Can we get a quickfire Q&A thread?

[Re321]

"Quickfire Q&A Thread"

 

That would work until Oni-kun finds the topic and ventures it off topic with one of his rants. Which is most likely this has never been done. It would be too easy to go off topic, like I just have done for this thread. Soon enough Thorpe may come along and lock it for going so far off topic

 

i personally think it's a great idea. what is up your ass this time premiso?

[salathe]

IRC just seems most familiar for it, a lot of good posters hang around there.

Firstly, IRC generally only answers the question for the individual doing the asking. A forum thread will preserve the questions and answers in perpetuity for everyone to discover. Secondly, I've no idea which IRC you've been hanging around in but hardly anyone hangs around in there and those that do are idly 95% of the time: it is a common occurrence for people to drop in for a quicky bit of help and be met with silence, even over long periods of time.

[ignace]

"Quickfire Q&A Thread"

 

That would work until Oni-kun finds the topic and ventures it off topic with one of his rants. Which is most likely this has never been done. It would be too easy to go off topic, like I just have done for this thread. Soon enough Thorpe may come along and lock it for going so far off topic

 

i personally think it's a great idea. what is up your ass this time premiso?

 

I can't believe you actually wanna know..

[oni-kun]

Firstly, IRC generally only answers the question for the individual doing the asking. A forum thread will preserve the questions and answers in perpetuity for everyone to discover. Secondly, I've no idea which IRC you've been hanging around in but hardly anyone hangs around in there and those that do are idly 95% of the time: it is a common occurrence for people to drop in for a quicky bit of help and be met with silence, even over long periods of time.

 

I know that, Ignore the reality and look at the concept that there are people at times here or there, and what would be "ideal" is atleast someone there some time in the week to help someone, and if there is, that person may be able to get a few things down on the more personal side (save for pm'ing), There may never be many people there as it's not convenient to, but it's the only thing that will be constructed in reality of its kind. I doubt they'll be some quick Q&A thread, unless it were purged, but that would be even greater a mundane task than "creating" it.

 

There are possibly infinite ideas, with atleast with one or two grains of respect or value or truth to them, but the reality of that is quite possibly none of them will be looked at as they skew from basic motives of a forum, To post, to get lost in time, to be discovered by another generation of people who may be interested in programming, bla bla ..

[TeddyKiller]

"Quickfire Q&A Thread"

 

That would work until Oni-kun finds the topic and ventures it off topic with one of his rants. Which is most likely this has never been done. It would be too easy to go off topic, like I just have done for this thread. Soon enough Thorpe may come along and lock it for going so far off topic

 

i personally think it's a great idea. what is up your ass this time premiso?

 

I can't believe you actually wanna know..

 

I think he's hiding something.. Tut tut.. we won't tell anyone Re321!

[webmaster1]

Though I understand the concerns about accessibility and unnecessary repetition, I still assert that many a novice - moderate PHP practitioners wouldn't have the audacity or shamelessness to start a thread in it's own right to simply ask what the difference between <?php and <? is. An archived FAQ style repository could be periodically updated with the crème of the select quickfire Q&A thread if the aforementioned concerns are all that, erm, concerning (damn my apathetic lexicon).

 

Rather than musing about how and if such a facility should exist, we should instead reflect on the fact that the questions simply may not be asked in lieu of the said facilitation. Hence, the maxim, the only stupid questions, are the questions that aren't asked.

 

The waffling is contagious. Onwards with the Q&A!

 

What's your preferred approach in terms of dealing with multiple independent forms on the one page? i.e. post or an if statement.

 

Who does md5 and hash string comparisons protect more? The end-user or the administrator?

 

Is the code of an included file relative to where it's included in or from?

 

Let's say you work in a company whose internal applications are predominately ASP based. What three points would you rattle off to entice them to PHP?

 

Can PHP be used for unethical hacking to any great effect? Everything I've read seems to be about Linux and packet sniffing.

[Daniel0]

What's your preferred approach in terms of dealing with multiple independent forms on the one page? i.e. post or an if statement.

 

I don't understand that question. What exactly is there to deal with?

 

Who does md5 and hash string comparisons protect more? The end-user or the administrator?

 

I suppose that depends on the applications and circumstances of the hashing. MD5 doesn't protect anything in and by itself.

 

Is the code of an included file relative to where it's included in or from?

 

What does it mean for code to be "relative to [something]"?

 

Let's say you work in a company whose internal applications are predominately ASP based. What three points would you rattle off to entice them to PHP?

 

Why would I? If all their existing code is written using ASP and their developers are specialized in ASP, why would they want to spend massive amounts of resources on switching to another language?

 

Can PHP be used for unethical hacking to any great effect? Everything I've read seems to be about Linux and packet sniffing.

 

Of course it can. Look up RFI (Remote File Inclusion) for instance. Any general-purpose programming language can be used for "unethical hacking".

[webmaster1]

I don't understand that question. What exactly is there to deal with?

 

My bad, let me paraphrase. I read through a tutorial that used if, if else for isset though I use post myself. I was just wondering if one approach is agreebly superior to the other or if it really depends on what's to be achieved.

 

What does it mean for code to be "relative to [something]"?

 

I'm thinking in terms of server/web root paths. Then again, I could should will just go and find out.

 

If all their existing code is written using ASP and their developers are specialized in ASP, why would they want to spend massive amounts of resources on switching to another language?

 

For no other reason other than the fact that I'm not familiar with ASP  . This prompts another question:

 

Does the left/right paradigm exist between PHP and ASP? i.e. are their fanboys who hate their counterparts a la Mac vs PC? I already understand that hybrids exist.

 

Briefly, in what way is PHP better than ASP and vice versa?

 

Of course it can. Look up RFI (Remote File Inclusion) for instance. Any general-purpose programming language can be used for "unethical hacking".

 

Heh, heh. A Russian apparently exploited this guys website using RFI. I'm laughing because of how he immediately decided to ban all of Russia from his site.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1743122

 

 

[KevinM1]

I feel you need to be a bit more precise - there's a difference between classic ASP and ASP.NET.  I wouldn't recommend the former to anyone as it's old deprecated technology.  That said, it still crops up from time to time.

 

It's hard comparing ASP.NET to PHP as they don't really match up in a 1-to-1 way.  ASP.NET is comprised of two parts - server controls and the code behind the scenes.

 

Server controls are the building blocks of a page - list boxes, dynamic tables with built-in sorting and pagination, calenders, etc.  They can be added to the page in a drag-and-drop fashion, or written using proprietary markup.  The actual code that runs behind the scenes to get everything to work is written in either Visual Basic (ugly language) or C# (wonderful language).  In the end, you get a naturally tiered product - the server controls lie on top, giving the user something to interact with.  The code behind is the middle layer, responding to changes in the server controls.  The bottom layer is the data store, usually a database.

 

Traditional ASP.NET web form projects have their pros and cons.  There's a steep learning curve.  ASP.NET can be a pain to deploy,  For smaller sites, the bulk of it all may not be worth it.  That said, server controls make it easy for non-programmers to add to the structure of a site (this feature tends to be leveraged by CMS systems), some of the server controls are powerful, and the code behind files can be a mix of both VB and C#, which is great for large projects where one coder may be comfortable in one language but not the other.  Finally, there's the benefit of the .NET framework itself.  It's powerful, flexible, and since it's divided into namespaces, you only use what you need of it.

 

There's more: ASP.NET MVC.  Relatively new, it allows one to write ASP.NET apps in a much more web-friendly way.  I haven't had a chance to play with it a lot, but it reminds me of Code Igniter and Kohana.  Really cool.

 

This probably reads like an advertisement for Microsoft.  It's not.  PHP has some clear benefits over ASP.NET.  First, it's incredibly easy to learn.  Second, its documentation blows MSDN out of the water.  Finally, its easier and cheaper to deploy.

 

There does tend to be an ASP.NET vs. PHP conflict, but it's really a Microsoft vs. open source conflict.  I can see the merit in both, and as a developer, I have no issues learning and using either.  IMO, it's worth your while to be familiar with a multitude of languages.  Now if only Visual Studio 2010 had a PHP extension...

[TeddyKiller]

Why do some functions have functions that do the same thing?

eg: Implode() and join()

They both do the same thing.. I think explode() and split() do too. Not sure though.

[seventheyejosh]

Explode just splits by a delimiter like a comma. Split splits by a regular expression and is deprecated. I believe preg_split is encouraged in its place.

 

But ya, join is an alias of implode.

[cags]

Aliases are generally used to create a similarity to another language to make life easier for people, or to maintain backwards compatibility when they decide a different name is more apt/descriptive.

[webmaster1]

@Nightslyr: Thanks for the fantastic ASP 101. It's a lot clearer in my mind now.

 

Is there a way of generating the structural code of a mysql table to quickly create a copy of that table in another database.

 

i.e. I want the code that was used to create any given table.

[webmaster1]

If I switch an integer field to UNSIGNED ZEROFILL can it have undesirable effects on my pages that have existing queries based on this field?

[Daniel0]

That depends entirely on how you use it. You'll always get strings back from your database and these strings will be left-padded with zeroes if they don't fit the display length. If you echo them directly without manipulating them, some of the numbers will not be padded while they were not before. Whether or not that's "undesirable" is up to you of course.

[webmaster1]

Cheers, D.

[Ken2k7]

Well, the IRC server is currently down. For now you may join ##phpfreaks on irc.freenode.net.

That's actually useless because the channel is moderated.

[Daniel0]

Well, the IRC server is currently down. For now you may join ##phpfreaks on irc.freenode.net.

That's actually useless because the channel is moderated.

 

It's not down anymore. I brought it back up a few days after that post.

[TeddyKiller]

Well, the IRC server is currently down. For now you may join ##phpfreaks on irc.freenode.net.

That's actually useless because the channel is moderated.

 

It's not down anymore. I brought it back up a few days after that post.

I noticed this a few days ago, although if you could of bought it back up all this time.. why did you wait until everyone moaned about it Just asking.

[webmaster1]

What prevents hackers from directly accessing the source code in my php files? e.g. dbinfo.php

 

If a page does not consist of any code to be parsed as html do I need to apply a session check to it à la ACL?

[Ken2k7]

Put the file outside of www root.

[webmaster1]

Put the file outside of www root.

 

Does turning off indexing of my site directories make a whole lot of difference in terms of security (aside from not listing the contents)?

[Alex]

Disabling directory browsing is always a good idea.

[Daniel0]

Well, the IRC server is currently down. For now you may join ##phpfreaks on irc.freenode.net.

That's actually useless because the channel is moderated.

 

It's not down anymore. I brought it back up a few days after that post.

I noticed this a few days ago, although if you could of bought it back up all this time.. why did you wait until everyone moaned about it Just asking.

 

I didn't because I couldn't. I needed my SSH account reactivated.