John “Cash” Carpenter and Darwin Gilmore presented 3 limited performances from August 7 to August 9, 2008 of both a magic show and a theater performance, dubbed the Magical Realm of Edon. Stephen Blaschke was director and choreographer. In a nutshell, this performance had to be one of the most visually stunning and exciting presentations of illusions I’ve seen in quite a long time.

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1) They store passwords in cleartext
2) HostGator doesn’t send maintenance notices through email
3) HostGator throttles emails from each domain
4) Despite throttling (see #3), HostGator’s servers still get blacklisted
5) HostGator’s support team does actually ask for passwords, which is a no-no in the tech biz

I could list a dozen others, but clearly this is ridiculous. I’m moving away from them ASAP and I suggest that anyone else do the same.

[Tue Jul 01 18:15:37 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.100] ld.so.1: histogram.cgi: fatal
: libgd.so.2: open failed: No such file or directory, referer: 
https://nagiostest.domain.tld/nagios/side.html
[Tue Jul 01 18:15:37 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.100] Premature end of script heade
rs: histogram.cgi, referer: https://nagiostest.domain.tld/nagios/side.html
[Tue Jul 01 18:16:03 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.100] ld.so.1: statusmap.cgi: fatal
: libgd.so.2: open failed: No such file or directory, referer: 
https://nagiostest.domain.tld/nagios/cgi-bin/status.cgi?hostgroup=all&style=grid
[Tue Jul 01 18:16:03 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.100] Premature end of script heade
rs: statusmap.cgi, referer: https://nagiostest.domain.tld/nagios/cgi-bin/status.cgi?hostg
roup=all&style=grid

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• Visual Studio 2005/2008
• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Outlook

Check out the article. It’s awesome.

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I made a post below relating to PHP, and the caching engine is not deleting the cache, so the post is showing up with < and > characters as literals, thus showing text boxes and other things that’s supposed to be straight code. Give it about 24 hours, and if it isn’t fixed, I’ll look into what’s causing the problems.

Update (3/28/2008): I thought it was a problem with wpsupercache, but in fact it wasn’t. It was a problem with the Wordpress plugin Google Code Prettify and/or something internal to Wordpress. I say this because my code snippets, which originally had < and > characters inline were rendering the HTML as literal HTML - not what I wanted. But when I figured that I’d change the snippets to use &lt; and &gt; instead, it _still_ got rendered as literal < and > characters. Weird - no? Well, check out the most previous post prior to this, and I’ll (hopefully) update my archives with the syntax used in the wp-syntax plugin.

How it may have been done (and you may be doing it right now) might look like this:

    <form action="deleteCategories.php" method="post">
        <input type="checkbox" name="deleteCategory1" /> Category 1<br />
        <input type="checkbox" name="deleteCategory2" /> Category 2<br />
        <input type="checkbox" name="deleteCategory3" /> Category 3<br />
    </form>

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    <?php
        if (isset($_POST['deleteCategory1'])) {
            deleteCategory(1);
        }
        if (isset($_POST['deleteCategory2'])) {
            deleteCategory(2);
        }
        if (isset($_POST['deleteCategory3'])) {
            deleteCategory(3);
        }
    ?>

The above code is highly inefficient, and if you’re dealing with database records, I honestly don’t see how your application would survive. You would have to add lines to deal with other records, which would make your application severely crippled, or extremely difficult to maintain - one of the two.

The solution to this is simple: use an “HTML Array”. When I say this, some people who have spent their lives working in HTML are going to say that HTML doesn’t have arrays. Of course they don’t. It’s PHP, though, that does. However, you have to pass to PHP the “array” in a certain fashion so that when it loads up it’s scripts, it knows its an array. Here’s how it works.

In PHP, arrays are usually written to and read from like this:

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    <?php
        $phpArray['key']['subKeyPointsToValue'] = "Some value";
        $phpValue = $phpArray['key']['subKeyPointsToValue'];
 
        // Iterating is generally done as follows:
        foreach ($phpArray as $key => $subArray) {
            foreach ($subArray as $subKey => $value) {
                // prints "subKeyPointsToValue = Some value"
                print $key." = ".$value; 
            }
        }
    ?>

So, in HTML, how on earth do you do arrays? You don’t have an element in HTML and you don’t have any array attributes for any tags. The key is in how you name your input cells:

    <form action="deleteCategories.php" method="post">
        <input type="checkbox" name="delete[category][]" value="1" />Category 1<br />
        <input type="checkbox" name="delete[category][]" value="2" />Category 2<br />
        <input type="checkbox" name="delete[category][]" value="3" />Category 3<br />
    </form>

What you see is I’ve named the checkbox fields the same name. In normal HTML land, this would be a no-no, and there’s a way to get around it if it doesn’t validate. That is, you simply switch to the following:

    <form action="deleteCategories.php" method="post">
        <input type="checkbox" name="delete[category][1]" />Category 1<br />
        <input type="checkbox" name="delete[category][2]" />Category 2<br />
        <input type="checkbox" name="delete[category][3]" />Category 3<br />
    </form>

Now each checkbox has it’s own name and doesn’t overlap with others. We’ll consider the first HTML set case 1 and the second case 2. Here’s where the true PHP “magic” takes over and makes this a really powerful solution. You don’t have to then check and delete with the following code:

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    <?php
        if (isset($_POST['delete[category][1]'])) {
            deleteCategory(1);
        } // etc. for 2 and 3
    ?>

The above code is horrible. If you’re currently writing code like that above, slap yourself in the face with a nice wet fish. You’re about to get a rude awakening. Here’s how you’re actually going to use it:

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    <?php
        // Case 1
        foreach ($_POST['delete']['category'] as $id) {
            deleteCategory($id);
        }
        // Case 2
        foreach ($_POST['delete']['category'] as $id => $dontcare) {
            deleteCategory($id);
        }
    ?>

In either case, only the checkboxes that are selected come through as the array, but in either case, PHP converts what looks like a name with special characters in HTML to an actual PHP array. It’s very powerful and you can script code to handle what you need to and not have to worry about adding or changing it as your database grows.

Update (3/30/2008): I’ve restored all of my old extended entries, so they’re saved! Have fun reading!