Author Archives: Donncha

Get The Look – Design Templates – lots of tips here when designing web pages.

Ivan has a new article on “Automatic PHP Class Loading”.

GnuCash is hard to find on Google or freshmeat. I just installed it again and working away filling in the last month of receipts and bills. It’s a lot more user-friendly than it was. The first time you run it you get the option of bringing up a help page that suggests you run a “druid” to configure your accounts. Hopefully, it, along with Open Office Calc will help me keep track of my finances over the next few months!
GnuCash isn’t as hard to install as their website states. I installed the Red Hat 7.2 RPM and only needed to install 2 or 3 RPMs, each of which I found at rpmfind. Give it a go!

The new Apache worm is spreading according to this news.com article. Thankfully my servers are upgraded!

It not even 4am and the sky is bright! Myself and Owen walked home from town this morning after a night out. We could even see vapour trails in the sky, the sky was mostly clear and a bright moon cast a silver glow on everything.
The queue at the taxi rank was 10 deep so we left, and we had a great chat on the way home, even if the walk is almost 3 miles… Anyway, Martina is in Carlow and I miss her terribly! *sigh*

Wow! RKO has another couple of great tunes! The two Sidology tunes by Machinae Supremacy are excellent!

Seems like my phplib instructions below came in useful to at least one person, and hopefully the install procedure will be cleaned up a small bit! I’m very happy with how it performs. Seems to be 7-8 times faster than using a database for the sessions!

Padraig Brady wrote a nice script (archive.org link) for testing regular expressions. It’ll highlight the regular expression being tested!

Some PHP stuff for you:
Ivan wonders when do sessions end?

It’s always been a hassle getting PHP4 sessions working as a backend to phplib sessions. Here’s how I did it:

1. Download the latest phplib tarball (currenty phplib-7.4-pre1) and copy php/* into your include directory and customize as per the INSTALL docs.
2. Download session4.inc file from http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/phplib/php-lib/php/session/session4.inc and copy it into your a subdirectory of your include directory called “session”.
3. Copy session4_custom.inc from phplib-7.4-pre1/unsup/ to your include directory.
4. Edit prepend.php3 and change session.inc to session4_custom.inc and edit local.inc and change your session class definition so that it inherits from Session_Custom. Add var $module = 'files'; to the session class so it’ll use PHP4.
5. Copy user4.inc from phplib-7.4-pre1/unsup/ into your include directory and modify prepend.php3 so it includes that instead of user.inc

Now visit a page that has a page_open() call and take a look in /tmp/ for sess_* files.
It’s way faster than using a database for sessions!

There’s also more docs but I think they refer to different code.

Ivan has also written an article about php session security with some good points to follow.

Antefacto has stopped trading. There’s some really good developers looking for work now..

According to Stephen’s referers page people have hit his site 15 times from here, yet Site Meter didn’t record that many hits to this page. Looks like I’ll have to do something about that!

I added a refer list at the bottom of this page, thank you Stephen for that!

HTML Utopia — Designing Without Tables: Part 2 – must have a closer look at this.