Secure PHP Programming

A new group has appeared on the net – the PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC). It is an international group of PHP experts dedicated to promoting secure programming practices within the PHP community. Nice. While many PHP developers make sites people are supposed to use and enjoy, few as actual education and experience in how to make secure applications and websites.

Through projects and articles, they’ll try to educate PHP developers.

it’s more than syntax

Most developers and programmers know more than one programming language, but often do most of their development in just one language. Listening in on IRC channels on people using something other than their favourite language is often quite interesting. It’s often a common misconception, that their favoured programming language - be that perl, php or java - is the ultimate tool no matter what the challenge is. When they are forced to use something else, a large part of the development process seem dedicated to (a) bitching about how much easier this and that would be in their favoured language and (b) forcing the language they use into looking like their favoured language.

Being a Project Manager

It seems any one can become a self proclaimed internet project manager. It really isn’t so, but if you choose to try your lucky anyway here’s a bunch of tips and insights, which may help you along.

Step one) Know thy domain

Being a project manager requires some domain knowledge. Not always deep insights, but a basic understanding of the elements you encounter - what’s a web browser, what’s DNS, how does HTML look like (raw, unrendered) and so on. To be a capable project manager you must be able to “speak the language”.

Design tweaks

I’ve been toying slightly with the design recently, and I just noticed today that it’s pretty obvious that almost any browsing I do happens in Firefox. The site (well top menu anyway) looks awful in Internet Explorer – auch. Better fix that some time in 2005.