Archive for October, 2007

Common Zend_Filter_Input problems

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Zend_Filter_Input, while a very useful component of the Zend Framwork, has some oddities that can cause a lot of headache if you can't figure it out right away. Missing fields show up as valid even if they have validators that won't let empty ...

Mozilla Prism: A fancy name for a technology as old as the browser

Monday, October 29th, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Mozilla recently introduced Prism, which takes Widgetize to a whole new level. Opera's Widgetize will turn your blog or RSS feed into a widget with some custom skins and stuff. What Prism does is, it takes any website and turns that into a ...

Simple and efficient spam prevention techniques

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera I've previously outlined some alternative methods for CAPTCHA/spambot prevention in Different kinds of CAPTCHA. Josh Clark recently posted Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spambot Hunters which gives even more good methods for preventing spam. But with spambots gaining more and more features, what can ...

Handling Ajax requests in the Zend Framework

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Doing Ajax is quite simple these days with the various JavaScript libraries offering easy ways to do it. But how do you do it on the server side, without complicating things too much? Typically, in addition to the Ajax response, you need a ...

What kind of software is needed at a LAN party?

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera So, the Solid Fireparty is over now and I'm back home. Something like 1200 kilometers driven. I have also posted some photos to the photo gallery and more can be found at http://fireparty.org/lanikuvat/, so check it out. Getting back on the usual topics, ...

Going to Helsinki

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera I'm going to Helsinki today, to the Solid Fireparty LAN, to help with the event organization and to do other LAN-party'ish things, whatever they are. I might not post anything from the usual topics for the rest of this week, but stay ...

LAN party place reservation

Monday, October 15th, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Let's take a look at one of my biggest PHP projects so far: Reservinator 1.0, or in other words, a very advanced place reservation system for LAN parties. The page is in finnish, but the post is not, so read on! If you've ...

How to make a modal AJAX login box with Mootools

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Sometimes I've been asked to do a modal AJAX login box for a website. What is that you ask? It's basically what you can do in JavaScript with alert() but with different functionality: If you do alert('foo'), you get a box with text ...

Lively Kernel - Another waste of time?

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Sun Labs recently introduced Lively Kernel, which is an attempt to treat web applications in a similar way as desktop applications are programming-wise. The Lively Kernel places a special emphasis on treating web applications as real applications, as opposed to the document-oriented nature ...

Blocking ads on websites is bad behavior

Sunday, October 7th, 2007

Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera A lot of people really dislike any ads on a website. This shows in browsers too: Opera added a content blocker and Firefox has AdBlock and probably at least two other plugins for getting rid of ads. Some people even use separate ...