Came across a rather interesting article by IBM on how to convert IE specific web apps to work with Mozilla. Aside from the obvious, by listing the different approaches each browser adopts it serves as an excellent resource for making a web app cross-browser complaint. I hope they will update article with the other two commonly (relatively) used browsers, Konqueror/Safari (KTHML Engine) and Opera.

With the release of PHP 5.1.0b3 the dev tree has been closed for new features, allowing only bug fixes to facilitate the stabilization of the code for the upcoming (don't ask me when) 5.1.0 stable. This however created a unfortunate situation where PHP does not have a development tree for feature enchantments, so any improvements remain lingering on developer's boxes until development tree is once again available... In the past few weeks I've been doing some work, which involved using parse_url() and cURL extension quite a bit and in the process came up with few improvements. parse_url() tweak [ patch ] This patch adds a 2nd optional parameter to parse_url() which allows the function to return a particular URL component rather then an array. Ex: [php] $host = parse_url("http://www.ilia.ws/gallery/", PHP_URL_HOST); echo $host; // will print www.ilia.ws [/php] cURL improvements [ patch ] The patch does two things; first of all it allows the user to retrieve the request sent by cURL to the server. I...

In the past few years FUDforum has grown quite a bit in both the offered functionality and the user base. However, aside from a few tweaks the layout of the forum has remained largely unchanged. While the current layout works quite well for most people, there is a clear want to update the layout to something more interesting. Hence this contest, the goal being to devise a new better, faster and prettier default theme (layout) for the forum, which would improve the user experience. Aside from a new and improved default template some additional templates maybe included in the stock distribution to give forum deployers greater flexibility as far as appearance out of the box. So, if you have some spare time and would like to help to improve FUDforum please submit your design entries, more information can be found here: http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=26425

A few days ago I received a bug report from a FUDforum user about his forum members having trouble staying logged in when using the AOL 9 browser, herein to be referred to as POS. According to him after logging in and browsing a few pages, the user would suddenly find themselves being logged out from the FUDforum. This happened on seemingly random pages, with no common element in between making tracking down the problem ever so enjoyable. The following is a nightmarish tale of me trying to resolve this problem, which hopefully serve as a clue to the developers who encounter the same issue. At first I thought the issue maybe related to the fact that POS, a hacked up IE that always goes through AOL proxies when it comes to fetching the content. These proxies change in between requests (load balancer?) so during the same session a user may go through any number of different IP addresses, which AOL has a fair number of. 64.12.96.0/19, 149.174.160.0/20 152.163.240.0/21,152.163.248.0/22 152.163.252.0/23,152...

In the past few days I've been testing a number of my own applications and scripts as well as various bits and pieces of applications written by others that I use, using an automated scanning tool I have written. One particular issue I came across, common to all applications is the inevitable "path disclosure vulnerability". The premise behind this so called vulnerability is that remote attackers by specifying certain value can make the script report it's own location on disk. Theoretically this combined with another vulnerability could be used to do something or rather then potentially could be bad. As you can probably tell, I don't see this as a something to be terribly concerned about in most cases. To demonstrate consider the following, most PHP function that take strings as parameters, like our favorite validation functions such as htmlspecialchars(), addslashes(), and so on will raise warnings when values they are passed are arrays rather then strings. This means that to get the path of the script,...