codedread

This is just a quick entry for me to jot down some caveats that I encountered while making a simple instant messaging application for the browser using Asynchronous JavaScript, XML and PHP. Click To Read More...

In designing a little on-line chat program accessible through a web browser, I came across what was one of the most frustrating problems in my software development career. Click To Read More...

I’ve been working on learning JavaScript over the last month or so and I’ve come to a point where I’ve started to delve into the hot topic of “Asynchronous JavaScript, DHTML and Server-side Programming”, or as some pundits have termed it “Ajax”. The ‘x’ is supposed to stand for XML since one of the primary enablers for this technology is the JavaScript object XMLHttpRequest (though you can use it to return any type of text). Click To Read More...

I wrote about rolling your own server logs awhile back, but it only occurred to me while at the GDC that by updating the .htaccess file I can redirect 404 errors to my own PHP document that will display the 404 error and also log when misdirections occur at my site (since the requested document is in the GET request). Click To Read More...

Let’s say you’re cheap or you can’t afford a fixed IP address and let’s say you also want to be able to access your Linux box from the internet but you don’t want to have to constantly know the IP address of that box.

Well, if you have your own website (that supports PHP scripting), you can still get around this. Check out this article that I just wrote on how to work around this using some PHP, some Apache mod-rewrite and a simple cronjob.

After getting bombed with some comment spam yesterday (over 15 of them in various blog entries), I decided I wanted some extra security, but I didn’t want to have to approve every comment (especially when the majority of them were spam). So I thought I’d dig into some PHP again and design my own Captcha.

This little project proved to be more challenging than I thought it would be, the easiest part was generating the unique and random image every time, the hardest part was figuring out how to make sure the image was not reused again (even if the user clicks the “Back” button on his browser). While I won’t get into the details right here and now, suffice to say that it works completely now and I can now work on making the image even more difficult for a computer to read in the future…if anyone wants it let me know (leave a comment, heh) and I’ll post a subsequent entry about some of the details and put the source up.

Anyway, I hope it’s not too annoying to those who wish to leave comments…

A couple days ago, when I finally got around to installing Linux and configuring my old PC as a 24×7 server, I had the notion that I’d like to make daily (or at least weekly) backups of the databases behind my websites (my forum and my blog primarily). The MySQL databases are provided by my hosting company (GoDaddy.com). However, when I sent an email to them asking why I couldn’t seem to connect a local mysqldump to the database servers they responded stating it was not allowed since it was a security risk and put unknown load upon their servers. Being the type of guy I am, I decided to do something about that. Click To Read More...