Validating user input is always a great idea from a usability and security point of view. However, when it comes to things like URLs, the data is complex and there is a very strict pattern that the data has to adhere to. From a data perspective, this is great news, since we can validate for what we want, not try to detect what we don't.

However, a lot of modern URLs don't always do a great job following RFC 1738. Specifically, I'm looking at you .Net guys who insist on putting UUIDs wrapped in curly brackets in query strings and the like. According to RFC 1738, curly brackets are "unsafe" within URLs and should be encoded to their URL-encoded entities.

The Apache module mod_vhost_alias and its VirtualDocumentRoot directive can really be a great time saver for local development (some googling will explain why in more deapth). Basically, my local dev is set up so that I just have to create a directory in my aliases directory, and I just then navigate my browser to a URL matching the name of that new directory, and apache knows exactly what to serve automagically.

I think my previous posts have already indicated that my development environment, specifically my IDE, is important to me, and that I make a habit of exploring my options on a regular basis. For the last 7 months I've been using NuSphere's PhpED, which I've really enjoyed. The only things that I've been just a little dissatisfied with is that it only runs on windows and that its window arranging capabilities are not as robust as Eclipse. But, having seen a few tweets about NetBeans, I decided to visit this old acquaintance once again.

I had used NetBeans ages ago when I was learning a little bit of Java. It was good enough... for Java. Then, some time ago I had tried NetBeans 6 (I don't recall which minor version), because I learned they were working on building a PHP IDE out of NetBeans, which intrigued me. At the time, I simply felt NetBeans didn't stack up to Eclipse, and I hadn't yet discovered PhpED. However, with some recent twitter traffic about NetBeans, I figured I'd give the latest incarnation a spin to kick the wheels a little.

This past weekend, for a number of reasons I won't get into now, I performed a complete "re-install" of my primary workstation. Previously, I was using XP Pro SP2, which had been installed and running smoothly on the machine for nearly two solid years. This also meant that my machine had two years worth of my customized configurations, applications, tools, etc., so a re-install also meant bringing a fresh Windows (Vista this time) installation up to speed and in sync with my preferences.

During the process of re-installing all the various programs and utilities that I make regular use of, it occurred to me that I was installing the things that I just couldn't do without -- the tools I keep in my toolbelt at all times. I don't know if I've got everything installed yet, but I know I've installed all the primary tools that I use on a regular basis... and they are listed here:

I do a lot of work involving PHP-based web development. I often find myself needing to test e-mail functionality of a complex PHP application (such as Drupal), but I want to be sure that emails won't be sent to any of the unsuspecting users in the database of the application I'm testing.

Do accomplish this, I make a small but important change to my php.ini (actually in my conf.d/dev_mail.ini -- but it's the same thing):

sendmail_path="/usr/sbin/sendmail -i user@host.tld"

This tells PHP to use this command line whenever the mail() function is used to send an email. PHP's default here is "sendmail -i -t". The -t tells sendmail to scan the message text for To:, Cc:, and Bcc: headers to determine where to deliver the mail. By eliminating the -t we tell sendmail to use the email address(es) on the command line to determine delivery, thus making sure that no matter what PHP's mail() tells sendmail, it will deliver to the address you want.

I'm one of "those" people that paid for Eclipse, an open source integrated development environment (IDE). I originally bought it because I love and use Eclipse a lot for my work and I wanted commercially available support for the product on which I depend so heavily.

Zend recently released version 6.1 of Studio for Eclipse, with very little (if any) fanfare or announcements (I didn't know about it until I looked at the download site), compared to the release of 6.0.1 which was heralded in their newsletter, all over their website, and everywhere Zend's press team has any influence. I find this ironic, because 6.1 contains huge improvements and more fixes than the upgrade to 6.0.1 did.

Last month Chapter Three announced they were working on a Firefox plugin and Drupal module that would allow Firebug to talk with Drupal. As a Web Developer who uses Firebug heavily every day and who specializes in Drupal, this announcement from Chapter Three got me a little excited -- so I installed the plugin, enabled the module, and gave it a shot.