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August 2008

SEOmoz Guy, PHP doesn’t suck really

I agree, PHP, is easy to learn, use and abuse and makes many people who don’t know anything about server and web development feel like experts, but that doesn’t mean PHP sucks, those developers suck.

Recently I read on SEOmoz:

There is no mileage in buying vBulletin for $160. It can’t be any good at that price – and is probably written in PHP. You are looking for a cool project to write in Ruby and here’s your chance.

Just in case the author doesn’t know, here is a list of sites that are powered by PHP:
1 – Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/index.php)
2 – Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index.php)
3 – Yahoo! bookmarks (You have to login)
4 – Stumbleupon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/index.php but redirects to http://www.stumbleupon.com/)
5 – SEOmoz itself! (http://www.seomoz.org/index.php)
6 – Flickr (http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/uploads/flickr_php.pdf Flickr even uses Smarty template engine!)
There are more but I think this is enough.

Now vBulletin which is also written in PHP, is a state of the art forum software that is running some of the biggest communities on the web such as:
1 – Digital Point
2 – Site Point
3 – RC Groups
etc. ect.

That’s all.

Comments (0) Filed under: Annoying Stuff, PHP, Web Development Posted by: Codehead

Windows Vista pisses me off

Last night I was doing some stuff and had all kinds of open apps.
I went away for like 15 minutes and apparently Windows Vista updated itself and restarted my computer!!!
It probably told me that it’s going to do it but the fact that it just goes ahead and does it is really stupid.

I don’t know who in Microsoft makes these design decisions but it makes me angry that they don’t respect the user.

The reason behind it might be that the updates are important for security or all the other problems Vista has but it’s stupid and it shouldn’t restart my computer without my permission.

It also tries to remember what you where doing but in a retarded way and I lost stuff.

I’m really considering moving to Linux and trowing this piece of crap operating system into trash.

Comments (7) Filed under: Annoying Stuff, General Posted by: Codehead

Don’t upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 beta, yet

Yes, many people did and they are complaining.
It’s a beta product and it’s not meant to be for users. You can safely (well…) upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 when it’s not beta anymore.

It has so many issues, Internet Explorer 7 has so many problems already and I can’t imagine what sort of issues Internet Explorer 8 “Beta” has…

Here are some stories:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10028458-75.html

The definition of beta software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Beta

Beta software is for users who want to participate in testing an unfinished product.

Comments (0) Filed under: Annoying Stuff, General, Web Browsers Posted by: Codehead

Adding Auto Login (Remember Me) Capability to Your Applications

Here are the steps:

1 – You need to add a field to your login form, preferably a checkbox and name it “remember” (or whatever).

2 – We need a way of recognizing users computer, to do this you will need to add an extra field to your user table and name it something like “token”:

ALTER TABLE YOUR_USER_TABLE ADD token VARCHAR(40);
ALTER TABLE YOUR_USER_TABLE ADD INDEX(token);

(We need the index for fast lookup)

You will also need another column to save the user agent:

ALTER TABLE YOUR_USER_TABLE ADD user_sig VARCHAR(40);

This is for security. (I will explain this in a little bit)

3 – We will also have to save a cookie on users computer; after you logged the user in successfully you will need something like this in your login script:

if (LOGIN_VALID()) {
   /* Log user in here first */
   if (isset($_POST['remember'])) {
       $token = md5(str_shuffle('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'));
       $user_sig = md5('SOME SECRET SEED' .$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
       mysql_query("UPDATE YOUR_USER_TABLE SET token = '$token', user_sig = '$user_sig' WHERE USER_ID_FIELD = USERS_ID");
       $cookie_name = 'A SHORT NAME FOR THE COOKIE';
       $cookie_value = $token;
       $cookie_expire = time() + 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 * 12 * 10; /* Approx 10 years */
       $cookie_path	= '/';
       $cookie_domain = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']; /* If this didn't work, put your domain name here */
       setcookie($cookie_name, $cookie_value, $cookie_expire, $cookie_path, $cookie_domain);
   }
}

What this does is that it generates a token to be saved on user’s computer as a cookie, and also for security reasons, it generates a request signature out of user’s browser user agent and saves them both in your database.
It also sets a cookie on user’s computer with the token only.

4 – Now you will need to place something like this in your main include file:

if (!isset($_SESSION['valid_user']) && isset($_COOKIE['A SHORT NAME FOR THE COOKIE']) && trim($_COOKIE['A SHORT NAME FOR THE COOKIE']) != '') {
    $token = mysql_real_escape_string($_COOKIE['A SHORT NAME FOR THE COOKIE']);
    $user_result   = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM YOUR_USER_TABLE WHERE token <> '' AND token = '$token'");
 
    if ($user_result && mysql_num_rows(user_result) > 0) {
        $user = mysql_fetch_assoc($user_result);
        if ($user['user_sig'] == md5('SOME SECRET SEED' .$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
             /* Go ahead and log the user in again */
             $_SESSION['valid_user'] = $user;
             session_regenerate_id(); /* Always good idea */
        }
    }
}

This script will check and see if the user is already logged in and if he/she is already logged in then it won’t go through all the trouble to log the user in again.
It also checks for existence of the cookie you saved on users computer before.

If all the conditions are true then the script will checks the token and user’s signature and if everything matches, it will log the user in.

5 – There is also one last step: Clean up. In your *logout* script, place:

       $cookie_name = 'A SHORT NAME FOR THE COOKIE';
       $cookie_value = '';
       $cookie_expire = time() - 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 * 12 * 10; /* Approx 10 years ago */
       $cookie_path	= '/';
       $cookie_domain = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']; /* If this didn't work, put your domain name here */
       setcookie($cookie_name, $cookie_value, $cookie_expire, $cookie_path, $cookie_domain);

This will delete the cookie from user’s computer when the user logs out.
If you don’t do this, your application will keep logging the user in even after he/she logs out.

The same concept will work in other languages.
Also this script only relies on the user agent to double check everything, you might want to take extra security measures…

I hope this helps someone

Comments (0) Filed under: PHP, Web Development Posted by: Codehead

Password Support for Jeditable, a Cool jQuery Plugin

Here is the original plugin:
http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/jeditable

It let’s you implement inline editing capabilities and it’s supported by major browser.
Here are some examples:
http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/jeditable/default.html

An example usage is like this:

$(".edit_area").editable("http://www.example.com/save.php", {
         type      : 'textarea',
         cancel    : 'Cancel',
         submit    : 'OK',
         indicator : "<img src='img/indicator.gif'>",
         tooltip   : 'Click to edit...'
     });

The problem is, it doesn’t support password input types, but here is how to add this support.

1 – Open the plugin file.
2 – Find this code:

text: {
	element:function(settings,original) {
		var input=$('<input>');
		if(settings.width!='none') {
			input.width(settings.width);
		}
		if(settings.height!='none') {
			input.height(settings.height);
		}
		input.attr('autocomplete','off');
		$(this).append(input);
		return(input);
	}
},

3 – Add this after that:

password: { element:function(settings,original) {
		var input=$('<input type="password">');
		if(settings.width!='none') {
			input.width(settings.width);
		}
		if(settings.height!='none') {
			input.height(settings.height);
		}
		input.attr('autocomplete','off');
		$(this).append(input);
		return(input);
	}
},

Now you can do:

$(".edit_area").editable("http://www.example.com/save.php", {
         type      : 'password',
         cancel    : 'Cancel',
         submit    : 'OK',
         indicator : "<img src='img/indicator.gif'>",
         tooltip   : 'Click to edit...'
     });

It’s odd that the developers didn’t add this capability…

Comments (3) Filed under: AJAX, JavaScript, Web Development Posted by: Codehead

Fading images with Fireworks

Here is how to do it:

1 – Open your image
2 – On the top menu, go to Commands > Creative -> Fade Image
3 – A dialog box will open, choose the kind of fading effect that you want
4 – Click OK
5 – If you select your image, you will see a line with a dot and a rectangle on each side, hold the dot and move it around and experiment. Use the rectangle to move the whole effect around and the dot to resize it and change it’s direction.

Enjoy

Comments (0) Filed under: Web Design, Web Graphics Posted by: Codehead

Fixed font sizes on Firefox 3

In Firefox 2, you couldn’t have a fixed font size, as soon as a user zoomed on your page, where ever you had a fixed font, it would get bigger and ugly.
So I used to use images for menus in form of CSS sprites.

But in Firefox 3, they fixed this issue.

Now, I find those arguments about how it was OK to blow the web pages and how it made sense, blah blah, pathetic!

Comments (0) Filed under: CSS, HTML, Web Design Posted by: Codehead

Programming Paradigms 5; Linear Search and Stack

This one is about linear search and stack within the C programming language.

It’s great

Comments (0) Filed under: Assembly Programming, C Programming Posted by: Codehead

Secret Places on Google Earth

If you haven’t seen Google Earth yet, go ahead and download and install it here:

http://earth.google.com/

After you are done, put these coordinates in the search box (on top left):

1-
50° 0′38.20″N 110° 6′48.32″W

This one is really cool but it looks like it’s random.

2-
19°56′58.08″S 69°38′2.25″W
(Zoom in a little bit)

Now, this one is not random, it was made by someone, some say Mayans but remember, they couldn’t fly so I think making something like this that only someone in the air can see would be their last thought… Correct me if I’m wrong, I can’t find anything about this on the internet.
Honestly, it looks like an alien to me

3-
45° 7′25.87″N 123° 6′48.97″W
(Zoom in a little bit)

The Firefox logo!