In the book “the Davinci Code” there was a fun little device called a cryptex.. A Cryptex has 6 dials with 6 letters on each, and only one combination producing a word will open it. The most straight forward way to crack it would be to try every combination one by one, but there’s a substantial number of combinations and we know only those which a valid words is a candidate.
A great strength in PHP is that it’s so accessible, that almost anyone can get access to a PHP site and often will download “applications” for their site such as discussion boards, photo galleries and others. While it may easy to download such applications, it often happens that the people trying to get things to work, doesn’t read the requirements section of the install.txt or readme.txt file, and thus never get the application running and doesn’t understand what the problem was and how to fix it. This is a brief guide with some tips on how to improve usability in this area.
Publishing a list of which pluins you use seems to be popular among Wordpress users, so here’s my contribution in case you’re wondering, which plugins are in use around this site.
In line:
Gmail from Google is usually great, but it does have some bug-like features.
One of the most annoying is when your inbound mail is tagged with a label and should have been auto-archived, but is caught by their spam filter and placed in the spam folder. Discovering and finding the mail in the spam folder is easy, but when you tell Gmail, that the mail isn’t spam, it doesn’t pop in to the archive (where the filter-rule should have put it). It pops back into the inbox, and you can then archive from there.
A number of podcasts and websites have mentioned that you can get your Gmail SSL encrypted by just adding a small s in the url (from http:// to https:// in the url). Cool. But wait there’s more… it seems to work for Google Docs and Google Reader too. While I doubt the usefulness of an encrypted RSS Reader, there’s certainly a great vaule in having encrypted access to documents used with Google Docs.
The past few days I’ve been toying with Wifi equipment from D-Link – and access point (DWL-G700AP) and a wireless router (DI-524). These were pretty much the first to wifi-devices, which I’ve completely setup, and configured on my own, so it was an interesting experience. The first experience was in the weekend, when I tried to get a basic TDC Broadband (DSL) connection made avaiable wirelessly. Not knowing too much about Wifi, I though the Access Point was the thing to get, and the DWL-G700AP seemed to be a fair deal in the local IT-vendor. After spending a few hours trying to get it to work, I gave up and called a friend for some advice.
Navigating around in mysql is quite easy. You can see which databases by using the command “show databases”. There will always exist a database called “mysql” which is used by mysql itself.
If your user account has access to a database, you can access it by using the “use DATABASENAME” command. You can se which tables exist within a database by using the “show tables” command - and see details for each table by issuing the “desc TABLENAME” command.
Micro tip of the day: How many days has past since a date field in the database?
SELECT (TO\_DAYS(NOW()) - TO\_DAYS(date\_field)) AS days\_past FROM tablenameThis script fetches a list of available newsgroups (and descriptions) from a news server. The group list is returned as a hashref where the keys are the groupname and the value is a description of the group.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Net::NNTP;
use MIME::Base64 qw(decode\_base64);
use MIME::QuotedPrint qw(decode\_qp);
my $server= "sunsite.auc.dk";
print STDERR "connecting to $server... ";
my $nntp= Net::NNTP->new($server);
unless($nntp) {
print STDERR "failedn";
exit 1;
}
print STDERR "okn";
print STDERR "getting messages... ";
my $newstuff= $nntp->newnews(time - 7\*24\*2600, "dk.edb.programmering.perl");
unless($newstuff) {
print STDERR "failedn";
exit 1;
}
print STDERR "okn";
my @messages;
foreach my $msgid (@$newstuff) {
my $head= $nntp->head($msgid);
next unless $head;
my %msg;
push @messages, %msg;
foreach(@$head) {
next unless /^(Newsgroups|Subject|From):s+(.+)$/i;
$msg{lc $1}= $2;
}
}
my $last= "";
foreach(sort { $a->{newsgroups} cmp $b->{newsgroups} } @messages) {
if($\_->{newsgroups} ne $last) {
print "n" if $last;
$last= $\_->{newsgroups};
print "$last:n";
}
print "t" . decode\_header($\_->{subject}) .
" - " . decode\_header($\_->{from}) ."n";
}
sub decode\_header {
my($text)= @\_;
$text=~ s/=?(iso-?8859-.?|us-ascii|utf-8)?(q|b)?(\[^?\]\*)?=(s\*(?==?))?/&decode\_header\_block(lc $1,$2,$3);/gei;
return $text;
}
sub decode\_header\_block {
my ($input,$enc,$text) = @\_;
if ($enc =~ /q/i) {
$text=~ s/\_/ /g;
$text= decode\_qp($text);
} else {
$text= decode\_base64($text);
}
return $text; # oh well \[:-)\]
}
exit();The followig piece connects to a news-server and fetches subjects from the last week in a specific newsgroup (the Danish perl-newsgroup) and prints these.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Net::NNTP;
use MIME::Base64 qw(decode\_base64);
use MIME::QuotedPrint qw(decode\_qp);
my $server= "sunsite.auc.dk";
print STDERR "connecting to $server... ";
my $nntp= Net::NNTP->new($server);
unless($nntp) {
print STDERR "failedn";
exit 1;
}
print STDERR "okn";
print STDERR "getting messages... ";
my $newstuff= $nntp->newnews(time - 7\*24\*2600, "dk.edb.programmering.perl");
unless($newstuff) {
print STDERR "failedn";
exit 1;
}
print STDERR "okn";
my @messages;
foreach my $msgid (@$newstuff) {
my $head= $nntp->head($msgid);
next unless $head;
my %msg;
push @messages, %msg;
foreach(@$head) {
next unless /^(Newsgroups|Subject|From):s+(.+)$/i;
$msg{lc $1}= $2;
}
}
my $last= "";
foreach(sort { $a->{newsgroups} cmp $b->{newsgroups} } @messages) {
if($\_->{newsgroups} ne $last) {
print "n" if $last;
$last= $\_->{newsgroups};
print "$last:n";
}
print "t" . decode\_header($\_->{subject}) .
" - " . decode\_header($\_->{from}) ."n";
}
sub decode\_header {
my($text)= @\_;
$text=~ s/=?(iso-?8859-.?|us-ascii|utf-8)?(q|b)?(\[^?\]\*)?=(s\*(?==?))?/&decode\_header\_block(lc $1,$2,$3);/gei;
return $text;
}
sub decode\_header\_block {
my ($input,$enc,$text) = @\_;
if ($enc =~ /q/i) {
$text=~ s/\_/ /g;
$text= decode\_qp($text);
} else {
$text= decode\_base64($text);
}
return $text; # oh well \[:-)\]
}
exit();