Hammer & Duct Tape

Today the Israeli law requiring all phone service providers to allow for number portability has come into force. Since I understand that most countries in the world don't have this luxury yet, and that there's an argument about it, perhaps a beaten horse by now, and in particular whether it's a worthless idea that's driving the consumer costs up, or a genuinely good thing for the consumer and for the companies. And on the day one, results are here.
Continue reading "I've heard blah blah blah about phone number portability, but here's what actually happened in Israel."

Hey folks,

In this post, I'd like to show you how I set up a testing environment in an Agavi applications. Since Agavi doesn't come with its own testing tools, we will be using the framework's features to help us set this up. I'll be using PHPUnit for the tests themselves.


Continue reading "Setting up tests for your Agavi application - a short primer"

I didn't mean Dreamhost.

Ten reasons it doesn't pay to be "the computer guy"

DAMN RIGHT IT DOESN'T.

I appreciate this guy's comments to my previous post about secure file uploads in PHP. Unfortunately, Wordpress is crappy and its ajax comments are broken, for whichever reason, so my trackback comments didn't seem to get posted. I will reproduce my response here.


Continue reading "Uploading files in PHP yet again: heavy duty."

Kore Nordmann has a writeup titled "Why Active Record Sucks". While his commentary deserves applause, it also touches a more general problem which the author overlooks, resulting in a wrong conclusion: "You either destroy your business objects or your DB model."

First of all, let's blame Rails.
Continue reading "ActiveRecord sucks, but Kore Nordmann is wrong"

I haven't edited it yet.

Newbie developers are often unaware of problems associated with uploading files in PHP. These problems result in security holes, which spammers and crackers do not hesitate to explore and abuse. PHP security is a big problem, though it is not an issue with PHP itself but rather with people using PHP's facilities without understanding the implications.

UPDATE: further discussion on the topic is here and here.

Continue reading "How not to get hacked: uploaded files in PHP"

I am getting sick of repeating this, so please concentrate or I will have to send my spider monkey minions after you and all your offspring.

Regular expressions are great and you should master them. However, do not use regular expressions to parse HTML or XML. Resist your animal urges. They are wrong. lf you do not resist them, the government will take away your reproductive rights.

UPDATE: Kore Nordmann says this better than I ever could, but he doesn't have the minions.

Continue reading "For the 2,295,485th time: DO NOT PARSE HTML WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS"