In one of the sections on my “One Year of PHP at Yahoo!” talk I’m giving next week, I mention the security implications of the allow_url_fopen config setting. I recommend that people set allow_url_fopen off, and instead use the libcurl extension to do server-side HTTP fetches. Here’s a comparison of a simple HTTP fetch using […]
LA Times 7-Day Protest
Seven Day Vacation Protesting the Los Angeles Times: July 7 – July 14. Please join the boycott by calling the LA Times at 1-800-252-9141. Tell them that you are participating in a protest and would like to cancel your subscription for 7 days. [via valley luach]
How to scale PHP
With one week to spare, I’m finished with the slides for “One Year of PHP at Yahoo!,” a talk that I’m giving next week at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland. The finished product is a quite a bit different than the abstract I submitted, but I think it’s a good thing. This talk […]
National Do Not Call Registry Opens
The opening of the National Do Not Call Registry, a free service of the federal government developed to give consumers a choice about getting telemarketing calls at home, was announced this morning by President George W. Bush, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Timothy J. Muris, and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Michael K. Powell. Consumers […]
Working on my OSCON talk
It dawned on me recently that I’ve only got about 2 weeks before my One Year of PHP at Yahoo! talk at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland. Here’s the section title slide for one of the parts of my talk: I like talks that have lots of graphics, even if they’re a little […]
GIF Patent Expires Tomorrow
kuro5hin.org: “On Friday, 20th June 2003, the death knell sounds for US patent number 4,558,302. Having benefitted its owner, the Unisys Corporation for 20 years, the contents of the patent are entered into the Public Domain and may be used absolutely freely by anyone.” Note however that the patent only expires in the USA tomorrow. […]
Absurd interactive animation of the day
Local musician Craig Taubman recently posted an amusing kosher pickle animation on his website. If LAUNCHcast had an absurd category for music, I’d be sure to rate it 100 so I could hear the music like the Kosher Pickle song every day.
Shared Libraries on my mind
I just finished writing up 4 pages of documentation on how to correctly build shared libraries for FreeBSD using Yahoo!’s Makefile macros. The fact that Makefiles are such a black art probably explains the popularity of alternative build systems. I’m sure a bunch of these ideas will be covered in Theodore Ts’o’s Designing and Creating […]
Real Nice Clambake
This was a real nice clambake, We’re mighty glad we came. The vittles we et Were good, you bet, The company was the same. Our hearts are warm, our bellies are full, And we are feeling prime. This was a real nice clambake, And we all had a real good time. (See also Hukilau)
How to consume RSS safely
Excellent reading for web engineers: How to consume RSS safely. Mark lists 10 HTML elements that must be stripped to safely display HTML from an RSS feed. He mentions stripping style attributes from RSS, but fails to mention an even more imporant set of attributes: the JavaScript event attributes. Sure, you’ll want to leave <img> […]