Nasty PHP 4.4 Bug in Session Data

November 17th, 2005 This stupid and nasty spammer - my-pills.be spammed me 918 time in less than 24 hours and all the while repeatedly fetching only my home page! Guess what happens? They are into my permanent ban list. Hasta-la-vista morons - my-pills.be! After I aggresively started banning the new crop of referer spammers, my bandwidth usage has come down from last month, despite almost 50% increase of traffic! Think how much damage they are doing to everyone.

April 11th, 2007 Today while setting up and trying new application I found that one of the Gnome panels containing Applications, Places and System menu (taskbar for Windows users) wasn't displaying. After restarting the Gnome session I found an error message along the lines of: Error panel already running will exit panel.

May 14th, 2007 SessionSaver is a popular Firefox extension which allows you to seamlessly save existing session and restore it automatically at startup. You can also name the session and retrieve them anytime in future.

June 8th, 2006 Using cURL (in PHP) to access https url is often not as simple as using the proper url. Using it for authentication is also not very clearly documented.

April 29th, 2007 I needed to run Synergy server for my triple monitor setup at startup of Gnome session. crontab isn't going to help here.

May 27th, 2007 WordPress has the nasty habit, thanks to numerous filters, of converting two consecutive - to different ascii characters. This causes big problem for code fragments where people often tend to cut and paste the displayed code from browsers.

October 21st, 2005 I use and test my web applications and blogs primarily on Firefox these days. I do however occassionally look at Internet Explorer.

July 24th, 2006 Are we seeing the beginning of the end of Microsoft days, finally? It may be too soon to say but YouOS looks pretty functional to me. "YouOS strives to bring the web and traditional operating systems together to form a shared virtual computer." It is a wonderful concept.

May 25th, 2009 After writing a detailed guide of tips and howtos about Xfce (a free desktop environment for Unix and other platforms such as Linux, Solaris and BSD) we started our expedition on Xfce and soon encountered a problem that we had no feasible and complete solution to. One of our developers was having some problems with the Xfce panels.

February 16th, 2006 Often we come across procedures which need to be performed by issuing commands in a telnet session. It is relatively easy to do it manually but is definitely not suitable for automation.

November 27th, 2006 In Simple Thoughts blog and many other blogs worldwide there is a feature to email an article you liked (or hated) to your friends. Recently I noticed that this feature is being abused to send SPAM.

July 13th, 2006 The key new features of Firefox 2.0 beta (with brief commentary) are: Integrated spell-checker - no more excuse for poor spelling in form data Bookmarked web site summary - small updated headlines that sites can create that display in the bookmark sidebar in Firefox Crashed session recovery - finally I can replace tab browser extension Re-open recently closed tabs - this one is a life-saver Anti-phishing warning popup - I hate popups but will let this one slide. Search suggestion - live dropdown of suggested terms while searching Tab close button on tabs - Personally I like ctrl-w better, a close button on every tab just makes it more crowded, not convenient RSS feed preview - provides information on an RSS feed when the user is subscribing to it You can download and test it here.

June 29th, 2006 Fresh security problems found in Microsoft Internet Explorer that can allow attackers to take over a system or read private information from other Web sites. One of the bugs also affects Firefox.

November 30th, 2005 Most of the changes in WordPress 2.0 are internal. However you will notice improved admin interface and some nifty features and some pain.

November 13th, 2007 PHP supports shared memory which can be used to store and retrieve data across processes. This is also another alternative way to communicate between php scripts.