The Drawingboard

Fixing an open relay on Postfix

Sunday, May 11, 2008 3:05 PM

On some levels GoDaddy really sucks. One of those levels happens to be their almost craven willingness to leave the base install of their virtual dedicated servers in a deliberately sorry state in order to pressure customers into paying for their assisted support plan.

GoDaddy leave their virtual dedicated servers open to being exploited as open relays... MORE ... Read whole article

Google updates PageRanks

Tuesday, May 6, 2008 1:11 PM

Not a big thing, but over the last week of April and the first week of May 2008, Google appears to have processed the new PageRank updates. Nothing too crazy in store for me. A few of my older sites have earned their extra point for being old, I think.

But, I thought it was worth mentioning... MORE ... Read whole article

The joy of errors: 426 Failure writing network stream

Monday, May 5, 2008 1:00 AM

I was FTPing files in order to tinker around with installing ImageMagick on my server. Doing a build from source was not particularly successful, so I decided to see if the RPM installer would give some more joy. In the process of attempting to upload the RPM file onto the server, the FTP process got really snippy... MORE ... Read whole article

Back to Basics: Scrubbing POSTs in PHP

Sunday, April 20, 2008 1:39 AM

Post values are writable, in addition to being readable. I've noticed a lot of code that seems to forget that you can scrub and then dump data into the POST values. Consider the following:

foreach ($_POST as $key=>$value){
$_POST[$key]=htmlentities($_POST[$key]);
}

This code takes every POSTed variable and converts it using the PHP command 'htmlentities'... MORE ... Read whole article

Back to basics: Scrubbing for alphanumeric input in PHP

Sunday, April 20, 2008 1:33 AM

... MORE ... Read whole article

Back to basics: Using PHP's GD library to make a border

Sunday, April 20, 2008 1:27 AM

... MORE ... Read whole article

Blacklisting by country works

Sunday, April 20, 2008 1:20 AM

A while back I began implementing a country-specific blacklisting system to control the amount of spam that appears on a local classifieds website I run, called PunxsyPage.com. Combined with a system that allows unregistered users to pass their ads into a human-edited system for approval, this has brought the appearance of spam on the website down to nearly zero... MORE ... Read whole article

GoDaddy: something nice to say

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 11:23 AM

You know, I read and read a lot of stuff on the internet bashing every service provider and hosting company out there. I just wanted to plug in my two cents about something very cool that GoDaddy does. I've known this for a while, but it came up again and I wanted to write something about, because I often delve into negativity a bit much... MORE ... Read whole article

TV's fetish for making the internet sound evil

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 11:13 AM

The other evening I was, for some inexplicable reason -- I think there was some Barrack versus Hillary stuff on -- watching the NBC Nightly News. And they were discussing that incident down in Florida with the girls who filmed their rather tame beating up of another girl and were going to put it on YouTube... MORE ... Read whole article

Small user-generated websites

Friday, April 4, 2008 10:52 AM

In the last two months I have had the opportunity to build two distinct user-generated websites for small groups. If you have ever tried to get a smaller group to generate content, you know from experience that getting wide participation is like pulling teeth. But, I did find one factor that makes a huge difference in creating participation... MORE ... Read whole article