Development

I found this to be an entertaining ~30 minute video over front-end web security. While I’d heard of XSS and CSRF, I was not aware of a few of the hacks, especially those that include CSS.

Macleod Sawyer recently wrote a blog post titled “9 truths that computer programmers know that most people don’t.”

While I believe there was truth in each fact, there were a few quotes that stood out.

�Under the hood, most critical software you use every day (like Mac OS X, or Facebook) contains a terrifying number of hacks and shortcuts that happen to barely fit together into a working whole. It would be like taking apart a brand-new 747 and discovering that the fuel line is held in place by a coat-hanger and the landing gear is attached with duct tape.� � Ben Cherry

�Programming is thinking, not typing.� � Casey Patton

For the other truths, visit the full article which is linked below.

Source: 9 truths that computer programmers know that most people don�t.

It’s one thing to know which sort to use given a situation, but it’s much more interesting to see a sort in action.

Here are a couple of videos that will show sorts at work.

The only class that I’ve ever truly worried about passing was my compiler design class with Mr. Richard Simpson at Midwestern State University.

While the material was interesting at times, it was almost always several levels over my head and I had a hard time keeping up.

Even though I constantly worried about passing that class, I did have quite a bit of fun with at least one project in that class — Converting the C based interpreter for Mouse into any language of our choice. You can probably guess that I decided to go with PHP 🙂

I’m not sure why I was fond of that language. It was esoteric, hard as hell to understand, and there was almost no chance that I would ever use it for any practical situation.

After all, looking at this sample program below, do you have any idea what’s going on?

[code]
"Enter a positive number that you would like fibonacci numbers up to."

A0=
B1=
C1=

D?="You entered: "D.!"!"
"Fibonacci Sequence: "

(D.C.-^ A.!" "AB.=BC.= CA.B.+=)

A.!" "B.!

"!"

$$
[/code]

But something about it was enjoyable. Which is why I geeked out so hard the other day when I came across an old copy of the Mouse: A Language for Microcomputers.

Now that I’ve got the book, I’m considering creating a JavaScript based interpreter for Mouse.

Until then, here’s a link to the PHP based interpreter of Mouse that I came up with about a year ago.

https://github.com/ebinnion/Mouse-Playground/blob/master/translations/mouse79.php

At this point, the interpreter doesn’t include macros, but should run all of the sample programs in my Mouse repository.

I recently moved a couple of my sites from Dreamhost to GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting.

While one of the websites migrated perfectly fine, the other website had issues with the WordPress importer failing. :/

My best guess of what was happening is that the GoDaddy max_execution_time was set quite low, which was causing the importer to fail. I confirmed this by downloading the phpinfo plugin which showed the following:

Let’s Increase the GoDaddy max_execution_time

It took a bit for me to figure out how to increase the max_execution on GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting, but after quite a bit of search I found an article on GoDaddy’s support portal that describes where to put the PHP initialization files for the varying GoDaddy hosting products.

Easily enough, the PHP initialization file for GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting is located at html, which is the initial directory upon logging in to SFTP.

So, to increase GoDaddy max_execution_time, all I had to do was:

• Open an SFTP connection
• In the same directory as wp-config.php, create a .user.ini file. Note the leading .
• Lastly, in this .user.ini file, I added the following:

[code lang=text]
max_execution_time = 180
[/code]

The above will increase the GoDaddy max_execution_time to 3 minutes, which you can verify yourself by using the phpinfo plugin mentioned above.

Unfortunately for me, increasing the GoDaddy max_execution_time didn’t fix my issue of the WordPress importer failing. I ended up moving my site to WP Engine which worked like a charm.

A couple of months ago, I found myself wanting to check if a value was in an array in JavaScript. Since I come from a PHP background, I was super excited to see that jQuery has an inArray() function.

So, I popped $.inArray() into the program, did a few tests to make sure it works, and then committed it. The next day I got a bug report…

Turns out that I forgot an edge case. What happens when the value I’m searching for is at the front of the array?

jQuery.inArray() Does Not Return a Boolean

Coming from a PHP background, I expected jQuery.inArray() to return a true if the value was found in the array and a false if the value wasn’t found in the array.

My mistake here is that I didn’t read the documentation well enough, or I would have seen that jQuery.inArray() is equivalent to using .indexOf().

So, instead of returning true when the value is found in the array, jQuery.inArray() was returning the index within the array where the value was found. If the value is not found, -1 is returned.

:facepalm:

So, instead of having my conditional look something like this:

[javascript]
var numbers = [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ];
if ( jQuery.inArray( 2, numbers) ) {
// do something
}
[/javascript]

I decided to use this:

[javascript]
var numbers = [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ];
if ( jQuery.inArray( 2, numbers ) >= 0 ) {
// do something
}
[/javascript]

Lesson Learned

RTFM and Slow Down…

We all require looking at the manual at some point when we program. Sure, there’s a few choice functions you use on a day-to-day basis for which you remember the parameters, order of the parameters, etc.

But, so much of a developer’s job is searching � Whether that’s on StackOverflow or Google. 30 more seconds would’ve been all it took for me to get it right.