I was working on a site that had PHP warnings turned off. The program I was working on showed a blank page. Creating and executing a new file, as shown below, solved the problem (which ended up being a parsing error). Indeed, a very nice php debugging technique.
<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set("display_errors", 1);
include("file_with_errors.php");
?>
I have been grappling with using SMTP in WordPress. For a while, it worked fine using an SMTP plug-in. The problem manifested itself by rejecting emails sent from a WordPress blog. In tracing the problem, debug told me I had a 550 error: recipient email address not found (which is not true). Finally, putting the same email address in “sender email” as in SMTP user name solved the problem.
I believe it is related to SPF (sender policy framework) record used by my host to prevent spamming. That is, the sending email address must be the same as the one that shows up in the ‘from’ email address. SPF prevents someone from putting a bogus email address in the ‘from’. Most major SMTP hosts and email companies use SPF (Google/gmail, yahoo, hotmail…).
I thought I knew how to refresh a browser – just hit F5 and you are done.
That is not quite true.
If you want to truly refresh a browser, the cache should be cleared out. The key sequences below will clear out the cache and refresh the screen.
| Browser | Control Keys |
| Firefox | Ctrl-F5 |
| IE | Ctrl-F5 |
| Chrome | Shift-F5 |
| Safari | Ctrl-Alt-E |
Most of the sites Smartlab Software optimizes includes specifying an extended cache time for static files such as images and css. Imagine my surprise when this could not be done on GoDaddy shared hosting. I’m even more surprised because having a long cache time would reduce server load. It took a while to find this out. GoDaddy shared hosting does not support mod_expires.c (Linux) which means the webmaster cannot set an expiration date. I also could not turn off the Etag (as recommended by Yahoo YSlow). Hopefully, they will change in the future.
WordPress.org announced a critical update, 3.0.4. You can read about it here. The update fixes a bug in the WordPress HTML sanitation library which is used extensively. The vulnerability is through XSS cross scripting. We recommend updating your WordPress installation immediately.
I have probably deleted a lot of valuable emails.
Why?
Not because they are in the spam bucket, but because they look like spam. Like most business owners, I get tens to hundreds of emails a day. (Of course, having forty email accounts doesn’t help). Many of them are spam; many are not. The spam catcher does a decent job as it rarely gives a false positive on emails. But I digress.
In order to filter out more spam, I scan the ‘subject’ line and ‘from’ line of each email. If the subject line looks spammy, out it goes. If I do not recognize the ‘from’, out it goes…and therein lies the problem.
I have had many emails sent by legitimate companies both as initial emails and emails in response to one I sent. BUT, the ‘from’ name is unrecognizable. Most of the time, it is some person’s name. Period. Out it goes.
One innocuous example was I put a hold on a book at our local library. Several days later I received an email with someone’s name on the ‘from’ line who I didn’t recognize. I accidentally clicked on the message and it was from our library. I sent an email back to them explaining what happened and suggested they include the library name in the ‘from’ line. Next time I put a book on hold, the email notice had the library name included on the ‘from’ line.
Oh, if the email looks legitimate, I do check the ‘from’ email address. Knowing this can be spoofed, when I read the content, I check the links, if any. Sometimes the links will indicate one thing but link to an unknown, spam URL.
The Internet in 2009 brought us:
The percent market share of popular web browsers:
| Browser | Percentage |
| Internet Explorer | 62.7% |
| Firefox | 24.6% |
| Chrome | 4.6% |
| Safari | 4.5% |
| Opera | 2.4% |
| Other | 1.2% |
The statistics were brought to you from pingdom.com
I was debugging PHP and the error/warning messages did not concur with the source code. After a bit of sleuthing, I found out that I was stripping out comments when I was publishing the code. Turning off ‘Optimize HTML during publishing’ fixed the problem.
BTW, I was using Expression Web but this tip is applicable to most IDEs.
Microsoft released Expression Web SP2.
SP2 fixes a number of issues, the most important being erasure of PHP code while editing or copying.
Installation just takes a minute.
I started using Thunderbird portable so I could take it between computers and not have to keep recreating beaucoup amount of emails.
The problem was Thunderbird was using 100% of the cpu.
After a few frustrating hours of search and experiment, I finally figured out the problem: AVG antivirus 9.0.
I ended up disabling the email scanner; but it still scans the emails?!
Hopefully this problem will be fixed soon.