Posted by Brian Fending on February 25th, 2008 — Posted in Reviews, Technology
I’m not sure if this should be a series or not, but I’ve recently come across a lot of bad PHP. No, seriously baaaaad PHP. So bad that I don’t think they were serious. Couldn’t have been.
For instance, when you’re looking to redirect from one page to another, and no headers have been issued yet (juuuust running through the business logic…) , use header(’Location: .’$uri); exit;. It’s really that simple. PHP 101. Javascript redirects - EVERYWHERE - are what I found recently. As in, depend on the Web browser to issue this request and make sure everything’s behaving. And that included the http_referer check as the only form of security. Just horrendous. I swear I’m going to stop looking at the code of others someday.
On another note, I recently finished looking at an osCommerce install for a friend. Again, horrendous. And not at the developer level, either - out of the box bad. I can’t believe that little ecommerce engine is still chugging along with such a devout following. It is NOT a framework. It is NOT a CMS (though they don’t intend or pretend to be); it is good at letting you load products and sell them. Don’t try to move the column_right content over beneath the column_left content, and heaven forbid you want a fixed-width site. Got time to make thirty changes? OH, and the joy of hunting & pecking just to add an item to the INFORMATION_BOX area for a stupid link. I swear, I will never, ever, ever, neva-eva-eva-ever touch osCommerce again.
There are so, so many examples. Maybe this WILL be a series…
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Posted by Brian Fending on February 13th, 2008 — Posted in Reviews, Technology
My flu has relapsed and gone once more (which makes me suspect some other viral agent…), and I found a little time during that whole process to use a couple of really neat products I had been hearing about for a while but hadn’t yet toyed with.
First, VMWare… I’ve been using virtual server instances using their server product for a while, but the release of VMWare Fusion (to run a bunch of different OS’s on a Mac) a few months ago caught my attention on the consumer product side. The VMWare Workstation product allows you to have any number of “virtual computers” - complete with operating systems - on your computer. No reboots. The combinations are virtually (HA!) endless, but I tried setting up just a couple on my XP laptop.
The absolute write-home-about-it, Linux-distro-of-the-year, give-these-guys-a-medal OS I tried was Ubuntu 7.1 Desktop Edition. WOW. Absolutely amazing. Maybe it was the fact that I could get back to my Windows machine insanely fast, or the no-cursor-lagging-like-Virtual-PC performance while I was in the VMWare window, but man was I blown away.
In just a couple of inattentive hours (read: while I was working on something else), I had VMWare downloaded and installed, my Ubuntu partition configured, the Ubuntu ISO downloaded and mapped as a boot CD to my VMWare client’s Ubuntu instance, Ubuntu itself installed and set up, and PHP5, PHP5 CLI, MySQL, and Apache 2.2 RUNNING. Not just “got the source downloaded, just need to compile it now so I zzzzzzz…”, but fully operational using “sudo apt-get” from the command line / terminal. All that would have been even faster had I downloaded the ISO for an Ubuntu server distribution instead of the consumer-oriented desktop since the former comes standard with LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, php) already installed.
On the bells & whistles side, my Ubuntu release came with gEdit (notepad on crack, for you windows users who like to code…), OpenOffice, FireFox, and a ton of nice-to-haves that I will not even think of uninstalling. Heck, I’m thinking of blowing away the parent Windows install to replace it with Ubuntu, then just running my Windows machine as a virtual environment. My Visual Studio 2005 Pro and SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition installs may beg to differ on that, though, so I’m holding off for now.
I’ll write more on the Ubuntu story later, but man it is hard to blow me away. With this pairing, though: mission accomplished.
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Posted by Brian Fending on February 10th, 2008 — Posted in Personal
So I spent this weekend mostly in bed recovering from the flu. It started Friday night juuuuust as I was pulling into my driveway. Enough said there. Saturday was spent sleeping off the 101.9F fever (38.8C for my friends from sensible countries such as Canada) and eating’s Rachel homemade (right down to the STOCK) chicken soup with matzo balls. Never mind the fact that she was just recovering from her full-out bout with this on Thursday. She’s a powerhouse, that woman of mine. My recovery was quick in flu terms.
Influenza, historically speaking, is a fascinating subject and I took a couple of undergrad classes that had it as an important focus. Needless to say (wait for it…), I love talking about what we as agents for our health & well-being can do to avoid it. First among these things is to never marry someone who will get the flu or at least find someone who can make you soup while in recovery herself. Hard to forecast, but solid advice. I can go on and on about “Who should get the flu shot?” or stupid statements like “I’m getting the flu shot this year because they said it’s going to be really, really bad.” Tremendous. Maybe we can take some of that banter to the comments.
There was a lot of buzz a couple of years ago about an Avian Flu strain - the feared “H5N1″ - and it resurfaces now and again in the popular media. This is usually when the CDC or WHO or some government agency somewhere find a dead crow with a strain of the flu that hasn’t quite crossed over to the human population. At the height of this, I answered a want ad in the Chicago Tribune that I received in some email from a job site (probably because the response address was in my hometown of Buffalo, NY):
Writer (freelance)
To write self-help manual on subject of how one’s family, business, and other interests can survive the bird flu pandemic. Submit proposed table of contents, time to complete and fee to:
No, seriously. Well, somewhat seriously. I quoted an insanely high figure to write it, and was asked to provide a sample table of contents in support of my bid for writing the guide. I didn’t get the work, but MAN did I want to write it. I thought my piece would be an obvious choice for the editors… if they liked Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
. Looking back, it may as well have been written by David Sedaris’ younger cousin Rodney trying to squeeze some money out of the family name any way he could. I was just doing it without the family name.
In the spirit of my recovery from this illness, and just so you’ll believe that I actually wrote this proposal, here’s the full text of the cover letter:
Friday, 2 June 2006
Re: Web CB209768
Dear Sir or Madam:
I recently saw your Chicago Tribune call for proposals for a bird flu pandemic self-help manual, a subject in which I take great interest and have studied in great detail. Please find enclosed a proposed table of contents for what I estimate to be a work of 75 pages. A more detailed table of contents is available upon request.
A first draft can be ready for editorial review approximately 20 days from the date of commission. My fee for producing substantive content this manual, including responses to author queries and final proof review, would be $[edit].
Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you soon.
And here, the piece they resisted:
Bird Flu: A Guide to Preparing For and Surviving the Coming Pandemic
I. A brief history of pandemics
A. Plagues and other wide-spread illness
B. Influenza in the American colonies
C. Dateline: 1918
D. Global commerce and the spread of disease
E. Avian (bird) flu
II. Preparing your home
A. Assess your exposures
B. Stock up
C. Educate your family
III. Bracing your business
A. You are your own best insurance
B. Keep your workforce healthy
C. Your supply chain: A chink in the armor
D. Profitability in spite of global isolation
IV. Protecting your other interests
A. Protect your assets
B. Stay healthy and sane
C. There’s no such thing as “too cautious”
V. “H5N1-Day” : The pandemic is a reality
A. Still go into the world and come back virus-free
B. Strangers in need
C. Animal safety
VI. The aftermath
A. Resuming your life
B. Helping others pick up the pieces
C. Staying prepared
APPENDIX I. CHECKLISTS
APPENDIX II. RESOURCES
Appendices? Yes, appendices. I was fully prepared to write this, too. Maybe someday I will. Maybe, someday, I will.
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Posted by Brian Fending on February 5th, 2008 — Posted in Personal, Technology
The blog Global Neighbourhoods recently published a profile of an old co-worker of mine from NetSol [SAP Global Survey: Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions]. I have to say, Shashi and I have both come a long way since our cube-neighbor days at NetSol supporting the ImageCafe product line.
Rachel can recount to this day my coming home from work and saying things like, “Man, that Shashi… he has amazing people skills. He is doing great things for this company.” He was an advocate, not just somebody to move things through the queue and let the next guy worry about it. If every worker was like him, CRM systems would work differently.
Well, that was 2001. (Note to historians: This is the year I’d like you to label “The Great Move”, when we relocated to Buffalo from DC. Thanks.) My career progress has been marked by moving around and changing gears a fair bit, and his is from the exact opposite position: He stayed put.
Through miscellaneous promotions and lateral moves, he’s now “The Guy” for social media at NetSol. It is an amazingly good fit, and I cannot imagine a single person more likely succeed in that role. Hell, I can’t imagine a single person more likely to succeed. Period.
Way to go, ShashiB!
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