Viewing profile — alanstorm

It means if you have a PHP script or application (Wordpress, Drupal, etc) on your server, and there's code in the script or application that uses one of the `pcre_` functions, and …

> Has the experience remained the same? Yes and no. The PHP language and run-time continue to value backwards compatibility and, ultimately, a PHP application is still just a colle…

We're looking for a lawyer to help finish up our merger. The previous guy did 90% of the work and then stopped responding to our emails!!! This shouldn't take an experienced lawyer…

One of the most damaging things in cultures where agreement is more valued than honesty is how it can sap the morale of your workers to the point where they turn into exactly the u…

TL;DR; If you have the talent to do the sort of work these sorts of services require, then you have the ability to do it without them. Just my two cents here (with the caveat I cou…

That's solid advice, but only follow it once a sense of trust and rapport has developed between you and the client. There's far too many things a potential client may not be tellin…

HINT: For the purpose of this hint we'll assume your script is a bash script. If you've exploited the setuid program to run your script, bash may execute with the elevated permissi…

I'm not sure how useful public shaming and griping are, but I do think it works on the iamayoungconsultantandnoonetalksaboutthis.com level. I'd have found the stories super useful …

Put another way, republishing an otherwise unavailable CC-licensed/open-source-licensed work is explicitly respecting the author's wishes, the author that published it under that l…

Run the numbers, calculate the percentage of your income lost, and just consider it another unavoidable cost of doing business. I imagine you don't like paying Paypal, Google Check…

File under: Unintended Consequences. Also, Postel's law could probably be tricked into admitting itself as an accomplice. 1. Browser based Javascript provides a location object for…

Anyone know if this is related to the Fuel CMS ( http://www.getfuelcms.com/ ) or are they separate projects?

I can't comment specifically on the Fuel framework, but it's probably going to take years (if ever) for "the right" way to use namespaces to emerge among the PHP communities. There…

You can't read Gruber in the same context you did five or six years ago. At this point he's an established journalisty blogger who depends on a network of sources, some of whom are…

Nothing ever wins, pendulums just swing.

It's probably a part of a longer term pricing strategy. It's hard to start charging "real" money (even $40/$50) for an application you were formerly giving away for free. People fe…

Half of me says awesome, while the other half is slightly-creeped-out that scammers no longer need to stop at "nah, writing scraping scripts for bank websites would be way too much…

I'm not speaking for Stallman of GNU here, this is pure conjecture based on too many years of following these discussions. The "problem" with public domain software, (and BSD/MIT) …

And lumberjack competitions.

All true, but somehow it's comforting to know that this client and this developer deserve each other.

No presumptions here, which is why an in-depth story would be so interesting.

There's an interesting story to be told about what makes someone who's already a billionaire keep on in such a hyper-stressful job/career/calling when facing repeated life-threaten…

A the risk of being tarred and feathered for pedantic behavior, the W3Schools doesn't post misinformation. They posted information that was accurate at the time, and then let is si…

Hey, not a sidetrack at all, and I appreciate the link. At the risk of putting this back on discussion though, from the outside EBS looks like a separate, but complimentary product…

When you "don't get it" do you mean for yourself, or for the market? If the former, you can stop reading, because for someone already up on EC2 and devops it doesn't make sense to …