Top Down View

I still remember many a lunch spent with work colleagues during the early days of widespread internet adoption where we’d brain-storm a great new internet-related idea that would make us all millionaires. We’d come rushing back to our desks after lunch and immediately search to see if anybody had beaten us to the idea. Invariably [...]

The best ideas for web applications are usually ones where you identify a need of your own – something that you personally want. Something I’ve done ever since I first owned a car is to record my gas mileage – how many miles I get on each tankful and hence how many MPG (or l/100km) [...]

I’m going to write a new web application from scratch. Just for fun & with no intention of making my fortune from it (but it wouldn’t hurt if I did). I’ll be writing it in PHP – possibly plain PHP or possibly using a framework. I’ve done some work in the past with the Zend [...]

Hmmm – where HAVE I been? Well, the answer to that question is “right here!”. I guess the more accurate question is “what have I been doing?”. One of the things I’ve been doing is restarting my homebrewing. It’s been going very well indeed – incredibly enjoyable work producing 4 batches of beer, 1 of [...]

Last week I showed you how NOT to store your users’ passwords in your database: the biggest sin of all is storing them as plaintext and the ‘false sense of security’ solution is to apply a hashing algorithm to them. We saw that we can use a common hashing algorithm (the algorithm I used is [...]

I’m currently working on a PHP-based web site that stores member details – username, address, password etc in a database. Nothing unusual here… literally millions of web sites on the internet are doing exactly the same thing. But password storage is a dangerous area. Every month we hear about a high-profile web site being hacked into and [...]