Lame corporate proxies

Like a lot of weblogs out there, we use filtering technology to detect and block spambots, dodgy referrers and automated link spam specialists.

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Don’t waste my bandwidth

I got spammed recently by some knuckleheads who curiously must have thought I’d somehow be interested in their cheesy and unsolicited “newsletter”. The email consisted of a whopping 415Kb embedded JPEG image and a short text intro:

“It’s good to be back on deck and I hope your Christmas and New Year was restful. I have enclosed the latest newsletter for you to have a look at. Please let me know if anything is of interest.”

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PHP leap year calculation

A simple little function to calculate whether a specified year is a leap year or not:

function isleapyear($year = '') {
   if (empty($year)) {
      $year = date('Y');
   }
   $year = (int) $year;
   if ($year % 4 == 0) {
      if ($year % 100 == 0) {
         return ($year % 400 == 0);
      } else {
         return true;
      }
   } else {
      return false;
   }
}

The algorithm applied above, translated to everyday language, is something like this:

If the year is divisible by 100, then it’s not, unless the year is divisible by 400, when it is. Otherwise, if the year is divisible by 4, then it is. Otherwise, it’s not.

Did you get all that? I know, it’s probably easier to understand by looking at the code.

Deleting history in Firefox

Have you ever made a typo when entering a URL in Firefox? Firefox remembers any entered URL’s, so it can match them against what you type, whether they’re valid or not.

Which can be annoying the next time you use it and it tries to “autocomplete” your URL in the location bar. To remove any entries you no longer want, scroll through the URL history list and press the “shift+delete” keys.

Click on the logo and break the website

On the web, it’s standard practice to have your logo a clickable link which takes the visitor to your home page. Although I have seen the occasional business website which doesn’t allow you to click on the logo, I haven’t seen any that break the website when the logo is clickable.

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