quiet despair » code

Interfacing With Another Species 7.2 Ksecs Too Early

Maker — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:57:39 +0000

I’ve been scheduled for a conference call without my input on the time for more than 7Ksecs before I usually resume consciousness. In the past this has usually resulted in disaster for the other involved parties, as I typically can’t resume from standby that early, let alone speak in coherent sentences or form what humans would consider lucid thoughts. My ideal employer would either be able to work with this better, or be located in Japan.

This article on Code Climber identifies a lot of the most important reasons I and so many others work best at night. There are numerous benefits to working at night:

There are far less interruptions by email, instant message, and news via RSS
There is minimal interaction with human species, as they seem to prefer sleeping while Sol illuminates the oppopsite side of their planet
My best and most productive work requires long periods of concentration and Focus

A little regex in php for fun

Maker — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:01:44 +0000

So after working thirteen hours in a row I came home and thought of a handy function to bandaid some legacy code that returns a url with double slashes after the TLD. I realize this is a worse solution than fixing the code in question, but my regex-fu could use work so I though I’d do a little exploring. motel6 sparked my imagination and deserves full credit for my work below. Here’s what I came up with:

$url = remove_url_slashes('http://www.killallhumans.com//?robots_eating=hobos&passion=361', 'killallhumans');

function remove_url_slashes($url=”,$domain=”) {
if(empty($url)) return false; if(empty($domain)) $domain = 'killallhumans'; $pattern = "/($domain)(.*?)(\/+)/ie"; return preg_replace($pattern, "'\\1\\2/'", $url); }?>

Warning: SQL Statement is Missing SQL

Maker — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:33:24 +0000

I found some great code at work today I’d like to share. I’ve omitted anything that might qualify as a trade secret or proprietary information. I’ve also changed the names of the innocent variables to make it more readable. Also, this won’t be funny if code makes your brain hurt.

Here’s the error I kept finding:
Warning: pg_query_params(): Query failed: ERROR: bind message supplies 3 parameters, but prepared statement "" requires 0 on line 9175

Upon investigation, I determined that the reason our postgres query was failing was because we forgot to actually give it any SQL statement (pay attention to the second parameter here.. it should contain the SQL query that you want to apply the third parameter for):
$ret = pg_query_params($this->connection, "", array($shipping_type, $customer_id, $payment));

Well, fine.. but I thought it was funny.

In which a system administrator is an idiot

Maker — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:45:11 +0000

I recently did some freelance work for a friend of mine. It was extremely basic, just adding some includes so he didn’t have to manage a hundred different navigations for each page he had made. Well, I did it fast and I skipped some basic checking in my script. My code would work unless you had the error logging turned up all the way, which is fairly excessive. The other way it would fail is if you had display_errors set, which is the default PHP configuration. No one with any ounce of experience or common sense would let display_errors be set for a production server. This gives out sensitive information about the environment of the server. Here is what the PHP Security Consortium has to say about display_errors:

“The display_errors directive determines whether error messages should be sent to the browser. These messages frequently contain sensitive information about your web application environment, and should never be presented to untrusted sources.

Unless you are in a closed development state, display_errors should be disabled, and all error messages should be passed to system log files using the log_errors directive.”

So I fixed my code to be able to run in a very strict error checking environment, to such a point that it’s excessive. It checks to see if a variable exists immediately after I’ve set it. This is sort of my passive aggressive way of telling the syadmin who had a problem with my code to take a long walk off a short beach. The icing on my cake is that I check at the very beginning of the first include to see if display_errors is on. If it’s on and isn’t set to log errors to a file, I disable it. Then I check to see if the supeglobal $_SERVER is set. I’m not even sure if it’s possible to NOT have it set. But just for good measure, if by some miracle it isn’t set, and I can’t figure out the name of the script that’s running, I exit which causes a white screen to display.

// http://us3.php.net/errorfunc Note: You're strongly advised to use error logging in place of error displaying on production web sites. if(ini_get('display_errors') && ini_get('display_errors') == '1') error_reporting(0); if(!isset($_SERVER) && !isset($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'])) exit;

He also calls this production server, “the dedicated box” even though it runs many virtual hosted sites.