All entries of my technical and business blog

In my posting about Integrating PHPDocumentor into Eclipse, I touched on External Tools a bit. The combination of external batch files, the external tools extra options and the console has made my life easier. I’m using two new additional batch files that I’ve written myself and integrated as external tools. These include automated SVN release update and resource refresh and Apache application control (for those who can’t run apache as a service on w32):

I generally don’t like to be tied to a specific IDE when developing. Additionally, I like to have my choice in using tools to manage my source control (tortoisesvn, svn command line, etc). I just think this is the open-source way - it seems to be just a more free-spirited way of developing and managing projects. With this in mind, I’ve been looking for ways to integrate my SVN into my current IDE (Eclipse PDT) but not limit myself from accessing my SVN repositories from the file system. I’ve found a great plugin to help with this - so let’s go over the specifics:

Today, Todd (one of the consultants that (“the triangle”) uses) called me up to share a bit of a reminder and also tell me about an issue in the code that was in one of our older modules. There was an issue with the strtotime function converting a year to a timestamp.

After I installed Eclipse PDT, I had two project navigators. I closed the native one and kept open the PHP Explorer. PHP Explorer showed my php, css, js, etc, files. It also puts a plus sign to the left of the filenames. Using this view, we can expand the file to see the classes and functions inside of the file without opening it.

So many phishing attempts lately are just purely pathetic - easy to guess and figure out, mis spelling and grammar issues and just poorly fashioned websites. Although these will work on the novice web surfer, can a clever criminal actually create a phishing site/scenario that can trap the experienced members in your IT department?

The following is the result of a research project I had done about phishing. Its some best practices and suggestions based upon information from leading security professionals such as white hat security, McAfee, etc. A combination of e-mail security, authentication methods and corporate identity standards are among the suggestions… Here are the top solutions and methods of securing against Phishing:

The last time I downloaded Eclipse PDT for PHP, (located at zend.com/pdt), everything was great. That is, until I wanted to run the updates. It stopped with an error and would never update my PDT. Luckily, one of the consultants from (“the triangle”) had the same issues - and he was able to tell me what was up:

Although I’d like to pretend that my side jobs always are pure programming, but alas, not the case. There are times when the users send word docs to me and I have to convert them to html. Now, even these word docs might have spelling mistakes - but that’s just not ‘acceptable’ to them - I should correct those issues too! Whats up with that? But anyway, I now have a good plugin to do spellchecking in eclipse - that won’t break on code (well not sorta…). This supports spell checking as you type, language specific options, and more. At any rate, let’s check out eclipse’s built in spelling feature, and then see why this plugin I found is better:

Round 2, and the final round, is complete! The previous article here talked about my initial findings. Well, I was able to try some proofs of concepts on my javascript finding, and I put together our top level recommendations for (”the triangle”). Let’s see:

I have been writing code snippets in this wordpress blog alot - and I wanted to possibly have the code highlighted. One of the things that happened with code highlighting plugins I’ve noticed is that the code has to be valid (I’ve posted invalid PHP because stupid wordpress kept eating it) or one type of code (I post javascript/html combinations, with ellipses and such…), and so I finally decided to not highlight my code - unless I could find a really cool code highlighting plugin. But along the way, I discovered some really cool tools that might be useful.