Dropbox is the next big thing. Its an application that lets you sync multiple computers. For example if you have a laptop and a Desktop and want to keep some files across the two machines synchronized then this is the tool for you. The great thing is that its multiple Operating System compatible. There are currently clients for Windows and Mac and a linux client is in Alpha (They promise to release it). Ill leave the rest of the explaining to the video below…
When they do a full release there will be two types of accounts, premium and free. The free accounts will get 1gb of space each, premium is as of yet undecided. At the moment they are beta testing. Beta accounts get 2gb of space and will be kept free forever.
You can sign up on the getdropbox.com website to try and get a beta account but they take along time and sometimes you aren’t accepted. Im offering dropbox invites.. for free. Once i sent the invite email your account will get activated straight away! Thats a 2gb account for ever!
*Beta accounts used to be 5gb, but are now 2gb. If your 2gb is getting full you ask the…
The popular discussion board phpbb2 is being pulled/development dropped. Security patches and support will be given until January 2009 and you will be able to download the software from the website until the 1st of Ocbober 2008 . phpBB2 has been plagued by a large number of vulnerabilities, a significant number of them were through user submitted modifications.
phpBB 3 started strong and is continuing to do so. With more database types being support, and a massive new set of administrator controls, it’s set up to compete with the likes of MyBB and Simple Machine Forums. People often look back at this thread, posted when phpBB 1 was undergoing testing.
In this tutorial i’ll go over some of the frequently used Selectors and show you how to use them. Most of jQuery’s manipulations revolve around selectors, so it’s a vital skill to know.
So.. we want to select the first td. We do this by first selecting all the td tags and then use :first to select the first td. Using jQuery’s great chaining ability, we change the text.
$("td:first").text("This is the altered first box");
jQuery also has :odd and :even selectors. This will select the odd or even id’s. In this next example. We are selecting all of the odd td’s , and then select the first one of them. Again , we use jQuery’s chainability.
$("td:odd:first").text("We changed this using odd and first");
You need to be aware that selecting the odds/evens does not use the element ids. It just counts them. It starts from 0 and starts counting, not from 1. This is why it changes the second cell using the method above.
Now, lets match the next one by specific text. We can do this using the :contains selector. We look in all td elements, then in them we look for the word Three , if we find it we replace the text.
$("td:contains('Three')").text("we matched the text, then changed it.");
We can…
The 8th version of Ubuntu has now been released! Notable inclusions are..
- Linux Kernel 2.6.24
- Xorg 7.3 (Latest)
- GNOME 2.22
- Firefox 3 Beta 5
Its interesting to see that they’ve given some
of their older applications an overhaul. It now includes the Brasero CD burning utility which replaces Serpentine. They’ve also included the GTK front-end bit-torrent client Transmission and added a new VNC viewer called Vinagre. If you put the burnt ISO disk into a Windows machine, you can install Ubuntu via Windows! I thought this was a cool little feature.
Ive been following Ubuntu for a few years now, i started Using Hoary right through to Fiesty. After that Ubuntu wasn’t right for me. It felt pretty bloated, trying to do things for you, and now im happily running Zenwalk 5.0 which is based off Slackware. I’m interested to here what you think, of Ubuntu and the new release.
Heres a quick tutorial on how to stream internet radio, in particular shoutcast, through VLC media player. Most people stream through Windows Media Player or Winamp, but if you like Open Source applications like me, heres how you do it.
File -> Open Network Stream
Select the HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/MMS box and in the form, enter the URL of the shoutcast server, with the port. In my case its enaxi.com:8000 . Then click OK.
And tadah.. It works!
In nearly all of my PHP tutorials you’ll see me using the secure function to sanitise incoming user data from things like forms, and $_GETs . Its a small function, which no doubt alot of you already have, but here it is anyway.
function secure($string) {
$string = strip_tags($string);
$string = htmlspecialchars($string);
$string = trim($string);
$string = stripslashes($string);
$string = mysql_real_escape_string($string);
return $string;
}
As you can see, it basically sanitises the heck out of everything. Some people say its an overkill but you can use it in almost every situation when user data is incoming.
There are alot of remotely hosted systems out nowadays, Zetaboards, SMF for Free and the series of IPB 1.3.1s. If you want to edit the looks of your board you need to use Javascript since you can’t access the source PHP files. You can work your way around using getElementById and the likes, or you can use jQuery. Here are some hints on how to use it.
Say you have a menu and you want to add some extra items to it. The menu code is something like..
We want to add another
beneath the element
So, in normal javascript you would need to find the unordered list with an id of navlist, then add innerHTML or a childnode of the ordered list. However in jQuery we can do this with one easy line.
$("#navlist").append("
");
That would add it to the start of the list, if we wanted it at the end we would use the prepend function.
$("#navlist").prepend("
");
What if there were a menu item we didn’t like? Say Item Four. Lets get ride of it! We could need to match the text inside the list, then hide it. With this next snippet, we…
Heres a tutorial on how to use the apt-get package management system in Debian and its derivitives such as Ubuntu and Knoppix. I will cover command line use of apt-get, the aptitude program and the Synaptic Package Manager. I wrote all of this myself, feel free to link to here but do not copy and paste it.
Debian uses apt-get package management. It looks at a series of defined repositories (servers) for the package(s) you want and will download them if they are there. The repositories are defined in the file
/etc/apt/sources.list
You can edit that file directly (make sure you have root) or use frontends like the Synaptic Package Manager or Software Sources (Menu item) in the distro.
Command Line Usage
To install a package you need to use the apt-get install command. For example to install the IRC program XChat you would type into the console.
sudo apt-get install xchat
It would prompt you for your root password and then list information about the package and would double check you still want to download and install it.
To remove a package you would use the apt-get remove command. This will remove the package files but will keep the configuration files incase you install the same application…
This isn’t Yet Another PHP Security blog post, like you see on all the other websites. This is aimed at people who run existing software such as SMF, Joomla and Wordpress.
Some people using pre-made software think they are immune to hacking attempts. 4 days ago, there was a vulnerability found in the latest version of the Coppermine Gallery software, after the vulnerability was made public, hundreds of people got hit, and their galleries essentially destroyed. Infact there were 2 SQL injection vulnerabilities found within 5 days of each other. For something that has been in development since September 7th 2003, thats pretty scary.
Now, if you owned a Coppermine Gallery what measures could you take to make sure that your installation was safe, even if you couldn’t patch it yourself, you could take it offline until one is released. The website securityfocus.com is a security and vulnerability website. People post the latest vulnerabilities there in software, for example one of the coppermine vulns , http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/28767 . If you do a daily run of your blogs/forums, you could also go there and type in the version and software that your using to do a quick check. Social news websites such as digg,…
Heres a quick video tutorial i made, you’ll learn the basics of jQuery such as selecting elements as well as usage of the slide effect. Feel free to ask any questions
Demo File
