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An alternative for Perl heredoc’s
Perl has (true to its motto – there more than one way to do it) many methods for declaring string. Here are a few: The single quote (‘) – does not interpolate variables, does not understand escape sequences (like n for newline) The double quote (“) – interpolates variables (replaces $foo with the value of…
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Web Applicaiton Firewalls – are they usefull?
I was looking through a presentation by .mario about PHPIDS (embedded below for your convenience), which got me thinking about Web Application Firewalls (or WAFs for short). Currently I don’t see very much value in WAFs. My way of thinking goes something like this – there are two types of web applications you might run…
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Converting rows (records) to and from arrays in Postgres
Arrays are one of those more special features in PostgreSQL. Like any more esoteric features, you have people both in favor and opposed to them. On the pro side you have the fact that you can have an arbitrary number of elements without wasting space and/or having cumbersome table structure. On the con side you…
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Dynamic languages, the universe and everything
From Planet Perl I somehow ended up at a transcript of a talk about dynamic languages. It just so happens that during the same time I was reading the paper Eudaemon: Involuntary and On-Demand Emulation Against Zero-Day Exploits. The paper is an extension of the Argos project, which tries to identify zero-days by correlating network…
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Advanced MySQL features
I think usually of MySQL as a simpler alternative to more feature rich RDBMS’s like Postgres. However recently I listened to an interview with Brian Moon, the author of Phorum which is the oldest PHP and MySQL based forum software. The interview was very cool and demonstrated that you can do a lot if you…
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A (not so new) technique for breaking databases
There is joke which goes something like: those who know how to do it, do it. Those who don’t, teach it. Those who don’t even know how to teach it, supervise it. Sadly this is true for many tech journalists who make up sensationalized titles both because of lack of comprehension and because they have…