Electricmonk

Ferry Boender

Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.

Blog

Category: programming

Why spamfilters are useless

I used to never get spam, until I made a little mistake in my mail client and sent mail to a mailinglist under my real email address. My address wound up on the big bad public internet, and a few hours later the first spam emails started to come in. I installed a quite sophisticated […]

PHP Configuration hell

From the Apache2 configuration file for host example.com: php_admin_value upload_tmp_dir “/var/www/example.com/tmp/” From the file /var/www/example.com/htdocs/test.php: var_dump(ini_get(“upload_tmp_dir”)); Output: string(29) “/var/www/example.com/tmp/” Then, after trying to upload a file, from the /var/www/example.com/logs/error.log: [Sun Sep 02 18:09:05 2007] [error] [client 88.211.179.104] PHP Warning: Unknown: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/tmp) is not within the allowed path(s): (/var/www/example.com/) in Unknown on […]

Vim and PHP: tips

I’ve been using Vim for years now, but there’s still new stuff to learn. Check out this page for the PDF version of the slides of a talk given by Andrei Zmievski on editing PHP with Vim. His configuration files are also available. Here’s my favourite list of tips: Add the following text to your […]

Signs You’re a Crappy Programmer

Really old blog entry: Signs You’re a Crappy Programmer (and don’t know it). Check out the comments. They’re pretty funny. Especially this one: Alright, so I’m a student at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and currently studying Software Engineering. This is a very prestigious school (4th in the nation), and they courses dedicated to Design […]

GadflyB5: SQL Relational Database in Python

Gadfly is a SQL Relational Database that supports a large set of the SQL standard. It keeps the database in-memory while operating on it. It’s also completely written in Python (with the use of some Python/C modules). I don’t know why it’s cool, but it is.

PHP Idiotic Function Contest

I’m holding a contest about who can find the most idiotic PHP function. Rules: It has to be an official part of PHP (i.e. can be found in the manual). Leave your suggestions in the comments. I hereby nominate the runkit_constant_redefine() function. The manual entry says: runkit_constant_redefine – Redefine an already defined constant There is […]

Distribute your python app: distutils

Nice article on distributing your python applications and libraries with distutils on linux.com

PHP MySQL tips

Interesting PHP MySQL tips. Some comments: 2. Always prepend the table name to the field. E.g. ProductName, SupplierPostCode. This refers to field name aliasing, not to actual field names. He doesn’t suggest that you actually name your fields like that in the table, but only when you select them: SELECT product.name AS product_name instead of […]

Modeling Chess using SQL

Here’s an interesting use of SQL: SQLChess – A tutorial on thinking in sets.

AsciiDoc: Text based document generation

I write a lot of documentation for various articles and projects. Usually, I’ll use DocBook for writing that documentation. DocBook is an SGML/XML dialect for writing articles, books and other writings. It’s pretty extensive, and it can do a lot. It can export to LaTeX, HTML, PDF and a variety of other formats. But it’s […]

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