papasian.org - lifehacking

Using IPv6

Danny — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:28:14 +0000

I've gone ahead and deployed IPv6 on the server that hosts this site, as well as my desktop. I'm using 6to4 to tunnel IPv6 over the existing IPv4 connection.

In case you haven't heard by now - I'm moving!

Danny — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:05:35 +0000

In case you haven't heard yet, I'm leaving my current job at The Chronicle and am accepting a position back in Pittsburgh.

I'm transitioning to a perl and catalyst environment, which I'm excited about. Been working my way through a catalyst book, so hopefully I'll be able to hit the ground running.

PHP texis plugin

Danny — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:02:35 +0000

Several months back I wrote a hackish PHP extension to natively connect and talk with Thunderstone's texis SQL daemon and now it's just sitting around unused and unfinished. What I can't figure out is whether there's anyone out there who'd actually want such a beast - we were only thinking about going that route because we had a poorly deployed search index running out of texis, and replacing vortex with PHP seemed like a good idea.

Exploit written for recently discovered PHP-APC vuln

Danny — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:55:16 +0000

So I discovered a vulnerability recently (see the previous article) in APC and disclosed it, and it's sat there for a few days without feedback... so I went ahead and wrote a proof of concept exploit for it.

Vulnerability dicovered in PHP APC module

Danny — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:58:09 +0000

UPDATE: CVE-2008-1488 has been opened for this vulnerability

So I was noticing apache segfaulting today when I was accidentally attempting to include() a Savant3 Error object. Attached strace, and saw that it was trying to stat the string representation of Savant3 (woops!) and was getting back -1 and name too long as the errorno, but then shortly after it was segfaulting.

sneak peek: wizDom - manipulating the DOM with the ease of jQuery from PHP

Danny — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 23:37:06 +0000

What do you get if you take the ease of jQuery, the standards compliance of XPath, and implement it in PHP? wizDom!

(This is my first post in some time - I've been busy! Since the last post, I've migrated the site from wordpress to drupal, and there are some outstanding character encoding and lack-of-attachment problems I need to attend to. Hopefully I'll get to that soon...)

Excitement for plainTemplates

Danny — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 08:34:26 +0000

I wanted to express my excitement about plainTemplates today.

The plainTemplates approach for template generation is to have the template be plain HTML, and then to have a PHP processor fill certain parts of the document with dynamic content. It's familiar territory for anyone who has written an AJA[X?] application in recent times.

It makes a lot of sense for anyone who is used to adding javascript entirely at the head of a page instead of by adding javascript throughout the HTML, and I suspect that, properly implemented, it could not only save time, but increase the hardiness of web applications.

A simple RSS to SQL generator

Danny — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:03:12 +0000

Was looking for a simple way to put entries from an RSS feed into a database the other day, and didn't like what I found via a quick google. So, I put together a very short and to the point script using SimpleXML and the php mysql driver:

<?php $ch = curl_init($argv[1]); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $rss = new SimpleXMLElement(curl_exec($ch));

// fill these next two rows in!
$dbLink = mysql_connect('localhost', 'username', 'xxxxx');
mysql_select_db('xxxxx', $dbLink);

foreach($rss->channel->item as $blah) {

Drupal module performance

Danny — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 07:50:56 +0000

Now that chx has beaten me to it, I'm going to profile and patch and find all the low hanging fruit to cache in drupal. Here's an improvement to the module_hook function.

drupal theme performance

Danny — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 05:44:51 +0000

I've been playing with callgrind, xdebug, and kcachegrind to profile drupal. I'll go over the details of my results in a future blog entry, but if you want the short story just check out Rasmus's directions. Rasmus has given lots of talks with similar names to "Getting Rich with PHP5" and I'll leave it to the reader to google and find slides from this talk.

Profiling is an iterative process, and after awhile I might blog about it with something more concrete. But for now, I have early results.