script

The other day I needed to copy a Drupal project from my source folder to another folder, so rather than manually copy the files I decided to create a Phing script that would do it for me in one go. This Phing script will export your Drupal project into another directory, change the database credentials and create zip and tar files of the project. The first thing to do is create a properties, here is the contents of that file.

There is a script knocking about on the internet at the moment that allows an attacker to run some code that will bring your Wordpress blog to its knees. This will more than likely cause your host to get annoyed as well.

What it does it performs a trackback request to the file wp-trackback.php, but it sends a massive (over 200,000 characters) string that Wordpress will take at face value and accept as a legitimate trackback. The first time this is run Wordpress will write it to the database, but the every time after that it will run a select query to see if the trackback exists. Even though this isn't a legitimate trackback Wordpress will still process it on every request, causing a massive overhead as each large string is processed.

One solution is to simply stop access to the offending file by using an Apache rule in your .htaccess file to prevent all access to this file.

Yesterday I talked about creating some simple Flex elements in your application. Today I will introduce a new element called Script.

The Script element, if you haven't already guessed is used to run your application function and should be contained within the Application element. You can either put script inline like this.

<mx:Script>
// some code here
</mx:Script>

Or you can use the source attribute and link it with an external ActionScript source file.

Use the following snippet to convert any jpeg image into the equivalent image in ASCII format. It works by loading an image using the PHP GD2 library function ImageCreateFromJpeg() and then figures out the height and width of it. It then uses these values to loop through every pixel in the image and figures out the colour of that pixel. It uses this value to create a "span" element that uses the text colour of a # to change the colour of the text.

An additional time (and space) saver for this function is that it detects any pixels that are just off white and simply displays a   character instead.