I was using cURL in PHP to POST some data to a URL earlier tonight and ran into this problem.
With VERBOSE on cURL was erroring with the following error:
"Received problem 2 in the chunky parser"
After some Googling it turns out this is a problem with how some servers respond with chunked encoding.
A simple fix for this is to set the HTTP version cURL is using to 1.0:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION, CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_0 )
It’s not pretty but hey it works!
On one of our projects that we use multiple connections that are defined at run time we recently were generating reports that required us to change a specific connection multiple times in a single run. We noticed that even though we would define a new connection, it would not throw any errors but just continue to use the originally defined connection. Here is how we were doing the connections:
If you called the code above once, it would connect properly to the given DSN. However if you then called it a second time with a new DSN, it would not error and would simply just remain connected to the first DSN. After hunting around a bit it was the problem that Doctrine wasn’t assigning the new connection as the old connection was still open. To get around this we updated the code to the following:
You need to first check to see if the Doctrine Manager has the connection, as if you try to get a connection that doesn’t exist, it will throw an exception.
Hope this saves you some time!
Earlier today we were discussing implementing “security questions” for a client of ours. The client felt that we should implement security questions so that users would have to answers one or more questions before taking certain actions on the site.
For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, some applications will ask users “security questions” at certain touchpoints in the application. The questions have been previously answered by the user and usually ask somewhat personal information like “what street did you grow up on?”, “what is the name of your favorite pet?”, “what was your high school’s mascot?”
As several security researchers have pointed out, the answers to these types of questions can be easily derived from a mix of a user’s social profiles and some social engineering. One of the most famous examples of this was the compromise of Sarah Palin’s email account during the lead up to the 2008 presidential campaign.
At the gym earlier, I started wondering about this problem and stumbled across what might be the basis of a novel solution.
The issue with the current solution is that the lexicon of questions asked are always pieces of personal information that users typically will share with the world. The obvious solution would be asking extremely personal questions like “who was your first kiss?”, “have you ever stolen something”, and so on. Unfortunately, these will undoubtedly make users uncomfortable and force the application to store extremely sensitive information.
What we’re really looking for is innocuous personal questions that users will not typically broadcast via social networks and also difficult to social engineer. With this in mind, my solution would be to ask questions that users don’t normally think about but when taken together, are identifiable enough to prove that a user is in fact genuine.
Here’s a few I thought of:
– Do you signal a “3” with your three index fingers or with your thumb and two index fingers? (For those who haven’t seen it, this is discussed at length in The Inglorious Bastards)
– Do you tie your shoes with “bunny ears” or with a loop?
– What knot do you use to tie your necktie?
– What type of seafood are you allergic to?
– What brand of refrigerator do you currently own?
Obviously, some of these are multiple choice questions which makes a probabilistic attack easier but by using a combination of multiple choice and open ended I think you could end up with a pretty strong solution.
Anyway, I’d love to hear any feedback and other good questions if anyone comes up with them.
No one worry, I did in fact survive my birthday and subsequent party!
Anyway, I was poking around for some cool UI elements for checkboxes and stumbled across this neat jQuery plugin – http://github.com/tdreyno/iphone-style-checkboxes Basically, what it does is converts checkboxes into iPhone style toggles.
Check out a demo at http://tdreyno.github.com/iphone-style-checkboxes/
This is for a symfony project (shocker!), so I figured I’d roll it into a widget and share.
You’ll need to download and include the JS+CSS+images for the plugin yourself and then copy the following code into your project:
Using it is straightforward:
$this->setWidgets(array(
'show-upcoming-events-nav' => new sfWidgetFormInputiPhoneCheckbox( array("checked_label" => "on", "un_checked_label" => "off") ),
));
This Saturday was the second annual Redline Challenge which is a bar crawl from Downtown Crossing to Davis Square that loosely tracks the MBTA Redline.
This year, we decided to use Foursquare to allow the website to track the position of several of the participants on the challenge. Foursquare natively allows you to track your checkin history with private URLs. Currently, they support a handful of formats with KML being the most interesting for our purposes. You can find your private URLs by navigating to http://foursquare.com/feeds/
We used the Google Maps API along with the KML stream from Foursquare to dynamically place markers on the map as different users checked in to different venues.
Here is the PHP we used to pull back the KML feed, transform it to JSON, and spit it back to our jQuery on the client side:
Pretty straight forward. Here is the jQuery code on the client side to add markers to the map:
That’s about it.