Write your code correct the first time around

06/28/2012 How To Thoughts & Rants No Comments
After hanging around on StackOverflow.com for so long, I’ve started seeing bad programming patterns in the way new posters go about creating code, specifically using CodeIgniter, an MVC Framework. The code they write almost always shows a general lack of understanding of MVC design. A typical ‘bad programmer’ will create a controller, which would just call a view: and then their view would be jam packed with business logic, database queries, and very much a…

CodeIgniter URI routing issue with Controllers inside folders

12/08/2011 How To PHP 16 Comments
I’ve seen a lot of people requesting help on figuring out routing on CodeIgniter (2.1.X as of this entry). Which leads me to believe they don’t read the guide and confuse how routes are setup. So, Here is our scenario, We want to have a nice clean URL of: http://example.com/account/manage/4123245/jakub Up to this point, we are fine, we don’t panic, we say “Self, we can do this”. Then we confuse ourselves by organizing our controllers…

Enabling CSRF Protection in CodeIgniter for AJAX calls

12/06/2011 How To PHP 4 Comments
If you use CodeIgniter (CI) like me, you’ve probably read/heard about the CSRF protection that comes built into this great framework.  I typically kept ajax functionality (form submissions in this case) to a minimum as I wanted to focus more on development and finishing a project than prettying it up with ‘Web 2.0’ stuff. Well in a couple of my last projects I’ve ran smack into CSRF protection and how it impacts AJAX (as well…

No such thing as a “bandwidth” hog, finally proof!

12/04/2011 In the News Thoughts & Rants No Comments
Since the advent of broadband speed internet that was available to the consumer, we’ve all heard of the term ‘bandwidth hog’. The term always was used by your ISP to describe ‘evil’ consumers that ‘hogged’ wayyyy too much bandwidth for themselves, and thereby choking or reducing the speeds of everyone around them. I was always overly anal with these accusations (being an IT person and having some understanding of the underlying infrastructure), I would point…

VW Jetta MkIV (2003) Automatic door lock/unlock issue

11/27/2011 How To 1 Comment
If you are a Volkswagen Jetta owner like me, you might eventually be faced with having to jump start your car. In my case it happened after I left my lights on at work (for some reason, the 2003 Jetta does NOT beep when the lights are on, so it is very easy to forget them on). Also in my case, I had to jump my car after work to get it running properly again.…

Putty strange ‘Access Denied’ following username entry

10/31/2011 How To Linux SysAdmin No Comments
I don’t know about you, but I kept getting this since upgrading putty to 0.61, as 0.60 didn’t do so before. It would be an error of ‘Access Denied’ right after username entry, and all else would proceed as planned. Well I searched about it a bit and found the answer on superuser.com. PuTTY tries several authentication methods in a row, which might cause these messages: GSSAPI (only if your system and the server have…