Terry Chay's Blog: Clever HTTP
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With the recent release of a new Firefox/PHP combination extension, several developers were interested in just how it all worked. One such developer is Terry Chay who has posted about it to his blog today after looking into how it all fits together.   The standard way of debugging in PHP involves just echoing shit to the screen. The fact that PHP is a scripting language makes this an excellent way of debugging on the web. But what happens when doing this breaks your site?   That's where FirePHP comes in - it sends along a special request from your PHP script (as fired off by special code you insert) to include debugging information inside a different part of a "multipart/mixed" message. Terry also includes some of his sample code (including a custom version of the software) that he used to get things working. Check out the screenshot for the results.
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In a new posting on Chris Shiflett's weblog today, he shares with the world a little bit of what he's written for php|architect - a free version of one of his columns: Security Corner: Session Fixation.
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Also: Arthur C. Clarke's three wishes. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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In a much anticipated article, Peter Belesis returns with this piece on a DHTML Lab Popup Calendar. Among it's many features: No knowledge of JavaScript is necessary; only a beginner's aquaintance with HTML and CSS syntax is all that's needed. 0809
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Mozilla is trying to weave a new web. Not sure if it matters yet.
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The other day I was thinking about all the edge-cases within Linux and how there are hundreds of little commands and tricks.  I these know now but only after using UNIX for more than 15 years now (has it been that long!).  I wish I would have known all these tricks when I was just getting started.  This is similar to Danny O'Briens Life Hacks  but since so many of us spend our life tied to our shell these are essentially "Shell Hacks".  NetCat is one example.  Very powerful tool with a simple syntax.  Just run 'nc' and you can connect to a host/port and interact with it manually.  You could even write an HTTP client with bash if you really wanted to.  The zsh  shell looks like it might becom ...
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Chris Hartjes has a quick post (but complete with code) about moving files around a bit differently than the norm - it's his method for using a HTTP-PUT to push a file out.   A work project is getting close to 0.1 status. Pretty underwhelming, I know. One of the last 'milestones' for 0.1 is taking these wonderful XML documents that my web app creates and sends them to an internal web service. This web service will accept documents via an HTTP PUT [...] so I dug around a bit on the web and put together some code.   The code is a generic "publish" method that opens a stream to the remote server and, in a binary format, pushes the contents of a local file and parses out the response.
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A few of my previous columns discussed my vision of creating a more secure Internet. It involved replacing the Internet's default anonymity with pervasive authentication, from the hardware initialization, through the OS and all applications, the user, and ending with a verifiable network stream. It is my strong belief that without a complete overhaul of default authentication, malicious hacking is going to continue indefinitely.
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If you search for Yahoo Microsoft, this page is the second hit. I like that of course. It's generating a fair amount of flow, since the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft is a pretty hot topic. Keeping the topic going, I think it's pretty amazing that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, but then again, which of all their web efforts has captured our imagination? At least Yahoo has Flickr, and when they try something new, we all try it with them (often with not the greatest results). The rambling continues... If Yahoo is into poison pills, try this one out.  Reserve 5 percent of Yahoo's common stock for blogger options. Put us to work to find new businesses for Yahoo, ones that are relevant to our world. When we find them, reward the bloggers with a significant upside stake in Yahoo's future, not the airy-fairy kind, but real stock that we can trade. Handled properly, it could raise shareholder value by much more than 5 percent. Just the kind of deal they pay you to do, oh Yahoo gods and board members.  Of course it'll never happen. It's an idea like the one I keep proposing for newspapers -- that they hire their public editors from the public, independent bloggers with no journalism experience, with no undue reverence for the institutions so revered by journos. They're going away, just like Yahoo is (sad but true). Now what will rise in their place? Imho, something that's home grown, with the integrity of the people, in our interest. The more they invite the public in, the more clued in they will be when we figure out where we want to go with news on the web. It's why I'm excited about the Obama campaign and why I keep giving to it (I'm up to $400 now). I'm excited because so many other people are excited.  I like his idea about tuition for public service for college students. It's so simple. People want to be involved, they want to use their energy and creativity to solve problems. In the 20th century we were couch potatoes. In the 21st we do it for ourselves.  The first tech company that fully embraces this, not just in the form of User Generated Content (what an insult) but by giving us power (that comes from stock) will rule the world. If Y! had the guts, it won't be long before they're making tender offers to buy out Ballmer.  BTW, I think I understand why Ballmer wants Yahoo! When Yahoo engineers wake up they program stuff like Yahoo Live, which is pretty cool and runs on the web, and while it steals ideas from smaller companies, it adds some pretty cool stuff of its own. When Microsoft engineers wake up they program stuff like Vista, a multi-year, multi-billion dollar waste of money, time and customer goodwill. They can't do another Vista without wrecking the franchise. Now the question is -- where do they go for growth? That's what Yahoo is for.
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Aaron Wormus has a quick note on his site about one of the up and coming web services availible out there - flickr.
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There are some  great  browsers  out there. But they all seem to have some slight niggles, different for  each, that make it hard for me to kick back and enjoy them.        While there are some projects out there to make browsers more useful for  some specialised purposes  or by bolting on handy  extensions, wouldn't it be great if these people could come up with a  standardised set of nice features like these? A lot of browsers may support  one or two, but I'll bet none have them all.
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Cameron Olthuis wants to share the tools that he finds th emost useful with the entire web, so he's posted them here on his blog.   His list includes libraries from all different technologies, not just PHP. Several are Javascript-related, but it's always good to have a complete toolkit on hand when trying to tackle some of the more difficult things.   Included in his list are things like:  Moo.fx - a Javascript effects library Swat - an open source web application toolkit PEAR - the PHP package repository Mochikit - lightweight Javascript library    Be sure to check out the post and its comments for more great resources!
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Plus: Geek squad comes to the rescue. [News.com Extra]
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Recently I had lots of time on my hands visiting relatives and in-laws. Most of the time I was able to get an Internet connection. Sometimes I had to leech my connection from unsecured wireless access points. Some of my relatives and friends posted videos on youtube.com but they wanted to save other flash videos on their hard drive or USB drive. At first this can be frustrating if you don't understand what is going on. So I decided to download them the hard way. For the faint-of-heart, you can scroll all the way to the bottom of the article for the easy way to download flash video and audio files.    Why do this the hard way?  First I wanted to understand why it was less than straight forward to do. I understand why proprietary software developers are scared right now. Software is slowly moving to Internet applications. As most of you know, the Internet is wide open, even SSH and SSL to some degree.    With youtube.com, Google video and some of the more popular video sites you can download and install software to automatically grab the video or audio flash file. However, I had a lot of time on my hands and there are many sites where a video downloader does not work for the particular site.    If you find doing it yourself interesting then here's one way to download flash video files. Keep in mind this only works with embedded flash video or audio streams.
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Sara Golemon describes the path she took in a search for an OpenID library to work with in PHP. The trip took her through both PEAR and PECL with no promising results. Heading off to a Yahoo! search she comes up with one good result - Auth_OpenID.   Now, granted, this is the first OpenID system I've looked at, and I haven't really dug into it in depth, but I've got to say, this is some clean, well written code and the author clearly understands the maths involved (or at least fakes it shockingly good).   Knowing this, she asks "why isn't this in PEAR" if it's so well-structured and useful? It works with any version of PHP from 4 up and is smart enough to adapt itself to whatever the structure of your application might be.   There's also some great comments on the post where it's explained why the library isn't in PEAR, another OpenID package for PHP and suggestions for alternate distribution methods (PEAR channel).
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Last Friday, Polish researcher Michal Zalewski reported discovering an interesting little JavaScript trick that keeps a user stuck on a Web page even though he's trying to navigate somewhere else. His discovery involves the simple use of a JavaScript event to make it appear as though a browser is displaying any particular URL, when it's not.
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