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Phil gives the source code for implementing a MySQL singleton class in both PHP and Python.
Posted on: May 31st, 2009 by Famous Phil
As always, I feel the need to blurb about something. This time I want to do a technical blurb about high speed internet. Inside this post you will find my letter to New York State Senator Young regarding internet in my area. It attempts to explain why land based internet is the best internet connection. Its a worthy read especially after reading the below material (there is an inaccuracy in this letter explained below) : Letter to Senator Young
Tags: bluelight, catharine young, dial up, dialup, evdo, kmart, lag, latency, satellite internet, senator, verizon, wildblue
Posted in Technology
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Posted on: May 26th, 2009 by Famous Phil
As you probably have noticed, I have changed a few aspects of the site yet again 
Most of these changes came from commments and suggestions via email and comments. Overall, the roughness of the images and the size has been corrected. Remember, I’m not that good at photoshop, so although there are errors, I’m going to kind of push off fixing them until I become better at photoshop. 
Of the corrections, the most notable is the contact envelope now points to a contact page. I also have integrated the calendar to the famousphil.com theme. The blog has also been shortened with read more tags. Hopefully this makes my site more reader / user friendly
Finally, the main addition to FamousPhil is the Philki. This is an attempt to make FamousPhil.com more modern and involve user interaction. I’ve added mediawiki and will allow everyone to describe me. I probably won’t do much moderating (if at all). I think its a great, humourous addition to FamousPhil and I encourage you to “define me”.
I’ve also gotten a few emails from other people wanting to promote their sites through posts (similar to the promotion I did for asciibin). I have no problem in doing this for other sites if they don’t seem like spam and look really useful for readers of my site. I also don’t mind adding partners to my partners widget if the site in question has great potential
Thats enough for this post. I will probably be blogging about our pool experience this year tomrrow or the day after and why pool regulations from the government are really starting to get out of hand.
Tags: philki, smooth images, updates, user friendly, wiki
Posted in My Site
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Posted on: May 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil
The title pretty much says it all but I thought I would take a few moments of my day to remember all of those who have died fighting for our country. Hope your day is as relaxing as mine will be
Tags: memorial day
Posted in Personal
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Posted on: May 22nd, 2009 by Famous Phil
Being a member on codecall I normally read posts about the newest features and sites that Jordan (the admin) comes up with. This is where I found a potentially valuable resource for working on programming and essays with friends and collegues.
Asciibin.com is the site that I am speaking of. This site allows anyone to post their own code or any kind of text and create an environment (with http links) so that multiple people can view and edit that code or text simotaneously. I have personally used this site a few times so far to share documents and some IRC bot code with others. I see great potential in this site and I’d highly recommend you try using it, you won’t be disappointed! You can either create a login or use it anonymously, so what do you have to lose?
If you’d like more information, please visit Jordan’s Blog Here.
Tags: asciibin, code, collaboration, communication, text
Posted in Programming
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Posted on: May 21st, 2009 by Famous Phil
Although I wanted to write much of the following content a few weeks ago when I was packing to go home for the summer, I was strapped for time. Therefore, I’m making this post now.
Moveout
At the end of every semester, I always try to get out of UB a few days early to beat the last minute move out rush, and this year was no exception. I was fully packed and ready to go about a day in advance. After last year’s fiasco, I thought that having a covered trailer instead of an uncovered truck bed would be a much more efficient way to move out and protect my stuff from mother nature’s worst. Last year’s move out brought thunderstorms and a lot of rain which complicated move out a lot (not to mention that I got completely soaked during the move out and remained soaked through the hour and a half ride home. I said to my father, “never again without a covered trailer”!
Luckily, this year, we had no rain (I looked at the forecast days ahead of time and actually moved the date once) and we had a nice big covered trailer. The move out process this year went very smooth! Just one minor nose bleed later that night that was caused by the dry air and elevation change going home. Unpacking was also very easy since we had space all set.
Lets move onto college text books
Every year brings the same old problem, I buy books at the beginning of the semester for my classes: cost: “arm and a leg”. I return my books to the bookstore at the end of the semester: recovered funds: “next to nothing”. If you are a college student, you probably know exactly what I mean!
Tags: bookstore, college, moveout, ripoff, text book, trailer, university
Posted in Student Life
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Posted on: May 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil
After a lot of pressure, not only from Jordan but mostly everyone, FamousPhil.com now has a new, shiny look! *at least for the most part*. Sure, I could improve the navigation buttons a bit to make them look “web 2.0,” but that will come in another project down the road after I finish up the rest of this never ending to do list.
As you’ve probably noticed, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been very tight with my blog releases after posting almost every day for one stretch there. The truth of the matter is, when I get highly involved in a site redesign, I like to spend all of my time and effort working on that redesign and forgetting about everything else. I do admit that its tough for me to get into working on a website design in the first place, but once I’m in the process of working, I generally do not like being distracted.
For me, a distraction of any kind, even that 1 second hi to a friend passing by can throw my mind off by a huge amount. To me, distractions can end up costing me a few hours (sometimes an entire day) to get my thoughts back and continue working on the problem I was focusing on at the time of the distraction. Sure, this is annoying, but I’ve learned how to slam the door and tell people not to disturb me at all unless the world is on fire when I begin such projects. Its just the way that I work I suppose.
Tags: chrome, css, design, div, firefox, internet explorer, position, positioning, problems, relative, safari, table, validation, web 2.0, website, xhtml
Posted in My Site
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Posted on: May 7th, 2009 by Famous Phil
I just finished up my last final for this semester of college and it feels good to be done. That is why I haven’t really been blogging much for the past few days, and it might be a few days more until I get my next blog out. Now its basically wait for a few weeks for my professors to be not-so-lazy and post my grades and grade the finals. I am confident that my courses will come back as high marks (none below B). In past semesters, I haven’t been able to say the same, so that’s a good sign.
Anyways, I have a short rant about the bookstore on campus. As you probably know, most bookstores for colleges are a huge ripoff operation focused at making maximum profit because they know they can do that and get away with it. Anyways, I thought I’d just talk a little bit about my experience every semester and what I started doing this semester to fix the problems that I’ve noticed.
The first semester I came here, I wasn’t sure about what books I needed until the final week, so I figured that I would get them from the bookstore. That semester, I know I spent close to 500 dollars. That is just outrageous for a mere 4 books. Pretty sad, isn’t it?
After that semester, I began planning ahead and finding my book titles / isbn numbers out ahead of time. The bookstore isn’t very helpful with this either. The bookstore hates to post the book picture on their online store, so I end up always going to the bookstore about a week before class with a pen and paper to write down everything I need. This works fine unless the professor hasn’t yet decided on the book they wish to use. I’ve found that the bookstore also hates ordering books early, so they rarely have all of the books until the first day of class (even when the professor ordered them ahead of time).
Tags: amazon, bookstore, ebay, edition, education, grades, higher education, international edition, isbn, online, rip off, ripoff, school, us edition
Posted in Student Life
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Posted on: May 3rd, 2009 by Famous Phil
Anymore, it seems that at least once a week spam gets on my nerves and I end up researching ways to block it more effectively without blocking legitimate messages.
For instance, the other day, I noticed a huge influx of email spam to “phil@saveourshows.org” and I went into that account and increased the spam filter a touch more. This quite often brings up a very legitimate problem for me, that is, what happens when someone legitimate tries to send me an email? Everytime I notice spam on accounts that is heavier than usual, I usually end up bumping the spam filter up a little more, and to be perfectly honest, that spam filter can’t go much higher! Sure, I do recommend that if I don’t respond within a few hours, try sending email to another one of my many addresses, but what happens when that someone finds my address on one of these sites by googling? They will potentially not get a response from me and not realize that I have so many email addresses.
I could go on about email spam, but that isn’t my main focus, comment spam is! I installed wordpress sometime back in January (don’t ask me when lol) when I was redesigning my site (which needs a lot of improvements still). Back in January and even into February, I didn’t really blog much (mostly because I didn’t feel like it), and this site got so little traffic that no spammer would consider hitting it. Actually, this was the case until my blog on WHM / CPanel came out. For some reason, I rank really high with terms like “cpanel advantages and disadvantages”. I also began blogging about technical topics, which drive traffic to my site because it is generally unique content that most system admins are looking for (but usually can’t find). That is great for my site’s traffic, but not really great for my current spam fighting techniques (for my blog, these have been me manually deleting spam).
I am now getting on average: 30 spam comments a day. Being a human that makes mistakes, I sometimes hit delete on legitimate comments by accident because it gets to a point where legit comments look like spam too lol. Unfortunately, I have to let the legit comments get deleted after this because there is no backup copy of these comments. Anyways, long story short, I’m sick of the spam.
Solution: I used the google approach (as usual). I found this wonderful blog here. My default install of WordPress did have Akismet installed (but not activated) exactly like this blog said. I installed it, got an API key from WordPress and now I should get no more spam, or minimal spam. I will say that I am getting no more spam that isn’t easy to delete. It no longer takes as much brain power from me to think about what is spam and isn’t spam. Hopefully this plugin will keep the spam away for a long time before I need something more powerful.
Personally, I recommend this plugin for WordPress. It has saved me time in the past week of having this installed and I’m sure that it will save me much more time to come.
Tags: akismet, blog, comment, comment spam, spam, wordpress
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, My Site
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Posted on: May 2nd, 2009 by Famous Phil
I agree with every point that Jordan makes. But just to add to the topic, if you are curious if my sites encrypt your passwords, the answer is yes. I use the default security of WordPress (on here) and PHPBB3 on many of my other sites. I don’t believe in modifying passwords prior to encryption, and I update these scripts whenever a new release comes out, so your password is as safe as these scripts guarantee it.
I do use multiple passwords all over the place, and I’d recommend that you do the same. I change my passwords by at least 5 characters on many sites, and I have groups of sites which use the same password. I group sites together mostly because its less passwords to remember and I don’t care if my password is compromised because I store nothing confidential on such grouped sites.
One last note to developers, by simply encrypting with md5 isn’t good enough. You need to use a salt too. I know a site that uses md5 encryption only (I wouldn’t consider this data confidential, but still, it uses passwords), and it wouldn’t be that hard to goto a site that converts md5 hashes into passwords. Many md5 hashes are already archived on these cracking sites. If they aren’t, it is fairly simple to crack one using a super computer, although it could take a while.
Tags: encryption, hash, jordan, md5, passwords, phpbb3, security, sites, wordpress
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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