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Entries tagged with programming:

Naming procedure line labels

Apr 13th, 2009

I recently worked on improving a VB6 application, and as part of the task, I decided to clean up the way procedures used line labels.More >>

Automatic tabindex with PHP

Dec 8th, 2008

As most of us who've created HTML forms know, the tabindex attribute is a nice way to force text fields, checkboxes, dropdowns and buttons to be in a predefined order, so the user can utilise the tab key to navigate between them.More >>

Sanitising uploaded filenames

Dec 1st, 2008

Because of the differences in the way Linux and Windows systems handle filenames, and because users often upload files which have spaces, quotes, and other punctuation characters in the name, it's important that you strip out these characters from the filename before saving the file on the webserver.More >>

Don't be lazy when configuring security certificates

Nov 17th, 2008

If you're going to offer a secure protocol to your users, don't do what CSA Australia did, as I indicated in an earlier post.More >>

Why bother with development frameworks?

Nov 3rd, 2008

Having worked with a couple of web application frameworks over the last couple of years, I got thinking.More >>

Converting PHP arrays to XML

Nov 1st, 2007

I thought I'd share with you a PHP class I found useful lately. I had to take a comma-delimited text file and turn it into an XML text stream. With the ubiquity of XML these days, you might find it useful too, if you dabble in PHP software development.More >>

Looking for a new text editor

Aug 28th, 2007

Over the last eight years I've been exclusively using Notetab for all my text editing needs in the Windows environment. Simple to use, really intuitive and very powerful. Great for editing multiple files too.More >>

The most useful PHP function?

Jul 4th, 2007

I know that PHP has a lot of functions built right in, some of which are used frequently andMore >>

PHP leap year calculation

Mar 24th, 2007

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

Click on the logo and break the website

Mar 16th, 2007

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.More >>

Fabulous Firebug

Jan 10th, 2007

Is this the future of web debugging? I think so.More >>

Hyperlinking to 'members only' pages

Dec 21st, 2006

I've been asked a question similar to this one a number of times over the last few years:More >>

Checking for Office applications in Visual Basic

Nov 16th, 2006

I recently got an email from one of our readers who found our Spellchecking from Visual Basic article useful but wanted to know if there was a way to ensure that Microsoft Word was installed before attempting to invoke the spellchecking function.More >>

Is your website used for relay spam?

Oct 28th, 2006

Most websites have contact forms, which allow customers to get in touch with the website owners, without the owners necessarily having to reveal their contact email address. The customer typically fills in their name, email address and some message text. When the customer submits the contact form for processing, the server software then constructs an email message and sends it to the website administrator or owner.More >>

Parsing comma-separated data in PHP

Oct 14th, 2006

It's only recently that I discovered the PHP function fgetcsv(), which offers a quick and powerful way of handling CSV data, such as that exported by Excel and other spreadsheets.More >>

Stripping whitespace in PHP

Sep 20th, 2006

Here's a simple way to strip all whitespace from a string in PHP, which is useful for properly trimming any user input:More >>

Spellchecking from Visual Basic

Sep 13th, 2006

Here's a quick way to run a spellcheck on any data stream from within your VB6 application:More >>

Programmers excuses

Sep 5th, 2006

Recently, I stumbled on this amusing list of things developers have said, when their software doesn't quite work as intended:More >>

Quick disk cleanup

Aug 25th, 2006

Every few months, I like to do a little spring cleaning and remove the hundreds of temporary and backup files which get left behind by various applications.More >>

Document your PHP projects with PHPXRef

Jul 25th, 2006

PHPXref is a handy developer tool, written by Gareth Watts, which cross-references the source code in PHP projects and creates readable HTML documentation which can be viewed with any web browser. The main features of PHPXref are:More >>

Hottest search engine optimization software?

Jun 2nd, 2006

That's what the people behind the RankAttack SEO Technology website claim anyway. Apparently, their aggressive technology (whatever that means) enables the overwhelming majority of webmasters to enjoy improved rankings with the search engines in a matter of just days. Yes, that's right, days. Not weeks, not months but days.More >>

Form loading trap in VB.NET

Apr 21st, 2006

One of the first problems a VB6 developer encounters when migrating to VB.NET is that the way forms are loaded has changed completely. Although this (typical) VB6 method of loading the main application form is syntactically correct, it will definitely not produce the desired result:More >>

Holy meat navigation

Apr 11th, 2006

I know that Pope John Paul II has only been dead for a year now, and what I'm about to say could be interpreted as blasphemy, but did he get ripped off by his web designers or what? Take a look at his website and see for yourself.More >>

Secure web pages with PHP/MySQL

Mar 30th, 2006

While there are numerous examples of poorly implemented web applications causing all sorts of security problems, the first step to take when developing in a PHP/Apache environment is to make sure your application always works with register_globals switched off.More >>

SQL string formatting in VBScript

Mar 10th, 2006

If you're a software developer, string concatenation is something you do regularly, irrespective of the programming language you use. While languages such as C, C++, Perl and PHP all support the very useful sprintf() function, the VB/VBScript developers have traditionally had to resort to using a combination of single and double quotes, escape characters, text, line continuation characters and ampersands (&) to get the job done.More >>

Email obfuscator

Feb 20th, 2006

Displaying mailto links in web pages is much less widespread than it used to be in the good old days, largely thanks to the proliferation of web scraping spam harvesters.More >>

Ticketmaster: useful, unless you want to buy tickets

Dec 16th, 2005

A couple of days ago I attempted to purchase some tickets for the second U2 concert at Telstra Dome, next March.More >>

Registry mechanic dialogue

Dec 13th, 2005

If you're running one of the many flavours of Windows, you would have noticed that the more software you install, the slower your computer seems to get. A good system registry cleaner is an indispensable tool to keep your system running as it should.More >>

How much is a website?

Dec 9th, 2005

After some six years of web development, I still get the I want a website, how much will it cost question on a regular basis. Over the years, I have learnt to reply with:More >>

PHP upgrade woes

Nov 27th, 2005

There's been lots of noise about PHP 5.0.5 breaking application code which had been happily running for quite some time under previous versions.More >>

Hungarian notation - deux

Nov 1st, 2005

It doesn't happen all that often but when it does, it's worth the wait. You see, I'm one of those insubordinate software developers who has for many years insisted that Hungarian notation is crap because not even Hungarians find it useful. I was one of the obnoxiously vocal minority who just refused to conform to variable naming conventions, Microsoft-style.More >>

VB grows up

Oct 28th, 2005

For experienced VB.NET developers this isn't really anything new but having spent most of my time in the last five years writing web applications in PHP, I have to admit that I'm a bit of a late starter in this area. Having just recently worked on a new project using the .NET framework, I can tell you that as a former Visual Basic developer, I'm really impressed.More >>

Mozilla autocomplete bug

Oct 12th, 2005

I recently came across an annoying little bug which seems to affect all Mozilla based browsers, including the current version (1.07) of Firefox. It seems to happen when you have a form text input field and you're using Javascript to validate whether the user has entered anything into that input field. So, for instance if you had a text input field like this:More >>

Free software

Oct 5th, 2005

With so much confusion about the free software and open source software models, I think it's important to reiterate what is meant by those terms, and specifically what is meant by the word free.More >>

Lightweight ADO class

Sep 9th, 2005

When putting together dynamic web applications in an ASP environment, developers use ADO recordsets for the overwhelming majority of their database interfacing. Although most web applications will involve data entry forms, where the user will insert, update and delete database records, the biggest performance issues are in presenting recordset output to the client browser.More >>

VBScript hashtable

Aug 30th, 2005

For quite some time now, the more vigilant Windows IIS administrators have typically been configuring their hosts to have the filesystem object removed, due to an inherent security flaw which permits a malicious user to gain access to the servers directories and files.More >>

Microsoft move in on LAMP

Aug 26th, 2005

Microsoft is going to release Visual Studio 2005 Express in 2006. As much as I am tempted, I won't comment on that by the way. It will cost somewhere around AUD$89 and the word is that it may be released free as part of some promotions.More >>

SQL injection attacks

Jul 16th, 2005

As Steve Friedl's excellent article on SQL injection attacks shows, sloppy programming can lead to disasterous consequences for a database-driven website, especially if that database is Microsoft SQL Server.More >>

Hungarian notation

Jun 6th, 2005

Hungarian notation is a naming convention in computer programming, in which the name of an object indicates its type and intended use. According to Charles Simonyi, the inventor of Hungarian notation and senior programmer (at the time) at Microsoft, it was invented so:More >>