I’ve been meaning to get an SSL certificate for the blog for some time, and prompted by how cheap they now are, I have finally set it up. All HTTP links should still be valid, but will redirect to their HTTPS equivalent. The switch is mainly to protect my credentials when I am logging on […]

I’ve been working as a software engineer for some 14 years, and having taken nine months out to work on a side-project full-time, I am now looking to start PHP/web freelancing. I have an intro page for what I offer; this partner article is a rambling rendition of the how. My purpose here is to […]

Introduction My experience of VirtualBox on Linux is mostly excellent, but there are a few areas in which host data would be good to bring into guests, for the purposes of updating informational widgets. For example, I’d like to see CPU activity and CPU core temperature in a guest VM, so I don’t need to […]

Some years ago I started work on a JavaScript implementation of a bad writing filter for Stack Overflow. I have some code for that sitting around, and one day I may even publish it! I find myself wanting to play around with the Stack Exchange API, partly as an excuse to learn Laravel, but sadly […]

One of the features missing from Stack Overflow is to receive a notification when a post that you’ve edited is subsequently edited again. This is useful where a post owner decides they disagree with an edit, and they wish to assert that their chatty tone, misspellings and extended downvote complaints really do belong (the community […]

As all social media users know, occasional time spent checking your various web accounts can add up during the day, and not all of it is productive. I use Twitter and Stack Overflow, primarily to help new developers, but the nature of these sites is that a new software library or interesting news story appears […]

I’m presently working on a project that handles the import of HTML from external sources, much of which will be fed through HTMLPurifier to ensure the HTML I render for the user is valid and safe. However, while pondering ways I can make this safe, I wondered how to find out quickly if some malicious […]

I’m currently working with the Ordnance Survey Code-Point Open data, which contains the 1.7M UK postcodes and their geo-coordinates. To import it into MySQL, I convert the Easting and Northing units into latitude and longitude, TRUNCATE the database table, and INSERT them in. This is rather slow, so I’m trying to speed it up by […]

I’ve a simple idea for a PHP information tool, very useful for beginners. If someone is asking about their PHP configuration on their system, they can just issue a command like this: > wget https://phpinfosite.com/installer.php | php in the same manner as Composer (and adjusted suitably for Windows). This will then give them a PHP […]