The other day I was putting together a computer for my 2.75 year old son (he loves video games, and I desperately wanted sole ownership of my computer again). I decided to put it in our bedroom, hooked up to our 42″ Sony Trinitron for all of his Super Mario extravaganzas. While putting it together, I realized that I didn’t have any extra wireless network cards lying around – but I figured it wouldn’t matter, its just for Jonas’s games and he won’t need to be surfin the web, etc. Just in case, I put in a regular old wired network card.

After the install, I decided I should figure out a way to get his computer online, for updates and such… but I still didn’t have any wireless network cards lying around… but I did have an old WRT54G Wireless Router that had been collecting dust for a few months.. surely I could use this, somehow!

I spent hours and hours hunting around for a simple solution to implementing suckerfish-style drop-down menus in Drupal 6. Lo-and-behold, I couldn’t find one. Every solution out there was overly complicated, and didn’t quite do what I wanted it to.

After a few hours of hacking around, this is the solution I came up with.

I hate thumbnails. There. I’ve said it. Well… I suppose hate is a strong word… but I seriously strongly dislike them. I guess it’s not the thumbnails themselves I hate… it’s the extra work involved. Open up the image, crop, resize, save, upload, not right? rinse, lather, repeat until right.

To save myself the time (and sanity), I compiled this script…

Recently one of our clients was in need of the ability to upload files to their webserver. This was easily accomplished with PHP’s built in functionality. But the draw back to this approach was that end-user had little or no indication that anything was happening.

Now we all know what happens. Typical scenario: User clicks a button. Seemingly nothing happens… *click*…. *clickety-click*… *CLICK CLICK CLICK*. Refresh, Reload. We all know how impatient some people can get. Specially when they don’t see the immediate gratification that is seeing something react when you push a button.

So we’re back on the topic of SQL Injection, and how to prevent them with PHP. This subject, while often discussed, is not taken as seriously as it should be by many a web-developer, whether it be because of laziness, or merely due to lack of knowledge. Assuming the latter is the most common cause, I felt that I should elaborate a little more on my previous article on the topic.

I didn’t write this article, so I don’t take credit for it.. But I felt it was something that everyone should read… and seeing as how it was released in the public domain, I’m posting it here for your reading enjoyment. You know, it’s one thing to keep secrets from the general population for national security’s sake. Fine, I can understand that… But to purposefully lie and deceive the citizens of an entire nation… or even more so, the citizens of all nations in the world…. I don’t know…. it’s just very disheartening to know that these are the people in power.. These are the people who we’ve placed where they are, and we do nothing when the facts surface. How long is this going to last people? When are we going to take out government back into our own hands? When are we going to hold them accountable?

I’m privy to many a private mailing list. Occasionally I get jokes, pictures, save-the-whales chain-letters, you know. The normal kind of mail that gets forwarded from one person to another – pointless, but usually semi-worth the the minute of your life wasted on reading it. Then I get things like the following. Things that makes you think and wonder how things have gotten the way they are. What went wrong? Why isn’t anybody doing anything about it? Read it in it’s brief entirety. Does this trouble anyone else but me?

I was recently reading various articles on how to load external pages using javascript and loading the results into a container div, mimicing that aspect of AJAX requests. But the main complaint I read was that you couldn’t POST. I thought it would be neat to figure out a way to do this, so after toying around with a few ideas, I came up with this dirty little method of posting form fields through javascript, passing the fields and values to php script through cookies, placing them into the $_POST array, and proceeding with business as usual.

Note that this method requires that the user has Javascript and cookies enabled. Also note that there is absolutely NO USE of the XmlHttpRequest object.

SQL Injection. We’ve all heard the term. But what exactly is it? Sounds dirty and vile… or maybe something you get at the doctor’s office. A new type of plastic surgery maybe? Well, let’s find out, shall we?

From Wikiedpia.com:

SQL injection is a technique that exploits a security vulnerability occurring in the database layer of an application. The vulnerability is present when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and thereby unexpectedly executed. It is in fact an instance of a more general class of vulnerabilities that can occur whenever one programming or scripting language is embedded inside another.

I dont know how many of you have seen this video, but I thought it worthwhile to share, just in case you hadn’t.

Based on the book “Imagining the tenth dimension”, by Rob Bryanton, you are taken through the first chapter of the book where the concepts of the 10 dimensions are explained in a fairly easy to follow and entertaining fashion.

Amazing. The things some people have the time and mental capacity to think about – Nevermind the mathematical ingenuity! Awesome video, just watch it! You’ll feel way smarter (or way dumber) once you’re done.