They always say the best way to learn is by making mistakes – and that is certainly true with web hosts. In the past 10 years I’ve had 6 different webhosts. Out of those, only 2 of them are actually decent. It’s a sad fact that I’ve spent more time with bad hosts than with...

SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is the newest attempt by the RIAA/MPAA/Media Lobbyists Congress to control Internet piracy. The way it all works now is like this: If a site infringes on a copyright, the content owner will send in a complaint, called a DMCA (Digital Mellinium Copyright Act) Notice to the website’s...

Many broadband ISPs these days use something called DHCP to provide their customers with IP addresses. DHCP works by creating a pool of addresses which can be given out to devices that request one. For the most part you will usually have a router that connects to your cable or dsl modems – so you...

Back in October Google announced that they would be enabling SSL search by default… at least for Google account owners. What this means is every ounce of information is (at least theoretically *see below) encrypted while it goes over the tubes between Google’s servers and your computer or mobile devices. Traditionally SSL was only used...

There have always been many different ways of setting up Apache and php. Whether it is with SuPHP, a multi-process-module, or simply using the Apache module, each way has pros and cons. Up until a few days ago I usually stuck with SuPHP – as it was the easiest to setup. However, I got adventurous...

As you probably already know, web application security has been an increasingly hot topic over the past decade. From simple SQL injections to full-on website defacings, many websites, big or small, have been affected by lackluster security. If you use a prebuilt system such as WordPress the biggest thing you can do is update the...

Linux OSes make it insanely easy to bind multiple IP addresses to a single network interface. This is mainly useful for servers, where you often have one ethernet NIC with several several static IPs. In Debian-based OSes such as Ubuntu, all it takes is a changing one file and running one command to add a...

In an effort to make things easier to manage I’ll be switching over a whole bunch of server stuff. I still do a little bit of freelancing on the side and I host a few of my clients’ apps on my server (well VPS), and it is slowly becoming a nightmare to manage it all....

In my work I always find myself stupidly writing code that first tries to insert data, then tries updating it if the insert failed. Or better yet, doing a select to see if it exists, then doing an insert or an update. The sad part is, I know I’m not the only one doing it...

I recently began thinking about the misconceptions of the MacDefender malware for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system and I came to one big conclusion – most people don’t know nerd jargon. Reading several online forums people often mistakenly believe MacDefender is a “virus”, when in reality it is a simple static trojan. Expanding upon...