I had a function in some of my code that I wanted to trigger a notice error on certain occasions. Unfortunately, it kept halting my script with a Warning instead. Unfortunately, the error handler at that particular block of code was not properly capturing the error string. It runs out that I was triggering an E_NOTICE instead of an E_USER_NOTICE error… (if I would have reviewed the trigger_error manual page, I wouldn’t have made this... (more…)

So many times during development, I’ve missed little PHP errors because they were 1) on a processing page that was redirected or 2) output inside of a html tag - and rendered invisible. From time to time, I have to go back to my file system and check the php error log to see what happened. The first step to solving this was implementing a custom error handler - which we did at (“the triangle”).... (more…)

In my posting about Integrating PHPDocumentor into Eclipse, I touched on External Tools a bit. The combination of external batch files, the external tools extra options and the console has made my life easier. I’m using two new additional batch files that I’ve written myself and integrated as external tools. These include automated SVN release update and resource refresh and Apache application control (for those who can’t run apache as a service on w32): (more…)

While working on a website for (“the triangle”), I came to a page running locally that just stopped - blank. This particular website was not using output buffering - so there is no excuse for a blank page. For whatever reason (laziness, stupidity, thursdayness), I haven’t checked my php.ini file for error reporting in the last few months… and for whatever reason a long time ago, I decided to go back to standard error reporting.... (more…)

Update: Looks like the plugin is no longer available at that link. (more…)

The following is the result of a research project I had done about phishing. Its some best practices and suggestions based upon information from leading security professionals such as white hat security, McAfee, etc. A combination of e-mail security, authentication methods and corporate identity standards are among the suggestions… Here are the top solutions and methods of securing against Phishing: (more…)

So many phishing attempts lately are just purely pathetic - easy to guess and figure out, mis spelling and grammar issues and just poorly fashioned websites. Although these will work on the novice web surfer, can a clever criminal actually create a phishing site/scenario that can trap the experienced members in your IT department? In this article we’re going to take apart a phishing proof of concept attempt I created at (“the triangle”) (for privacy... (more…)

After I installed Eclipse PDT, I had two project navigators. I closed the native one and kept open the PHP Explorer. PHP Explorer showed my php, css, js, etc, files. It also puts a plus sign to the left of the filenames. Using this view, we can expand the file to see the classes and functions inside of the file without opening it. (more…)

Today, Todd (one of the consultants that (“the triangle”) uses) called me up to share a bit of a reminder and also tell me about an issue in the code that was in one of our older modules. There was an issue with the strtotime function converting a year to a timestamp. (more…)

Although I’d like to pretend that my side jobs always are pure programming, but alas, not the case. There are times when the users send word docs to me and I have to convert them to html. Now, even these word docs might have spelling mistakes - but that’s just not ‘acceptable’ to them - I should correct those issues too! Whats up with that? But anyway, I now have a good plugin to do... (more…)