Fixing Typos by Web Users, Without Raising Hackles
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People who sign up for OpenDNSâs service are offered an easier way to find Web pages and greater online protection from malicious sites.
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Helgi has posted about the updates that have recently been made to the PEAR website (pear.php.net) to help correct some issues and bring in some new features.   I just did a new release of pear.php.net which has a bunch of new features and bug fixes, most of which you can see here.  Some of the updates include:  One column design instead of the 2 column design Usage of the YUI CSS reset + fonts The package list on http://pear.php.net/packages.php doesn't highlight deprecated packages anymore Now developers can see bug reports by unconfirmed accounts The RSS feeds now contain new line breaks! Patch uploading during ticket creation now works   He also specifically mentions some of the feedback he's gotten on certain things (like the new layout, the CSS of the site and the DES passwords) and explains some of the rationale behind their update/use.
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A formula for Web schemes: a lot of mathematicians, a lax legal system and Western targets.
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Computers have always sucked at translation. How one firm is cracking the language code. By Evan Ratliff from Wired magazine.
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On the Dallas PHP Users Group site today, there's a new, quick book review from baron covering Wiley Publishing's "Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML and CSS".    This is a hands on book useful as an HTML refresher and introduction to XHTML, CSS1, CSS2, JavaScript and general web related topics including; site design, page layout, hosting, and search engines.  This book contains many valuable links to external tools and sources of information such as syntax validators, browser archives, royalty-free image sites, sites with detailed CSS information and demonstrations, and much more.  The books contains a comprehensive reference section which provides a fast lookup of XHTML elements, CSS properties, special characters, mime types, etc.    His review isn't all too positive, unfortunately - there were code errors in the examples, and some subjects were just touched on too lightly. He notes that it's a good refresher/learing tool, but for anything more advanced than that, look elsewhere...
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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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Andrei Zmievski has posted something new to his blog today about a feature of PHP6 that's finally been hammered down - HTTP input (request) decoding.   There have been no fewer than 4 different proposals floated before, but this one combines flexibility, performance, intuitiveness, and minimal architectural changes, and has only a couple of small drawbacks. Let's take a closer look.   He details the functionality - what it is, what's been decided on, and the advantages of the method. The basic approach is a "lazy" one where PHP will only store the request when it comes in, no filtering or anything, until you want to do something with it (i.e. get it via $_GET, $_POST, etc). When the request for data is made, PHP looks at the encoding settings and formats the data accordingly.   Advantages he mentions for this method include removing the guess-work on PHP's part for which encoding the request is and that it removes some of the overhead by not processing the data until it's actually needed.
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Funky formatting gets Google's e-mail service to cough up prior messages. But the fix is in, a company source says.
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An update to Firefox fixes a number of security flaws in the browser.
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This is really cool!  I finally get my own comment spam!  For some reason I felt left out of the party.  I just wasn't cool enough for the spammers to consider me worthy of their spam.  Anyway.  I implemented my own little turing test.  Now the comments say:  {{{  Turing Test: Are you a human? (required. Just type yes... this is for automated spam prevention)  }}}  While this wouldn't work for all blogs in the wild I'm sure it will work just fine here in my little corner of the blogosphere.  If spammers really want my blog enough then I'll deploy a captcha.  If they solve the captcha I'll deploy a sentient robot  which will traceroute packets back to the host and then terminate with prejudic ...
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Reinhold Weber has put together a list of signs (40 in all on his "programming list of shame") that you're a lousy PHP programmer. Here's a sampling:   don't see the need and/or benefits of a good programming IDE like Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT have never used some form of version control like Subclipse don't use a consistent methodology don't use test-driven development don't return content but echo or print it from your functions or classes return HTML, not data, strings, or objects. don't allow intelligent error handling you think reusable software equals/requires your code to be OOP   Now granted, some of them are a bit more high level than others, but if you're not headed towards a lot of these, you might change paths, hop out of that comfort zone and branch out into the community and the language a little bit more.
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The O'Reilly Network has a new article posted for all of those out there that are looking to make writing large documentation/publications much simpler.
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A civil suit filed by Dell sheds light on typosquatting, creating ad-filled Web pages with URLs that are similar to brand-name sites.
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Internationalizing a website can bring all sorts of challenges, as Markus Wolff found out when working on a recent project:   When you're building international websites, there's always something new to learn. Especially if one of the languages your website is available in uses a character set different from anything you're used to. For jimdo.com, the greatest challenge as of yet is the chinese version.   His focus isn't so much on the content of the page but on one small character that caused him headaches - the comma. Unfortunately, it seems that Unicode has its own commas that don't quite adhere to the "normal" rules to make them easy to work with (and, in his case, split with a regular expression). The fix to the situation was simple, though - adding a "u" modifier after the expression made it Unicode-aware and split the information correctly.
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Stefan Koopmanschap has pointed out an interesting article over on the CIO magazine website that has some in the PHP community a bit up in arms about comments it makes towards the language.   The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.   Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:   Security and PHP Working with PHP and the shell Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)   These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.
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Adobe Repairs Reader, Acrobat Flaws Information Week
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In another quick note from Chris Shiflett, there's a summary of php|works and some of the comments made about it: