July 2006

..to spite his face.

Read this (quoted below)

<_sniper_> all other members of the UN security council
wanted to condemn Israel for attacking the UN post but USA (freedom and
democracy) vetoed it….Israel says the resolution was fair.
<_sniper_> hell yeah..
<_sniper_> NUKE ISRAEL!
…..
<_sniper_> FYI: I don’t care at all what anybody thinks about
me. I’m going to be openly anti-Israel from now on. This was the last
straw for me. Fuck you jews.
<_sniper_> I will also quit this
project. As long as it’s backed by some Israel company, I don’t want to
have anything to do with it.
<_sniper_> Good bye.
<– _sniper_ (~jani@a88-112-115-63.elisa-laajakaista.fi) has left #php.pecl

Then read this

He might be a brilliant coder, but he’s shown himself to be quite the idiot. It’s not like Zend killed anyone.

Quite what this means for the PHP project is anyone’s guess but I think I’ll buy that Ruby book now.

Here’s an artist’s impression of the Zend developer directory page for Jani today:

(Click to enlarge)

There’s a new website chat service that’s gaining momentum because it’s so darn cool.

It’s called Gabbly and it allows you to have a chat room floating above your website without the need to edit templates (although they do offer that as an option).

All you do is simply append your URL after the Gabbly URL. So,  http://gabbly.com/blog.mattmecham.com will show a little floating chat room on this blog.

One does wonder how long the project can keep going without any sustainable model. The chat must take up server resources and the servers must be paid out of someone’s pocket.

I get the impression that it might just be another piece of Google bait waiting to be snapped up by the highest bidder.

Whatever the future of Gabbly, it’s certainly an impressive project and shows that Javascript is very much back en vogue.

Well, what a month.

It seems that just about every hacking group under the sun has been having a pop at Invision Power Board over the last few months.

I remember back in the good old days an email was sent to you informing of any potential vulnerability before it was made public allowing you to fix the problem and send out patches to your customers and users. Now that’s extremely rare and more often than not the exploit is automated via a perl or PHP script which is then distributed to all the underground hacking groups which is posted on their forums for any moronic script kiddie to download and take down soccor mom boards for their own amusement.

With the risk of sounding like a whiny computer nerd, it’s tough being a web programmer these days. The dangerous balance of features versus security is very tough to maintain. A small mistake in your regex can potentially allow shell access to your server and a badly formed SQL query can allow your admin sessions to be taken. We’re seeing stuff that simply wasn’t possible a few years back thanks to the changes and developments in PHP and MySQL. “UNION SELECT” allows queries to be joined making a missing INTVAL() another notch on a hackers mouse cord.

IPB has become a very high profile target. Our customers include some of the biggest brands in the world (AMD, Sony, EMI, Warner Bros, etc) so it’s an obvious target for hackers. Also, our code is sold as readable source and not compiled which allows everyone to see the inner workings and work out possible weaknesses.

Of course, the responsibility lays firmly at the feet of the developers
writing the code. It’s our job to make hacker’s lives as difficult as
possible and with that in mind, we’ve made some huge changes to the IPB
2.2.0 codebase. I don’t want to say too much other than every single
exploit type that IPB has suffered with recently will no longer be
possible. These changes have been made at the very core of the program so we’re not simply papering over the cracks.

Debbie and I went to see Pirates 2 over the weekend and we both thought that it was excellent.

It’s pretty much vital that you see the first Pirates of the Caribbean film before hand or you’ll be even more lost than I was during the first hour.

I won’t spoil the plot and it’s impossible to write a synopsis of the film without doing so. It’s a very long and sometimes overly complex film that was shot back to back with Pirates 3 due out next May. On the whole it’s easily as good and often better than the first Pirates film.

Johnny Depp is back with a vengeance and we couldn’t get enough of his slurring, swaying and swaggering Jack Sparrow.
Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones is outstanding. Nighy brings a lot of character to Jones’s CGI face. It’s quite an achievement to see Nighy’s characterizations through the CGI and you get a lot of emotion just through his eyes.
The special effects are grand in scale and very well executed. From the huge set-pieces to the fishy crew of the Flying Dutchman, at no point are you aware of any computer or green-screen work. Compared to the digital rush job on King Kong, Pirates 2 is exceptionally well polished.

It’s not perfect thought. It is a long film and very complex. The first 30 minutes or so are quite confusing as we’re whisked from location to location and from character to character. As it’s shot back-to-back with the third film, you get the impression that Pirates 2 does a lot to set up the last movie of the trilogy. While Depp is fantastic as Jack Sparrow it’s a little jarring to see Depp perform some slapstick routines and pull a few ‘cartoon’ faces.
When Pirates of the Caribbean was written the character of  Jack Sparrow was written totally straight. Depp took the character and threw his own spin on it and it’s that magic that made the first film for me. This time around, it’s obvious (and quite natural) that Sparrow was written with Johnny Depp in mind which loses some of the magic.
Also, the film stutters a little bit when Jack’s not around. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley do well but they rarely share scenes so you don’t get the chemistry that bonded them in the first film.

They are minor niggles in an otherwise excellent film. You can’t help but be amazed at the sheer size and audacity of the set pieces which include fruit kebabs and giant hamster wheels. Depp and Nighy put in powerhouse performances that raise Pirates 2 from what could have been a bit of a damp sequel.

Roll on Pirates 3!

….if you’re the iTunes Music Store.

There’s an Icelandic ‘alternative’ band that I adore. They are called Sigur Rós (pronounced Si-ur Rose). They produce some interesting music ranging from the pretentious to the glorious. They’re so good, even Radiohead cite them as an inspiration and they’ve toured with Radiohead at Thom Yorke’s request.

On their 1997 debut album ‘Von’ there’s a track called “18 Sekúndur Fyrir Sólarupprás” which translates to “18 seconds before sunrise”. Unsurprisingly it’s 18 seconds of silence.

You can buy this track from iTunes for 79p. That’s a whopping 4.4p per second of nothing.

Now that’s good value.