Tinsology

I noticed an article today on CNN called  How to create a ‘super password’. For those of you who don’t feel like reading the article, it is basically about how researchers at Georgia Tech are able to brute force 8-character passwords in less than a couple of hours, using “clusters of graphics cards”. This is nothing new; graphics cards are being used for all sorts of applications other than graphics. What I think is more interesting is the conclusion the writer draws from the fact that cracking an 8-character password is a simple enough task, provided you have… Read More | 2 Comments

Every now and then I discover something that makes me feel like I’ve been doing things the hard way. The feeling is an interesting combination of excitement and embarrassment. I experienced this today while browsing PHP documentation. I discovered two function that will make my life a lot easier in the future: debug_backtrace and debug_print_backtrace. As someone who has written his fair share of Java, I’m very accustomed to stack traces. The fact I’ve made it as far as I have with PHP without them leaves me feeling amazed. The fact that I’ve had access to them all… Read More | 1 Comment

Creating Threads

Searching

When a rational person has a question or a topic to discuss on a forum that person might think “Maybe I should use the search feature to see if a thread regarding my topic already exists!”. This is generally a waste of time, however. The probability of two people on a forum consisting of thousands of members over the span of several years having the same question, idea, or thought turns out to be very low. In addition to this, using the search feature can be incredibly confusing to use and takes far too long… Read More | 1 Comment

This guide will show you how to create a domain on your local machine and configure apache to route traffic to that domain to a particular directory. I’ll describe how to do this using Windows, but the process should be very similar in a linux environment.

The first step is to choose a domain name. When choosing a domain you should remember two things: It will only exist on your local machine and it will override an already existing domain. The latter is probably the most important; choosing google.com as the domain will prevent you from accessing google.com. The… Read More

A new version of Apparatus is available. Previously I wrote about several new features that would be included in this version, however rather than further postpone a release, I’ve decided to hold off on those features until the next version. Version 0.4 incorporates a new theme, the latest version of tab override (which should resolve any browser compatibility issues), and various improvements and modifications… Read More

I have been using various shared hosting providers for several years now. In that time I have never renewed a hosting plan with any single provider; instead moving from one to another for various reasons. Before I go any further let me describe my needs with regard to hosting:

1. Obviously one of my needs is to host this blog. I don’t get a huge amount of visitors (150 on an average day) so this isn’t much to ask for.
2. I have a few other sites that are in development, most of them will never see the light

The lack of function overloading is one of my biggest complaints about PHP. If you’re not familiar with overloading, its a feature of some languages that allows you to defined multiple methods (or functions) with the same name, but taking different paramenters. In Java, for instance, methods are not identified solely by their name. Instead, functions are distinguished by their signature: their name, return type, number of parameters and their types. This allows you to do things like define multiple constructors for a class.

PHP not being a typed language, using parameter types and return types as part of… Read More

Tab override is now available for MediaWiki as well as Wordpress: Tab Override @ MediaWiki

If you have a wiki and use it to post code Tab Override is definitely something to try out. You can see it in action at ErrorDatabase

I have an old single core laptop that doesn’t get a whole lot of use anymore, partially because it is dated (purchased in 2006) and partially I’ve never really adapted to using a laptop as a general purpose computer. Increasingly, however, I find myself in need of a laptop either when I want to get some work done when I’m away from home, or when I need to take my work with me. This being the case I decided to re-purpose my old laptop as a dedicated development machine.

I could have just put a fresh copy of Windows… Read More

A while back I published a plugin that allowed you to insert tabs into textareas in wordpress just as you would in a text-editor. Until recently, however, there was a catch: I was only able to get it to work in Opera and Firefox. Today, however, I was contacted by Bill Bryant. He stepped in and took it the rest of the way; adding support for IE, Safari, and Chrome as well as improving the overall functionality.

Check out Tab Override