Adam Trachtenberg’s profile

You can use expired US Password as proof of work eligibility. If it's good enough in that case, I don't know why an expired drivers license isn't good enough for a bar.

Posted in OSCON People and Random Tidbits.

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 at 23:45:57 GMT

Thanks! Reviews are high, sales are low. I am blaming the slow adoption rate of PHP 5. :)

Posted in PHP 5's Adoption.

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 at 00:19:15 GMT

I say not just "communications client," but "communcations platform".

Posted in Google Talk.

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 at 01:42:44 GMT

Loving that consultancy...

Posted in The Birth of a PHP Consultancy.

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 at 00:45:19 GMT

The eBay IE Toolbar has a section that turns red when you land on an known phishing site. eBay also tries to educate people to let them know that if an e-mail asks for anything like a password or an account number, then it's always going to be a scam.

Posted in Phishing.

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 at 06:07:19 GMT

Shorter is better. Filter input. Escape output.

Posted in My Top Two PHP Security Practices.

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 at 18:55:19 GMT

In general, I agree with you and Rich. However, if you're looking "compelling reasons" here are the two I can think of :

1) The PHP Apache 2 SAPI modules don't have as much testing and burn in as the Apache 1 SAPI module.

2) None of the PHP code developers use Apache 2, so it's harder to fix Apache 2 SAPI bugs if they're reported.

Posted in PHP and Apache 2 Slashdotted.

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 at 23:18:12 GMT

You're still working on PHP Security? :)

Posted in ApacheCon 2004.

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 at 21:52:58 GMT

Well, as far as question #2 goes, I personally have absolutely no idea what a function that doesn't return a value actually returns. It was quite easy for me to notice the mistake, but then I had no idea what the value would have been. I think I actually would have guessed, true, quite frankly, or maybe false. I rarely guess null.

Also, as to #5, if forced to choose an answer, I guess I would have picked 1, or maybe false, because I didn't think count() worked for non-arrays. Heck, count() is even defined in ext/standard/array.c.

All I'm saying is that lots of these questions ask me to produce the answer for something I'd never actually do. At least octal is something real, even if rarely used.

Posted in Preparing for the Zend Certification.

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 at 21:17:25 GMT

I think all these questions suck big time, largely because a programmer who used common-sense would have never tried to do any of these stupid things.

1) Most developers don't play with octal, nor should they.

2) If you write this code, it's a bug, so who cares what it actually returns? This is also language dependent. The behavior is totally different in Perl, for example, so I don't know why it's obvious that the answer should be null.

3) PHP lets you split code up inside if/elses, so I don't think you'd again obviously assume you couldn't do it inside classes. Also, I can't imagine anyone ever doing this, so how would you know ahead of time?

4) This is editorial, not technical. register_globals is both a bug and a feature.

5) count() is supposed to be used with arrays. I've never even bothered to pass in a scalar, so it could return 1, or it could return false, or null, or a warning, or whatever. Again, nobody in their right mind would have ever tried this.

-adam

Posted in Preparing for the Zend Certification.

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 at 15:59:50 GMT