Archive for the 'Development & IT' Category

Sourceforge project administrators who are not familiar with Unix processes may find it a big confusing to figure out how to upload files to their project website space. A Google search reveals a couple of tutorials which are now out of date and incorrect, and the actual documentation on the Sourceforge website is not particularly [...]

I’ve been working on searching out sources of free for any use, royalty free (personal or commercial) icon sets that are of high quality and professional looking. I use these in my web-development projects. I’ve had such a hard time finding sets that are free for commercial use. But, after several weeks of searching I’ve [...]

A common problem new developers encounter is when they have an area of their website made private, how do they prevent non-logged-in users from going straight to a non-php file like a word document? There are solutions involving htaccess files but these typically can’t easily be integrated with your PHP user management system. The quick [...]

North American businesses are increasingly outsourcing work to cheaper labour markets overseas. Many businesses don’t really like to do this, and consumers are now shouting about lost jobs and increased unemployment. But we only have ourselves to blame.
My parents own a small local company. They do their work in-house. They, and myself have had recent [...]

Some people may not realize this, but my first personal web development project was horizonarchives.com. Years ago I thought it was the best thing ever. Despite the long domain name, the horrid orange and black design, and the overwhelming job of keeping it up to date, I loved it. It also allowed me to practice [...]

Sometimes you just want to dump the contents of a database table as a series of insert statements. Many DBMSes can do this, in fact I do it with MySQL all the time. But it seems Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Manager can’t do it. Oh you can export the create table statement. But that’s it. Why? It seems like a glaring omission. Almost like good old Microsoft is trying to make it as difficult as possible to migrate your data to another DBMS. So stupid. But we will always find a way… so I wrote an ASP script that’ll do what I needed. Here it is for you to use.

It only took me a few minutes of using Internet Explorer 7 yesterday to discover that the biggest problem with it, from my perspective, is actually a “feature”. For websites using a self signed or shared SSL certificate, IE7 is going to remove users from the webpage in order to present them with a big intimidating warning about the certificate having problems.

Traditional PC software development has had the benefit of several decades of experimentation, research, and improvement. There is a wealth of literature on how to develop applications based on time-tested principals and methodologies. However, web development is often seen as the immature kid brother of application devepment and hasn’t been given as much quality attention.

Ok, you might say that it already has, which is true. But we haven’t even begun to get so much as a taste of what’s to come. Why will the future change things and why is the Internet so great (besides the obvious)? Well, I’m going to talk about that a little bit.

There are many conflicting theories about what to do with passwords. How secure is secure enough? What should your PHP script do with them? Is this just paranoia? This article will provide some general information on dealing with passwords, and some techniques you can use in your PHP scripts.