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Has anyone been watching the news here lately?

Some of the things I've seen on the news as of late makes me actually ashamed to be an American. It's kind of sad that we even have this huge debate over something like this health plan... but now we have people comparing it to... Nazi's?

Really?

Nazi's??

Really really??

I mean, come on, how stupid can people really be?

This whole debate has been blown way out of proportion as of late. I mean, why is there even a debate? People are defending insurance companies who have raped and pillaged people's wallets for years. Many of these companies who, unless people forgot, tend to try to find excuses to deny coverage at every possible turn that they can.

"Oh you lapsed for 3 days"
"Well this was a pre-existing condition"
"Sorry we don't cover that"
...

Really? This whole damn debate is all over money. You have large insurance companies which feel threatened by some sort of government plan, so what happens? They raise hype, suspicion, and fear over the whole thing. What I think people fail to realize is that if they do indeed want to continue to keep their private coverage... THEY CAN.

Then you have all the job stuff people don't talk about. Illegal immigrants and their rights (also briefly brought up in this whole health care debate).

Here's a hint, they're "illegal immigrants". They should have no rights here. Patch them up, send them home, plain and simple. If they want to be in this country, they can go through the same process that other, legal immigrants, have. Same goes for having them work jobs here. How many millions of people are without a job now? Now, how many illegal immigrants have jobs here? Finally, how many jobs would be available if we started hammering down on illegal immigrants and deporting their ass left and right?

Funny thing is, "recaptcha" isn't any more secure than a normal captcha. I'm sure most bots adapted within less than a few days of that coming out that depend in cracking it. Chances are, if it can break the first word, it can break the second one as well just as quickly. The absolute best sort of captchas will never be the "type in this slightly obfuscated word" ones, but things like picture recognition or solid actual questions with real answers.

Then, as Xepher pointed out, if they have actual humans doing it, nothing short of actual human screening will stop them.

Don't forget to obliterate the link in their profile as well (if you can). Many of these sort of attacks are used to try to boost these sites google page ranks as well. Dirty fracking spammers.

We really need more moderators for this sort of thing when Xepher is away on yet another vacation.

Spam spammy spam spam spammer. Die in a fire, and take your dirty drugs with you!

Seems the new codename for the successor to IE that MS is working on is Gazelle. A technical document can be found here.

Psh, what you talkin' about? People still using IE6 need to be blocked from the entire internet!

Also, IE7 is more or less IE6 + png transparency. Not all that much of an improvement. Frankly, IE6/7 are worthless browsers which cause more headaches for developers and designers than they do good. Hand it to MS for totally ignoring specs and just doing things how they think it should be done. IE8 really improves on a lot of things, but still isn't quite up to snuff. IE8 also is the final IE to ever be released. The project has FINALLY been discontinued after this point by MS (supposedly in favor of some new browser not called internet explorer and possibly using webkit, which would be awesome).

He does almost always have his away message up, but hit him up anyhow. Even if he doesn't respond right away he tends to "get back to you".

Xepher, can't you just change the permissions for the user home directories to help prevent this from other infected sites in the future?

Hey, my standards aren't ridiculously high... they're expectant that people who wish to program do so properly. Those who half-ass things are the ones who put the good programmers out of work (and end up making things that later get hacked and lose 4 million credit card numbers in the process because they don't know what they are doing).

That error isn't really a super-major issue. If the developers can't figure something that obvious out, I'm a little sad.

It's what back traces are good for.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1137883380?bctid=16920289001

Sorry about that. I do this stuff for a living so writing CMS's and stuff is like second nature to me. I sometimes forget that when trying to explain it to other people who may not have the experience I've got.

A fatal flaw, I'm afraid, that many programmers share.

Blend them.

Never, ever, split your variables up to look like a directory structure. Things like Google rank your pages lower the more it looks like they are nested in deep directories.

Generally, when you're doing something like this, it's generally nice to do a blend of the two methods. There is nothing wrong with having some get variables. Also, you could add in a url mapping that auto-assigns get variables on the back-end. That way you can have things like, say, "/page-1-1.html" translate to ?chapter=1&page=1 to your scripts. However, if you want to do something like sort by X as well, keep that as a GET param, there's no need to mask things like that as it's nothing more than needless and extra headaches.

Generally in something like a CMS (which is what I'm familiar with), you'd have some sort of URL mapping that translates particular special urls or patterns into the explicit variables you need. Say, for instance, you are using a CMS and therefore need to define a controller and view for viewing a comic page vs a news article. The comic page could be something like, say, the "viewIndex" method on the "ControllerComic" controller, where the news article page could be the "viewIndex" method on the "ControllerNews" controller:

Code Select Expand

class ControllerComic {
  public function viewIndex() {
  }
}

class ControllerNews {
  public function viewIndex() {
  }
}

Yet to define this to your system you pass something like, say a "view" variable

Now, what you could do is make something like "/comic-1-1.html" translate to "?view=comic.index&chapter=1&page=1" to your primary script, then loading/appending things to get the appropriate controllers and views:

Code Select Expand

if (preg_match(';/comic-([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)[.]html;', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $match)) {
  $_GET['controller'] = 'comic';
  $_GET['view'] = 'index';
  $_GET['chapter'] = $match[1];
  $_GET['page'] = $match[2];
}

Of course this is a VERY rough example, and I'd generally advise against explicitly setting GET/POST vars in this fashion. Instead it would be better to explicitly define a global custom environment variable for your application and read that in conjunction to the passed GET/POST vars.

More or less. The thing is the more complex your session cookie is, the lower the chances someone will manage to hijack it anyhow. Again, storing anything other than simple ids in a session is bad practice and wasteful anyhow. Even if using built-in PHP sessions or something similar. Because it loads that data every single time, regardless if you actually need it or not, which is a waste of resources. Only load data when you actually need it for something.