Zend Studio now free for Zend Certified Engineers
Just got the very good news that Zen Studio ($299) is now free for Zend Certified Engineers. Neat! I’ve been wanting to try it out for a while, but wasn’t willing to spend $299 for it. Zend Studio is built on Eclipse (which is free for everybody), so it has a very small learning curve for those already familiar with Eclipse. My initial impression is that it is just an easier to use...
Read MoreFirefox 4 Beta Team
I got home from a business trip yesterday and found an awesome Firefox 4 Beta Team t-shirt waiting for me. Very cool! You may recall that I wrote a search engine add-on a few months ago. Well Mozilla offered free t-shirts to developers that got their add-ons ready for Firefox 4 by January 7, and since my add-on is just a search engine add-on it was already compatible. I filled out the form saying...
Read MorePHP’s [Lack of] Floating Point Precision
If you do a lot of programming in PHP, it is important to know that the way PHP handles floating points (like 1.0) has a few “gotchas” that you need to be on the look out for. In most cases, these issues won’t cause any major problems, but if you have a large invoicing or payment system that does hundreds or thousands of calculations, they could cause some serious issues. For...
Read MoreZend Alternatives
When most people think of PHP they think Zend, but did you know that Zend isn’t the only company that makes a PHP engine? There are many competing compilers and interpreters for PHP, each with their own slightly different take on the PHP language. Facebook’s HipHop HipHop takes normal PHP code and transforms it into C++, which is then compiled in machine code. Code compiled by HipHop...
Read MoreDoS using a single client
Have you ever heard of Slowloris? It has been around for a little over a year, but fortunately I have never had the “pleasure” of dealing with it. This short Perl script (less than 350 lines of actual code) is capable of turning your lowly desktop computer into a server killing monster. Traditional denial of service attacks use several clients (hundreds, sometimes thousands) to...
Read MoreAll The Domains in the World
After waiting months I’ve finally been given access to the .com TLD zone file! (And the .net, but who cares about .net, right?) So what is a zone file, you ask? Basically this file keeps track of how to access every .com domain name in the entire world. Well, technically not all of them, just the ones that have name servers associated with them, but practically all of them. So how many...
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