2012-12-27

A little inspiration from a fellow Greek

Just ran across this short video which is basically an interview with Less Rain founder Vasillios Alexiou a fellow Greek ... enjoy :)

Flex lives!

We haven't heard much Flex news lately but as of this month Apache took Flex out of incubation and made it a top-level project! Apache Flex now has also reached version 4.9 and contains the following changes:
  • New localizations for Australian, British, Canadian, Greek, Switzerland (German) and Portuguese
  • The SDK natively supports the Flash Player versions 10.2 through 11.5. Previous versions were locked to a single version.
  • Better support for Vectors, including new VectorList and VectorCollection classes.
  • Inclusion of the new PostalCodeFormatter and PostalCodeValidator components for more consistent internationalization.
  • The TLF (Text Frame Framework) was updated to version 3.0.33, and is now baked in the SDK. No need to download it separately.
  • Support for Java 7 for compiling the SDK.
Also Spark versions of the following components are coming in a future version: Alert, ColorPicker, HDividerGroup, VDividerGroup, Menu, MenuBar, and ProgressBar.

Turn OFF register_globals in PHP

Having now used two different hosting companies for PHP web site hosting, I would like to quick describe the configuration issue that have occured with both hosting companies. They both set PHP's register_globals configuration variable to On, which can have undesirable effects on your application and make you easily second guess why your application is behaving in a certain way.

When register_globals is set to On, this means that your variables are registered globally and available on every page. So if you declare a variable called $userCount and assign it some value in a page called script1.php and then have another variable with the same name ($userCount) but with a different meaning on another page (say script2.php), it will initially take the value assigned when script1.php was executed!

So let's say script1.php performed the following assignment:

$userCount = 5;

When script2.php executes, if it also has a variable called $userCount, its initial value will be 5! Very confusing!

So take my advice, if you can configure PHP yourself on your web hosting site, then set register_globals to Off, or ask your web hosting company to do this for you. 

Also note that the register_globals configuration variable has been removed as of PHP version 5.4.