One of the problems I’ve run into while writing up some of my little PHP web scripts is how to make them reasonably secure. Everybody talks about how code need to be made secure, but so far I’ve found it difficult to find actual examples or guides on just how to write secure code. Maybe it’s just the non-programmer in me that has a hard time with this.
So I was somewhat pleased to hear about the formation of the PHP Security Consortium. Hopefully this will become a good resource for people like me (as well as more experienced coders).
ECMAScript/Javascript menus
Just an entry to remind me of an interesting ECMAScript (formerly Javascript) menu system.
Found at 456 Berea Street.
Counting bits
The Christmas tree and Snowman have been put away on the shelf to wait for the next holiday season. But thanks to my brother, I now have this sweet binary clock sitting on my computer.
Although I’d seen the action shots posted at ThinkGeek, I was still surprised at how small the clock was. For some reason I was thinking it was a little bit bigger. But it’s a decently readable size at about 9.5×9 cm. Some rubber feet would have been nice to keep it from sliding around, but those are easy enough to find and put on yourself.
Setting the time is easy enough with the two buttons on the back for setting the hour and minute. Just press the buttons to increment the counter by one until you get the correct time. And if you’re a real geek, you’ve already got at least one clock that syncs with a stratum 1 or 2 NTP server somewhere. Pressing both buttons at the same time will reset the seconds counter so you can get the clock synced to NIST time.
The LEDs are surprisingly bright and easy to read even in a brightly lit office. Instructions on the box and in the manual show you how to read the digits. Easily visible from almost any angle too (except from behind). Doesn’t take too long before you’re able to decipher the lights into numbers. All it takes is a little bit of practice. Keep the box around for a quick reference while you’re learning.
It will be fun watching my colleagues stare at it trying to figure it out.
Referer spam
Lately I’ve been getting a lot of referer spam: hits to web pages on the server using spammy HTTP_REFERER URLs. Most of them for some reason are hitting non-existent scripts and pages, but there are a bunch of them hitting things like my photo galleries and such.
It’s gotten to the point where the Referring URL stats collected by Awstats is pretty much useless because all the ‘Links from External Pages’ is nothing but a list of spammy URLs.
Not entirely sure what the point of it all is. But I’m not the only one.
I wonder if there’s a way to tap into the MT Blacklist database to block them. Something I’ll have to think on.
A trip down CPU memory lane
Tom’s Hardware has a 2 part series looking at Intel and AMD CPUs going all the way back to the 8086, the mother of all x86 processors.
From the introduction to the first article:
Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts, because here we go. After 12 weeks of grueling and meticulous testing in our Munich THG lab, our biggest CPU test of all time is complete. Marathon, all-night monitoring sessions, system hiccups and crashes and the logistics involved in coordinating such a feat often short-circuited our caffeine-addled nerves. But then again, this project was about more than just tallying up CPU benchmarks
Benchmarks results aside (those are in Part 2), I thought it was an interesting brief look at the history of the x86 class of CPUs. A bunch of cool diagrams and big big CPU comparison charts to dazzle the eyes with.