Category: Uncategorized

This will end my fit of blogging diarrhea. Honest.

On Saturday, I ran to Kidderminster (21 miles in total). It went quite well, although my left thigh ached a little and I got a sore groin. Afterwards I also noticed my feet were aching on the outside of my sole (they don’t normally)….

Yesterday morning I went running again, only for 30ish minutes and found my thigh seemed worse and my right knee was unhappy too. And my lower back aches a little.

I’m wondering if my new running shoes are responsible – or if it’s just because I somehow pushed myself too far on Saturday (considering my running routine has been a mess for the last month with me rarely managing to run more than twice a week (i.e ~8-10 miles if optimistic)). I was going to write “I read somewhere” but I ended up looking for the site instead. This article I read at https://www.anipots.com talked about using Organic CBD Nugs for certain pains that occur in runners. I’m not sure I want to take something for it just yet, there’s still a possibility I pushed myself to hard, as I mentioned. I hope it goes away on its own and I can find a good balance of time, distance, and rhythm to my runs. What would make me most unhappy is to find I have done some permanent damage to my back, my knees or my ankles by wanting to go out there and being healthy. I… well, you’d read a very angry blog post about it, that’s for sure.

Stay tuned. Or not. Today and tomorrow will be run-free days in the hope something will repair itself.

Why do some programmers not ensure data is escaped for the right output ‘layer’… today I came across some legacy code which appends strings together to create a CSV file – it went along the lines of  :

$line .= $foo . ‘”,”‘ . $bar . ‘”,”‘ . $etc…. . “\n”;

There was no attempt at escaping the data being embedded, so if it contained a ” (which I know some records do) it will/would fail (yes, one premises has “…” in it’s name, and it’s caused us problems already with similar code).

The easy answer in this instance is to use PHP’s fputcsv() function (which has been around since 5.1).

What other demons are lurking there waiting to cause trouble I wonder?

(See also my random tweet linked to this)

If you want to allow WordPress to pass it’s HTTP requests through Squid (for security or whatever), edit wp-includes/class-snoopy.php and set the necessary details.

Shame WordPress doesn’t just have a configuration option or something for it. (

While updating some security training materials, I thought I’d include some more information on OpenId – with the hope of demonstrating how the typical username/password mess which web applications create can be countered (for example see here )

So, being a PHP type, and having seen that the Zend Framework supports OpenId, I thought I’d create a simple demo. The documentation looked good, and I quickly got a test script online (see below). So – to test it, I thought I’d try using Google as my OpenID provider (afterall StackOverflow does) and I obviously have a Google account.

So, the Zend Framework gives the following test code :

<?php
require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . '/Zend/OpenId/Consumer.php');
require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . '/Zend/OpenId/Extension/Sreg.php');
$sreg = new Zend_OpenId_Extension_Sreg(array(
 'nickname'=>false,
 'email'=>false,
 'fullname'=>false), null, 1.1);
//echo file_get_contents('https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id');
$status = "";
$consumer = new Zend_OpenId_Consumer();
if (isset($_POST['openid_action']) && $_POST['openid_action'] == "login" && !empty($_POST['openid_identifier'])) {
 if (!$consumer->login($_POST['openid_identifier'], null, 'http://*.palepurple.co.uk', $sreg)) {
   //echo $consumer->getError();
   $status = "OpenID login failed.";
 }
} else if (isset($_GET['openid_mode'])) {
 if ($_GET['openid_mode'] == "id_res") {
   if ($consumer->verify($_GET, $id, $sreg)) {
     $status = "VALID " . htmlspecialchars($id);
     var_dump($sreg->getProperties());
   } else {
     $status = "INVALID " . htmlspecialchars($id);
   }
 } else if ($_GET['openid_mode'] == "cancel") {
   $status = "CANCELLED";
 }
}
?>

<html><body>
<?php echo "$status<br>" ?>
<form method="post">
<fieldset>
<legend>OpenID Login</legend>
<input type="text" name="openid_identifier" value=""/>
<input type="submit" name="openid_action" value="login"/>
</fieldset>
</form>
</body></html>

Which doesn’t work if you try to use https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id [Google’s OpenID provider URL]. It just fails with a hopeless “Discovery Failed” error message. I spent an hour or two poking it, and making fruitless Google searches (or so it seemed). Then I gave up and tried using a different provider – success.. it all works.

Various postings imply there is/was a problem with the Zend Framework’s OpenId consumer – although to start with I thought it might have been due to my local PHP configuration (E.g. lacking support for openssl/mhash or something else, but this wasn’t the case). See also this and this

Thankfully the code does work when using other providers – e.g. MyOpenId. One nice feature of OpenId, which I wasn’t aware of, is that you (the web client application) can also request e.g. nickname, name, date of birth and country of residence from the OpenID provider (which is what the Zend_OpenId_Extension_Sreg stuff is all about – I’ve made the request parameters all optional, otherwise you get an auth failure when the provider doesn’t return the data you require).

Anyway, it’s really, really, easy to do. Shame about the poor support for Google though.

Rowan’s started to draw, say more words and generally be far easier – we’ve been out to a couple of restaurants lately, and in each he’s been no hassle (as opposed to him wanting to roam around the room and generally sticking his hands in anything he can find). We’re also hoping he’s deciding to sleep more overnight as well – but two days does not make a pattern with a toddler, so who knows what’s going on there.

Last night we had some fireworks at Jenny’s – Rowan seemed to enjoy them quite a lot (“Oh wow!”) – I had feared he’d start crying when a bang went off, and that would be the end of the evening. Thankfully he behaved really well. I also managed to drink 5 bottles of beer (far more than normal, so I had a crap headache overnight/this morning).

Kat and Rowan have spent most of the last week going to various museums in London – and finding other toddler friendly spots. I was slightly worried that taking him to London would fail totally – but it seems to have worked quite well, and it’s nice for me to be able to see them during the week in the evenings (while I’m there training).So far they’ve found some child friendly park in Russel Square, and hands on water and wheelbarrows in the Science Museum.

Yesterday, I bought a new pair of running shoes. This time I was insistent that having a neutral pair of shoes was not good – and the assistant eventually realised I was correct and gave me some with appropriate support. Hopefully I’ll soon get a routine running around London and be able to halt my expanding chocolate biscuit fuelled waistline.

In other news – my employees appear to be handling work things quite well – as by Wednesday I’ll have been out of the office for 2-3 weeks. No doubt there will be a stack of stuff waiting for me, and customers wanting updates and I’ll be kept busy. One good thing is that this excess of training work has allowed me to be more selective over which work we do, and it seems BinaryKitten/Kathryn will remain a part time, remote employee (lucky her?!).

Now I just need to sort out our Pale Purple Christmas party thing – I’m tempted in doing some sort of clay pidgeon shooting type thing – perhaps in the start of January. Somehow I doubt we could find a live fire range where we can shoot targets/zombies, so clay pidgeons will have to be the next best bet.

Anyway, time to think about getting the bus to Birmingham and then the train to Euston. Oh, the joy.