While surfing the net, you often come across web agencies how promote SSL-certificates (or TLS security) on their products - or their ability to create “secure web applications” with SSL. Most users know HTTPS/SSL/TLS as the little lock, that promises “security” when visiting a page - but what kind of security it actually provides is rarely explained - and far worse often misunderstood.

The while SSL is the popular name (and as it was once known) and HTTPS usually is the way users sees it (as part of a URL in a browser) - the correct name is TLS a short for Transport Layer Security.

A url may contain a hash/an anchor reference. If you need to remove it from url, it’s quite easy. Here’s a short recipe on how to do it in PHP (including a little test input):

$urls = array(
	'http://example.com/',
	'http://example.com/#test',
	'http://example.com/?id=1',
	'http://example.com/?id=1#test',
	'http://example.com/?id=1&id2=2#test#test',
	'http://example.com/?id=1#test#test'
);

foreach ($urls as $url) {
	if (strpos($url, '#')) {
		$url = substr($url, 0, strpos($url, '#'));
	}
	echo $url, "\\n";
}

Apart from removing the hash ending from urls, the function can naturally also be used on any number of other similar cases, where you need to trim a string.

PHP 5.4 comes with a built-in webserver, which can be useful for development and quick tests. It easily launched from the command-line, but if you’re running Linux Mint or Ubuntu, the PHP version, isn’t 5.4 but 5.3.x. If you don’t have the time/courage/energy to compile PHP 5.4 yourself, some nice fellow on the internet has done the work and made it available through a package repository which makes it a breeze to install.

So your current website - if running PHP - and it seems to work just fine. I am however working on a project, where the new servers are running on a 64 bit version of the OS. This change seem to cause a number of potential issues, and as there didn’t seem to be a resource collection the issues, I’ll try to post a few notes on the experience. Please feel free to add applicable notes and links in the comments.

Just a word of warning when using PHP and Mysql - if you’re trying to make efficient code and not utilizing all sort of frameworks and abstractions, you might be in for a small surprise in a default setting.

Usually is slightly lazy and often use the mysql_fetch_assoc function. It provides each row as an associative array, and is quite convenient to work with. Recently however while optimizing some code, I figured I’d switch to using mysql_fetch_array assuming it should be more efficient. The logic being that mapping hash keys to array values wouldn’t be needed and it should use less memory.