Letters remain the holy grail to code-breakers
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For 250 years it defied all code-breakers. Darwin had a go; Dickens, and Wedgwood too. But the 10-letter inscription - DOUOSVAVVM - carved into a monument on the Shugborough Estate in Staffordshire thumbed its nose at the curious.
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Mischief in black and white The increased use of barcodes in a wider variety of applications has made them a suitable, if unlikely, target for hacking attacks.â¦
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On the PHPKitchen site today, Demian Turner looks at a handy utility to ensure that the coding standards in your documents are all passable - PHP_CodeSniffer.    There was a fantastic CS helper package released at PEAR this week, PHP_CodeSniffer. The package, which requires PHP5 and is nicely coded, puts a phpcs script in your path so you can pass files or directories to it to get your CS validated.   The results are detailed and processing is surprisingly fast considering how many tokens are being parsed.    Demian gives an example of what the validation process looks like and why he finds the entire package particularly useful.
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In a new post to his blog, Chris Hartjes, spurred on by an article in the latest edition of php|architect magazine (covering protecting your code), has shared a few opinions starting with a certain paragraph near the end.   To start, I will focus on the paragraph above. What I get out of that is that if only your source was closed and hidden from prying eyes, it would not have bugs in it. Which is, of course, total nonsense. Code has bugs because it's open and they feel safer? There are two kinds of bugs: application bugs (which is the code I would write) and system bugs (in this case, bugs that that appear from PHP itself). I'm sorry, but there is nothing I can do if there is a bug in PHP that causes my application to crash except to point this bug out to the people who have the ability to fix it.   He goes on to talk more about how protection like this (the article talks about using the IonCube Encoder) will not stop someone if they're really determine to get at the code underneath the encryption. His only suggestion is to make an application good enough that people wouldn't want to try to steal it as much and would rather pay for their version.   Encode your stuff if you want, but be aware that the minute you choose to do that you are telling your customers "I don't trust you" and I have a hard time understanding a business model that assumes people are going to want to steal the stuff you sell.
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By Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.  Sep. 6--Software development once hewed to a tried-and-true formula. Coders pounded on keyboards behind closed doors for months. Finally, their products shipped in shrink-wrapped boxes to fanfare.
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Now that Microsoft&#39;s (Quote, Chart) two patent efforts regarding e-mail authentication are publicly available, anti-spam advocates are raising even more questions about how the patents might impact an industry-wide anti-spam protocol effort called Sender
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Lads from Lagos provoke grammatical carnage We're very much obliged to reader Robin Strong who has provided proof that just when we thought the Lads from Lagos had finally rustled up enough cash for a decent English grammar guide, someone from the MARIAM ABACHA 419er old school went and undid all that linguistic progress in one, magnificent missive. Read on in wonder:â¦
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In his latest post, Padraic Brady takes a look at PEAR in a verb form - both in how you can use it and what sorts of things it has in store.   over the last few months after finally getting over my ignorance of PEAR beyond it being a hodge podge of packages of dubious quality I've been questioning whether pearifying my future and past code is worthwhile. The answer is a resounding YES.   Unfortunately, there are some barriers for most people to get into the PEAR world (including the lack of the "coolest packages") with some of the perceived barriers including:   PEAR will require large scale changes to my shiny new cool code PEAR only allows proposals for complete functional code PEAR is elitist PEAR is fossilised   He also talks about PEAR packages and dispels one of the most popular myths about the package repository - "you can't use PEAR on a shared host".
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Matthew Turland, like many in the PHP community these days, has been pondering PHP6 and what it might mean to both the developers and to the language itself:   Be that as it may, as a user with about five years under his belt as of now who has seen all qualities of PHP code ranging from pristine to pedantic, a thought or two has crossed my mind on the subject of the latest upcoming incarnation of the language.   Specifically, he talks about some of the hot topics like namespaces, the mysqlnd driver, Unicode support, and named parameters. Overall, though, his comments are positive, looking toward a brighter future for PHP with this upcoming edition.
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Okay, non-interview stuff first. I've recently picked up several 'shortcuts' from O'Reilly and Addison-Weseley.  I love this format.  For about 10 bucks, you can get a PDF only copy of a 50-100 page "book".  The shortcuts (so far at least) have been very focused, which allows them to cover a reasonable topic in sufficient depth without creating a monstrous 600+ page tome.  The shortcuts I've looked at so far have been timely, useful, and a great value.  October marks the beginning of Apress' push into Ruby and Ruby on Rails.    Apress also has Practical OCaml coming out soon to help soothe your inner functional programmer.  Now, on to interview news!
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Billions of emails are sent around the globe each day but are their true meanings getting across? Maybe not.
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Science & environment: Creators of malware are no longer script kiddies after kudos - they're criminals after your cash. Wendy M Grossman asks if protection can keep pace with them.
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Letters Lock up the leakers and throw away the key!
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In a quick note from Dynamically Typed, there's a mention of the online publication of Paul Hudson's book Practical PHP Programming.
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There is a new column from the folks over at PHP Magazine for your enjoyment:
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Years to develop; days to break A lone hacker has unlocked the master key preventing the copying of high-definition DVDs in a development that is sure to get the entertainment industry's knickers wrapped tighter than a magnet's coil. What's more, the individual was able to defeat the technology with no cracking tools or reverse engineering, despite the millions of dollars and many years engineers put into developing the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) for locking down high-definition video.â¦
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In a new post on his blog, Kore Nordmann takes a look at a feature that's been around a long time (first introduced in a message board application) - BBCodes.   The discussion on my blog post "Do not use regular expressions for parsing" ended in a discussion about BBcodes in general. I just used them as an example to demonstrate why it it is impossible to parse such a language with regular expressions - and mentioned in a subclause, that I don't see any sense in using them at all.   He looks at some of the myths surrounding them and their use (more secure, easier to use, safer than HTML) and gives some reasons for making teh choice of HTML over them.