Heartbleed Vulnerability – Oh My!

Anyone who works closely with the IT world is likely well aware that recently, a vulnerability in the popular cryptographic software library — OpenSSL — has become very publicized and pathed the way for attackers to collect sensitive / private information. This particular vulnerability is getting so much attention not just because it has existed…

Review: Media Temple – Premium WordPress Hosting

Media Temple (MT) is one of the primary web hosts that I get the pleasure of dealing with. Their DV servers are nice and their support is awesome. Their Grid Server hosting, though? Not so awesome. It was often slow and finicky, plus had odd caching issues. Today, I get to play around with their…

Git – Force Overwrite of Untracked Working Tree Files

When it comes to version control, I prefer Subversion over Git. This is for several reasons: 1) Subversion is easier to use 2) The software that interfaces with SVN is generally simple and well-polished 3) It’s what I know the most With that said, I do believe that Git has the most capabilities. Why am…

Fix MySQL: Uncaught exception, MySQL server has gone away

For a recent Drupal 7 project, I had to import a large database into XAMPP. There was a particular string that was very, very long and would trigger the following MySQL error: Uncaught exception, MySQL server has gone away The solution is easy. Go to your XAMPP folder or whatever folder your setup is in…

XAMPP + Drupal 7: Clean URLs Not Working (Fix)

When using XAMPP and importing a Drupal website, I ran across an issue. The clean URLs weren’t working for some reason. Load your Apache httpd.conf file and search for AllowOverride None. Replace it with AllowOverride All. All should work nicely now! This fix isn’t specific to XAMPP, mind you. It should also work on similar…

PHP: How to Convert stdClass Object to Array

In my latest project, I am doing SOAP calls to a SOAP service that uses WSSE security headers. If you happen to use PHP’s SoapClient class, then you may notice that when your methods return data, they are returning stdClass Objects. Objects aren’t as easy to work with as arrays, so you may want to…

How to Fix: Drupal Can’t Login / Login Screen Does Nothing

If there’s one thing I have a gift for, it’s creating bad titles for posts! When setting up a WAMP stack the other day (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP), I needed to grab a Drupal instance from a repository. This is pretty easy to do — it was an almost-unmodified copy of Drupal, there was a…

Use PHP to Detect Internet Explorer 11 and Below

As I’ve mentioned before, Microsoft dropped conditional comment support in Internet Explorer 10 (and didn’t bring it back in IE 11). This means that you must use JavaScript or PHP to detect Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) or Internet Explorer 11 (IE11), which is a darn shame. It’s pretty easy to do, however. Especially if you…

WordPress Security: Scan for Security Vulnerabilities

Here’s another WordPress security plugin recommendation! The plugin? Threat Scan Plugin. It has one task and it does it well. It scans all of your files for potential security holes. These holes more often than not utilize PHP eval function, which can allow for an attacker to run malicious code if not sanitized and secured…

Security: Monitor Your WordPress Files

When an intrusion occurs on WordPress, depending on the level of breech, attackers can unfortunately modify your files. Generally, they hide in bits of obfuscated code utilizing evals and / or base64_encode /base64_decode. This is often found in the footer or header php files, or even the single.php file. A lot of attackers even go…