Author Archives: Donncha

The Digital Journalist – July 2005

A bit late this month, but Dirck Halstead the July 2005 edition The Digital Journalist is out.
It has plenty to read, including a good article on the emergence of “citizen-journalists” armed with camera phones.

Photojournalism history was made last week. For the first time, both The New York Times and the Washington Post ran photos on their front pages made by citizen-journalists with camera phones.

As I was snapping the sunset in Kinsale last night with my cumbersome 20D, swapping lenses, and swearing when I realised I had left my second memory card at home, someone else got out of their car, hopped up on the ditch and pointed their phone to the west. Somehow I can’t imagine it matched my 300mm zoom, but the future is now!

Processing a Digital Photo

Here’s the digital workflow of one photographer. The steps he describes can be followed in the GIMP too.
Despite earlier reservations, I’m still shooting in RAW format and it’s been useful on occasion. I find it useful to slide the shadows and gamma settings around and then hitting “auto-adjust”.
I always have to use the Auto-Levels tool afterwards to fix the colours but the RAW converter does give me some extra control.
I can see I’ll need to make backups a lot more regularly however. DVD is way too small.

Security Checking PHP Templates

WordPress uses PHP as it’s templating language. It’s well established and as I’ve said before, there’s an abundance of free themes out there for it.
Unfortunately in a multi-user environment, allowing untrusted users to edit PHP code on your server is a huge security risk. There has to be some way to limit the commands a user can use, and there is!
PHP already parses html pages, so why not take advantage of that engine? The PHP Tokenizer lets you do just that!
Feed your template through token_get_all() and it’ll spit out an array containing HTML, PHP, and other elements from your file.
Here’s an if statement that should be familiar:

T_OPEN_TAG: '<?php '
T_IF: 'if'
T_WHITESPACE: ' '
(
T_STRING: 'have_posts'
(
)
)

We then need to compile a list of allowed functions, which can be got from wp-includes/* and we’re well on the way to a safe environment for WP bloggers. Any more ideas?

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.