In recent days I've noticed some very strange referral URLs on my top referrals link list. A few sites who definitely have no links somehow appear to have sent me a noticeable amount of users. How is this possible you ask? Well, it seems someone had figured out that blogging software does not perform any validation on the referrals (such as check if the link in present on the sending site) and with trivial scripts generate fake hits that quite easily get said site to appear on the top referrals list. Blocking such things is quite difficult since the scammers fake genuine browser signatures and in some cases even setup dummy pages that have the link back to the original site. More over @ least one of those scammers seems to be using anonymous proxies to prevent IP filtering. Quite frankly outside of manual referral validation or a referral whitelist I see no fool proof way to prevent this from happening. Since I don't have the time or interest invest time into manual validation or creation of whitelists, I am...

Recently I had opportunity to obtain a Gmail account (thanks James). For those you living under a rock it's the latest fad as far as free e-mail is concerned from the same people who brought us Google. The biggest attraction of Gmail is the 1,000 megabyte storage box and saner(?) monetization model that will rely upon the same text ads you may have seen near Google's search results, rather then big bulky banners and/or popup variations. At this time the system is in beta stage, so to get an account you first must be invited by an existing member, but only some members can invite (I am not one of them, so don't bother asking). While my initial plan for this account was to use it as the handler for mail comming to my @php.net account, which now a days comprises mostly of spam and windows viruses. Rather then have my server perform slow analysis on some 2-3 thousand messages, I'd let Google's Gmail do it for me. Since most of the e-mail going to that account ended up being removed by spam filters, which seem t...

Yey! Yet another stable release of FUDforum is out. A bit more of e-mail fine tuning, this time aimed at making sure all mail clients can properly parsed encoded e-mails. Updated Chinese & French translations and the English translation undergone major grammatical revisions. The poll can now be position anywhere inside the message via the use of the {POLL} tag. Stricter URL session checks etc... All users are encourages to upgrade.

A friend of mine gave me a good idea of making a wrapper around the sendfile() syscall that can be used for very quick data transfers between socket and file descriptors. This syscall in some instances can replace 3 other syscalls (seek, read, write) when you need to write a portion of 1 file into another file. Another words a very neat functionality that I could see myself using in my own applications, such as the message file compactor for FUDforum who's entire job is to seek and write data from one file to another. Further tests have shown that this syscall can also be used to create a much faster copy() that compared to PHP's current copy mechanism is about 2x faster, not a bad improvement if I do say so myself. However, when it came to testing the code in my primary development box it just would not work, neither would any sendfile example I could find on the net that dealt with transferring data across two files. After much searching on Google, IRC and reviewing the relevant kernel sources I've discover...

There are a number of tricks that you can use to squeeze the last bit of performance from your scripts. These tricks won't make your applications much faster, but can give you that little edge in performance you may be looking for. More importantly it may give you insight into how PHP internals works allowing you to write code that can be executed in more optimal fashion by the Zend Engine. Please keep in mind that these are not the 1st optimization you should perform. There are some far easier and more performance advantageous tricks, however once those are exhausted and you don't feel like turning to C, these maybe tricks you would want to consider. So, without further ado... 1) When working with strings and you need to check that the string is either of a certain length you'd understandably would want to use the strlen() function. This function is pretty quick since it's operation does not perform any calculation but merely return the already known length of a string available in the zval structure (in...