After months and months of research, I finally broke down a few weeks ago and purchased a smart phone. When I first decided to replace my aging Motorola RAZR, I wanted something that didn’t cost a fortune and provided a basic ‘net experience when i was away from my Mac. After playing around with a [...]

When I run through my security checklist after building a host, one of the first things I change is the login fail delay. This option allows you to force a user to wait a given number of microseconds after a login failure before being able to try another password. For applications that perform brute force [...]

I currently live in an apartment, and was looking for a cheap and easy solution to sound off an alert if a door or window was opened. Most home security systems are really tailored for houses, and I wasn’t real found of paying $30 – $40 per month to monitor a relatively secure apartment. After [...]

Most admins have to support system logins in one form or another. These logins include everything from application service accounts, operations accounts, SysAdmin accounts and pretty much everything else you can think of. Some of these accounts may not need to access your servers 24/7, and you may want to limit the timeframes when users [...]

There are so many different hardware sensors on machines now. If you have a machine with a iLOM (like Sun’s line of x86 hardware) you can probe all of this information over the network using ipmitool and direct it at the iLOM. Usage for ipmitool over the network: $ ipmitool -I lan -H (ip address [...]

I've just posted the PHP OCI8 1.4.2 and OCI8 1.4.3 extensions on PECL. The change notes
are here. PHP OCI8 is the recommended database driver for using Oracle Database in the PHP scripting language.

Hi all,
I found this application that allows you to track your blood pressure. The cool thing is that you can actually send in your BP readings with SMS or email so you never have to write it down...



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I’ve been considering writing a PayPal desktop application for Windows for some time now. I’ve seen a couple of attempts at this done before, as well as web systems that utilize PayPal’s API. I haven’t seen a definitive piece of software that handles your PayPal account operations from your desktop. PayPal’s API doesn’t support everything [...]

I’m Adam Palmer, and I’m a UK based PHP Programmer. I represent APNIC Solutions Ltd – we’re a well established London, UK based firm with a massive amount of experience building clean and powerful solutions for web businesses. We specialize in secure, high traffic applications, specifically ecommerce. As head of the firm, I come from [...]

There are a bunch of scripting language sessions at the Oracle
Develop and JavaOne parts of Oracle OpenWorld extravaganza. This starts
on Sunday 19 September 2010 at various locations in San Francisco.

The easiest way to explore sessions is to go to the Content Catalog,
click Advanced Search, and use the Free Text field to enter keywords
your interested in e.g. PHP

Those of you that follow us on twitter/ORCL_Linux probably already saw this.   HP and Dell yesterday announced that they'll be certifying and reselling Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle Solaris on their x86 servers.

On Tuesday I participated as a student in the first Oracle Tuxedo
Virtual Developer Day. The VDD will be repeated
in various timezones & languages as shown on the schedule.

Check out http://www.dealsnear.me a brand new site to find, post and follow local deals in your area. Visit the site, select your market, and find local offers, all for free.

Anthony Tuinga has released the cx_Oracle 5.0.4 Python driver for Oracle Database.

Details are in his Sourceforge mail announcement.

I’ve been using a really clever device for the last few years that a lot of people seem to be unaware exists. It’s an ethernet over powerlines adapter – one such example is the Devolo dLAN. In a nutshell, you plug it into the mains, and connect the Ethernet socket to your network device. You [...]

Yesterday, I offered a free website security scan. Why would you need a scan? I went into a little detail then, but I’d like to expand on what I wrote about, that being my offering my services as a PHP programmer. If you’re an online merchant, your server needs to be PCI compliant. Otherwise, you [...]

As a PHP Programmer with 8+ years experience now, I’ve always specialized in web security, security standards, and secure programming. In the say 300+ websites that I’ve dealt with in the past, at least 200 have been vulnerable to some sort of moderate to high risk attack. By high risk, I mean the steal your [...]

If you need a skilled website security consultant or PHP programmer, then consider me. Get in touch with me for a quote, and I’ll be more than happy to discuss what I can do for you. These days, your site can’t be too secure, and if you’re unsure of how to properly secure your site [...]

Yesterday, I discussed how you can redirect your HTML files to PHP files. Why is it important to do so? There are certainly no security concerns involved here, but you probably don’t want to lose your visitors who may bookmark certain pages, nor do you want to lose search engine traffic, because the HTML links [...]

Brian Hall, “Beej” wrote a cool tutorial explaining all the different aspects of traditional UNIX Inter Process Communication (IPC). He provides a lot of C code where you can compile / test these concepts yourself for a better understanding. The high level concepts in this tutorial would be great material to use [...]

Let’s say that you want to rename all your HTML files to PHP files to begin PHP Programming. However, you don’t want to lose all your inbound links to your HTML files. Here’s a quick and easy way to automatically convert all .html incoming addresses to .php files on your server, allowing you to switch [...]

I recently picked up a couple of Seagate 1.5TB hard drives, and based on the reviews I wanted to conduct an EXTENSIVE burn on each drive (a number of people have reported these drives suffered from the “click of death”). There are various tools to read and write data to a drive, but the most [...]

You may be browsing through my site, or maybe you came here because you’re looking for a PHP programmer. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Adam Palmer, and I’m a freelance website security consultant, developer, and, of course, a PHP programmer. I’m willing and able to do most any web, Linux, or hosting-related project. [...]

Recently, I was developing an API for a PHP application I’d built, to be utilized by other php programmers. Essentially, the php programmer passes a load of data to our API though a POST variable. This is as follows: $api->process($to_process, $data, $opt1, $opt2); $to_process is an array, as follows; $to_process = Array( Array(“FOO”, “BAR”, 1, [...]

While it’s all well and good to spend considerable time securing your PHP applications, there is something else that you can do, or rather not do. As a PHP programmer, I see people do one alarming thing: they download and install PHP applications from questionable sources. While there are a lot of honourable programmers who [...]

Wow, I can’t believe 999 blog entries have been posted to the prefetch blog! This blog started all the way back in October of 2004, and was a way for me to document technology as I learned it. I never thought people would actually read it, and am even more amazed that this site now [...]

While investigating a performance issue a few weeks back, I noticed that a couple of our Solaris hosts were sending 10s of thousands of DNS requests to our authoritative DNS servers. Since the application was broken and unable to cache DNS records, I decided to configure a local caching only DNS server to reduce load [...]

PHP is of course a valuable tool, and PHPMyAdmin is an equally valuable asset for those that don’t like command line administration. The problem is that because it’s a valuable tool, it’s a security exposure. As a website security consultant, I see the problem often: people don’t secure the one thing that, if accessed by [...]

Matty and I haven’t really spoken much about the current state of the OpenSolaris project. Oracle has been pretty tight with releasing any type of information about their plans / directions in which they will be taking Solaris / OpenSolaris. Its caused a lot fusteration.
The OpenSolaris Governing Board threw down the [...]