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Last night, I spent the evening with a bunch of PHP developers in DC. This informal gathering in the DC-PHP community is a regular occurrence known as the DC PHP Beverage Subgroup – Virginia Chapter. There is also a DC-chapter that meets once a month as well. These two informal gatherings are for the sole purpose of getting together, enjoying some food and cold beverages and generally just talking about anything and everything. It complements the official DC PHP meeting which is generally a technical presentation directly related to PHP.

So last night, we were yukking it up about how PHP has re-invoked the GOTOoperator, a programming mechanism that, we thought, died with the BASIC programming language of yore. Coding in BASIC was very procedural and not very rich in its abilities. More after the jump.

I’ve been watching my Technorati ranking over the past few weeks and I’m happy to say it’s been climbing. In other news, I’ve been wanting to learn Applescripting. So, I put the two things together this evening and came up with my first practical AppleScript.
The script does one thing. It queries Technorati for my ranking, [...]

As promised, today I begin an open-ended series on WordPress plugin security. How do you know what is secure? What tell tale signs might there be? How to train an untrained eye on code? But before we begin, we must establish a premise.
There are many kinds of security vulnerabilities. The most common vulnerabilities today lie [...]

For more than a week now, I have been aware of a very serious security flaw in a popular WordPress plugin. When a security flaw is discovered, there are a number of steps that must be taken to defend against a malicious hacker exploiting the flaw.

Secure affected sites against such an attack.
Notify software developer of [...]

Every so often in open source circles, the issue of the GPL (General Public License) comes up. Most open source projects are released under this license as it allows for the freedom of open source and freely distributed source code, with the adequate protections of law.
Essentially, the GPL says that by recieving a GPL [...]

I’ve been writing code for the past 6 years. In certain areas (PHP, MySQL), I consider myself beyond proficient and more in line with “fluent”. Other areas I have no real experience: Ruby on Rails, .NET, Java.
For most of those 6 years, I’ve freelanced with the thought that if I could jusst generate [...]