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January 2009

Web History Book; Find Out Who Owned Your Domain!

So many people might not know that there is a service that is saving web pages since 1996 and is like a history book of websites.

The following pages might load slow, be patient.

You can see the old Facebook:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040212031928/http://www.thefacebook.com/

Facebook started as thefacebook.com because facebook.com was taken and you can see here what was on facebook.com:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000823042335/http://www.facebook.com/

They bought facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000!!!

Here you can see how simple Yahoo looked like back in 1996:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/

Microsoft:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961020014044/http://www.microsoft.com/
(Pretty good for 1996 though)

Or baby Google:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981111184551/http://google.com/ :)

Google, same year, 1996:
http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/

Here is Digg:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041211042536/http://digg.com/

And twitter:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061006030354/http://twitter.com/

You can also see here that some guy owned code-head.com but he gave up on it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010719161538/http://www.code-head.com/

As you probably know by now the site is archive.org.

Enjoy :)

Web History Book; Find Out Who Owned Your Domain!
Comments (0)   Filed under: Fun, General, Internet   Posted by: Codehead on January 29, 2009

Web App Security: XSS Attacks

Today, I saw a funny comment on a website:

<script> alert('0wn3d by X - X') </script>
 
<meta HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0; URL=Some URL">

In case you don’t know about these types of attacks, an attacker will write this comment on a blog (or any sort of web application) and if the application doesn’t escape it before displaying it, this code will display an alert box and then redirects your visitors to whatever the URL is right away.

So again, if I visit this page, I see the alert box and will be redirected to another page on the Internet.

To prevent this, you will have to escape all user generated content before displaying them on your pages, in PHP:

function html_escape($str) {
   return htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'utf-8');
}

In Python:

import cgi
 
# ...
 
def escape_html(value)
   return cgi.escape(value, True)

These types of attacks are called Cross-Site Scripting or XSS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting

Good Luck :)

Web App Security: XSS Attacks
Comments (0)   Filed under: PHP, Python, Security, Web Development   Posted by: Codehead on January 21, 2009

Eclipse “Launch Failed. Binary Not Found.” and Netbeans

Last night I needed a C++ IDE right away; I had Eclipse for writing Python and knew that it had a C/C++ extension called CDT.

So I installed this CDT and I also had MingW and Cygwin installed but the only project I could compile was the sample Hello World project.

Whenever I made an empty project, Eclipse responded with “Launch Failed. Binary Not Found.”.

I read a few articles online but no luck and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it so I decided to try Netbeans.

After I installed Netbeans, BAM, it detected Cygwin and compiled everything right away!!!

That is what I wanted, I wanted an IDE that I can just make a CPP file and compile without any extra steps and Netbeans did that for me!

I’m not a C++ or Eclipse guru but I’m a normal user who is searching for simplicity and doesn’t have a lot of time to waste on things like this.

Update:

Read the comments bellow for some possible solutions…

Eclipse “Launch Failed. Binary Not Found.” and Netbeans
Comments (50)   Filed under: C Programming, IDEs, Programming   Posted by: Codehead on January 10, 2009

C++ needs a higher level standard library

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought about this but I think one of the things that holds me back from using it more is the fact that C++ doesn’t have a higher level standard library.

A while back I was thinking of writing a thread library that works both on Windows (my desktop) and Linux (my server) and I gave up and used Python for the project.

The problem is that Python is not fast enough for parts of my project and I have to use either C or C++ but I will go with C++ because of it’s Map and Vector containers etc.

I’m not sure why they didn’t implement all the good stuff that are in Python standard library in C++ but I think it’s really time.

I also found this great set of tools that might be in the next C++ standard library:
http://www.boost.org/

This is exactly what C++ needs; I don’t see why cross platform libraries for threading, database access etc. shouldn’t be included in C++ standard library.

It has a lot of great features; objects, operator overloading, many kinds of containers, templates, namespaces and it’s very fast.

C++ needs a higher level standard library
Comments (0)   Filed under: C Programming, Low Level, Programming   Posted by: Codehead on January 9, 2009

Happy New Year

Happy new year everyone and I hope this will be a great new year full of great things for you.

Did you know the new year was delayed for 1 second?

Apparently earth is slowing down turning around it’s axis :)

Happy New Year
Comments (0)   Filed under: Fun, General   Posted by: Codehead on January 1, 2009