A Day in Paradise

What’s the Story? — By Aaron Wormus

Things might be a bit wonkey for the next few weeks as I consolidate all my sites onto my new dedicated. If somethings not working just wait a couple of days and it’ll come up again!

A picture is worth a thousand words

What’s the Story? — By Aaron Wormus

I decided to actually read what all those pesky blog spammers are saying about me. Here is the list (gathered before I did my daily blog spam deleting run).

Super site darlings. Thanks awfully

I just want you to know that I think you did a terrific job on this websight.

Perfect site I will recommend it to all my friends and fans

Your site is also very interesting, very calming effect just reading it.

Could you please send to me the contacts of developer of your site? It looks so damn good!

Thank you, I just wanted to give a greeting and tell you I like your website very much.

I really like the layout and colors that you chose for this website! It certainly is incredible!

This is great, look forward to looking into every area. Thanks for being there.

Quite enjoyed your work .

This nice is very good, i will recomend it to my friends and partners

I just surfed in and found your site, I really enjoyed the visit and hope to come back soon. nice Site!

Update: The stuff on this web site is really witty and cool wise

“The Unix-Haters Handbook” WWW Page

The “Anti-Preface” by Dennis Richie is the best part! The tail end: Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.

Bon appetit!

CNN.com – Pentagon: Rumsfeld misspoke on Flight 93 crash – Dec 27, 2004

So Rumsfeld “misspoke” when he mentioned the “the people who … shot down the plane over Pennsylvania.”

His head should roll — not really in context, just a nice thought.

Update: A bit of googling and I dig up this interview where Rumsfeld mentions the “the missile to damage this building [pentagon] and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center.” The missing plane theory jumped up a couple notches as most likely conspiracy theory!

::ill Will Press:: NEUROTICALLY YOURS CARTOON: NO CHRISTMAS FOR YOU!

A very original Christmas rant. I enjoyed it, but if you object to a bit of explicit language or are easily offended, then you might not want to click!

Peace on Earth, Goodwill towards men!

Note: This was originally a comment on shiflett’s blog, but I’m reposting it here for my future reference.

In my recent article on string handling in International PHP Magazine, I had originally dedicated a whole section to the ctype library. However, the more I looked at it the less useful they became for anything more than just the most basic of validation.

The main problem with this library is the fact that it is not intended for handling strings. The C stands for Character, and the original functionality is to determine if a specific character is of the defined type.

In PHP we are trying to make it work with strings and the concept doesn’t carry over very well.

If you could add a parameter that would check the string for an occurance of that character type it could be much more powerful, because then we could do stuff like:

if (ctype_cntrl($_POST['username'], true)){
    die("Your username contains control characters");
}

The other problem with ctype (and string functions in general) is locale. By default on Unix systems, PHP will use the standard C locale which is [A-Za-z], so with a simple alnum check, plenty of people won’t be able to sign in.

All that to say that after all my research all the ctype library got was a brief mention, since IMO it really isn’t that useful.

The upside is that you can use POSIX named classes in your preg_* functions (AFAIK, this is undocumented), so the same simplistic example above can be done with:

if (preg_match('/[[:cntrl:]]/', $_POST['username'])){
    die("Your username contains control characters");
}

Now you’re not able to give the speed that ctype offers, but at least it’s much simpler than trying to work it all out yourself.

Google Holiday Logos

What’s with the Google’s “Holiday Doodle”???

Since the talk about google suggest has slowed down, it is a good time for a little link roundup.

The /. article which links to the authors blog entry.
A lot of people were amazed by Google suggest, the technolgy has been around for quite a while and has been implemented in the “live search” feature on bitflux blog among other places.

The “Hacking Google” blog entry gives a simple explaination of the interface, and has whipped up some PHP code which uses the interface. Another hack is the Google Alphabet, which automatically builds the table based on the most popular hits for each alphabet letter. A proof-of-concept firefox extension has also been whipped up which implements google suggest in your firefox search. More details here.

As far as the actual “searching” goes, there is no real time searching involved, the data is simply drawn from the prebuilt database of common words and phrases. This database is obviously neutered in the suggestions that it gives. The words ‘porn‘ and ‘sex‘ do not give any suggestions. Goat, however, is right on the spot.

Finally, if you’re looking to implement a feature like this using javascript and PHP, Harry Fuecks Jspan will get you up and running in no time at all!

14.6. DNS %u2014 Domain Name System

I’ve gotten a new dedicated (yes it’s a noun) at Alturo! Now I need to figure out how this “Linux” thing works

Thankfully I have the green book. It is informative but very long… hopefully over christmas I can get all the bits and pieces up and running.

nyt_ad_large_2004.png (PNG Image, 1001×808 pixels)

Someone should buy a couple hundred, and store them in the basement until nobody remembers what it was an alternative to!

I think this would look good in a set of frames

International PHP Magazine – Cutting-Edge Technologies for Web Professionals – Columns

Barnstormer #27 is up! Since I’ve got a lot of work these days I’m not always able to get it up on Monday, so the schedule has slipped somewhat, however I will continue to do one a week, and it will generally be up by Thursday

In other news php|Architect is starting their 7DOX giveaway! Today’s offer is $50 off the Zend PHP Certification guide and the Test. I’ve got the book, and the $100 voucher from Zend… We’ll see what happens tomorrow

Google News

A quick look at todays headlines… other than the revelations of more detainee abuse we had the revelation that Bernard Kerik used Ground Zero rescue crew flat as a love nest. So much for Bush’s intelligence gathering system! Of course, the intelligence system wasn’t the only thing that was broken, yesterday the Defense Missile for U.S. System Fails to Launch!

I don’t see why they don’t just do what the Australians do and impose 1,000-mile ‘terror exclusion zone’. Yes, it’s illegal, but at least it will protect the poor threatened Austrialians against the impending terrorist attacks!

Crypto-Gram: February 15, 1999

An old ‘crypto-gram’ but VERY amusing and informational. Has some great examples of marketing nonsense:

The base of VME is a Virtual Matrix, a matrix of binary values which is infinity in size in theory and therefore have no redundant value. The data to be encrypted is compared to the data in the Virtual Matrix. Once a match is found, a set of pointers that indicate how to navigate inside the Virtual Matrix is created. That set of pointers (which is worthless unless pointing to the right Virtual Matrix) is then further encrypted in dozens other algorithms in different stages to create an avalanche effect. The result is an encrypted file that even if decrypted is completely meaningless since the decrypted data is not the actual data but rather a set of pointers. Considering that each session of VME has a unique different Virtual Matrix and that the data pattern within the Virtual Matrix is completely random and non-redundant, there is no way to derive the data out of the pointer set.

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Beatles Christmas Records

If you were fortunate enough to have been a member of the official Beatles fan club between 1963 and 1969, then you likely have heard one or more of these records. The Beatles recorded them and sent them out to their adoring fans every year, finally collecting them all on one album for the 1970 edition. Now rare and quite pricey to obtain, these seldom heard recordings offer a rare glimpse of the fabs at their funniest.