program.
XML Weather Data Available: "As Kevin notes, the release of NOAA Weather data in XML is a big deal"
(Via Jeremy Zawodny's blog.) - A big reason why I'm so into blogs is that they make it so effecient to find interesting tidbits like this. I've been wanting weather data as XML forever for several sites I run, but I would never have been checking the noaa site (I forgot it existed long ago). Too bad it's not xml-rpc, but soap will do.
Geek News Central Revealing Links & Useful Technical Information*
1. Pray
2. Backup Critical Data
3. Have on Hand Virus/Firewall/Spyware programs.
4. Unplug Network Cable
5. Reinstall Windows choose format Hard-drive option
6. Install Virus/Firewall/Spyware Protection Programs.
7. Connect to Internet download all Updates.
8. Install all applications
9. Restore critical data* - Hmm I have to say that the last time I tried something like this on Windows it took alot more than 9 steps. It also involved doing #1 over and over. I love reading these articles, it always makes me so happy I decided to
Sunday notes...: "CorporateBloggingBlog reacts to our book project and misunderstands something. He thinks that another book project is more exciting simply because it calls itself an 'open source book.' Um, hello. What do you think ours will be? It's going to be done 100% in the public. Oh, you mean his book will be distributable for free too? Well, here's a clue: anyone who wants our book will be able to read it online for free. But, here's the rub. If you want your boss to read it, he might not get into it online. He might want a paper one."
(Via Scoble.) - Sometimes you have to give something away to get something else. We're going to be doing some of this with our
help desk software. Should be very interesting. I'm sure this will be a big success for Scoble. Right now nobody in the blogging world can generate as much buzz as he can.
Looking at the wrong side of persistence: "As long-time readers will know, I'm not impressed by the typical object-relational schemes used in PHP. They are primarily derivative of Java with all its disadvantages and none of the advantages because there is no real persistence. The object is recreated on every page reload due to PHP's shared-nothing design. But I do think one type of persistence is worth-while implementing in PHP+Javascript. It's client-side persistence. I'm talking about a gmail style model, where the objects persist on the client, the web browser."
(Via PHP Everywhere.) - It's hard to get ready for this new age when in the past lots of developers avoided any tricky javascript which was often difficult to make work well cross browser. In
HelpSpot we're taking a middle ground approach using some nice JS to enhance things like queue's. I think most apps will end up being more this middle ground than the all out gmail/oddpost model. These models are really bad on accessibility and there really hasn't been much progress in moving js or flash into a highly accessible medium.
The Spaminator has killed a comment.
The details: Strikes : 10/5
How : user regex - email
IP Addr : 203.113.29.2
Referer : http://www.userscape.com/blog/2004/10/18/a-short-review-of-textmate/
Client : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0; PCUser)
Request : POST /blog/wp-comments-post.php
Post ID : 11
Email : byob@y5160o.com
Author : texas holdem URL : http://texas-holdem-a.fateback.com
Body: 5160 texas-holdem.order.gb.com Interesting observation --
This email has been sent because the Spaminator plugin is set to send emails when a suspected spam has been blocked. To not receive these emails change the $this->send_mail variable to FALSE.
Thanks for using this plugin, hope it helps!
http://mookitty.co.uk/devblog/
If your looking for some help with comment spam in Wordpress you might want to checkout this site. They have a nice list of all the available plugins. I'm trying a couple now. I can't believe how much spam I'm already getting.
"The prince of pod will not be kept down by the man!" (via Adam Curry's Weblog) - sweet.
MSN Spaces: seven dirty blogs: "Earlier today, I posted comments from a BoingBoing reader about the fact that MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging tool, censors certain words you might try to include in a blog title or url. If you can't speak freely on a blog, what's the point of having one? This demanded a full BoingBoing investigation."
(Via Boing Boing.) - Hmm sanitized weblogs. These type of things usually don't turn out too well. MSN still doesn't get who the