I’m with Coco!

I’m with Conan O’Brien, much smarter and funnier than Jay Leno!

DVD Censorship in South Australia

Another example of Governments gone crazy…

As of last week, the South Australian government has decided that all R18+ DVDs must be sold in plain blank covers and kept in a separate part of the store (with the pornography). This is to “protect” children from seeing the covers of adult DVDs, which will somehow cause psychological damage to them.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,,26596559-2682,00.html

This all started with a Family First politician (they’re also known as the “batshit crazy” political party), his 2 year old daughter accidentally picked up an R18+ DVD in a store and saw the cover. So now because of his failure as a parent he wants the rest of the state to suffer.

This may not sound like a huge problem, but for many stores it’s a massive headache to have to dedicate another section to these movies. It means Comedy, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi etc movies will be separated based on rating…”I’m looking for Event Horizon, is that in the MA15+ section or the R18+ section?”. Many stores will probably stop selling R18+ movies because it will be too much trouble.

And while I agree with protecting children from the content of R18+ movies, will hiding the covers really protect them? Let’s look at some examples of the R18+ movies that would be hidden from them:

Oh no! We can’t have children looking at offensive, dark, violent, pornographic covers like these!

But these are only MA15+, these are fine:

Severed fingers and legs, blood, and naked people…no I don’t have any problem with my children seeing that!

But men wearing suits, a robot man, 3 men with a baby and a chicken, and a star with people inside it…those are deeply offensive and could severely damage my child psychologically!

If this was a parliamentary bill to pass laws ensuring that DVD covers are PG rated, I could understand that. It’s incredibly unlikely that a child would steal the DVD and then watch it at home without their parents knowing. Or somehow unwrap the DVD and put it in the nearest DVD player, skip past the copyright notices and trailers, navigate the menu and watch enough of the film to get to something offensive, all without their parents noticing…

If that could happen in reality, I’d be forcing the parents to go through some kind of mandatory counselling, no parent should leave their child alone in a store for that long. If the child is old enough to steal the DVD, then they’re going to be old enough to find it in the adult section anyway, and nothing has been achieved.

This is a typical Family First politician overreacting, it sounds like a plot from The Simpsons (“won’t somebody please think of the children???”).  Just a few weeks ago they banned novelty cigarette lighters because “children *might* think they’re toys, and start fires with them”. So they’re banned, anyone who sells them will be fined. They never said “we’ve had a lot of police reports of children starting fires accidentally with novelty lighters”, they said “children might mistake them for toys”. Hopefully parents are keeping their lighters away from children anyway, whether they’re novelty lighters or not. If not, that’s a failure of the parents. Why should a responsible adult have to suffer just because of something that might happen.

Our state is now officially being run by these people:

A Plea on Behalf of Web Developers Everywhere!

Why are there still so many people using Internet Explorer 6? It was released in 2001, since then IE7 and IE8 have been released. Windows Update has provided updates for the browser, doesn’t anyone update their operating system?

It’s bad enough for people browsing with IE, but it’s even worse for us web developers who have to waste time adding all kinds of silly hacks to our code for IE users. Those people who are still using IE 6 are making our lives much harder. I can build a website that looks perfect and works flawlessly, I test it in Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari, even IE8 works (not always, but usually).

Then I get an email saying “The site is broken, the page looks funny and I get error messages”. Well, it’s NOT the website, my code is 100% XHTML compliant and my Javascript has passed all validations. My CSS code is pure and clean. So it must be your browser. Using IE6? I’m sorry, you can’t use my website until you upgrade. I’m not wasting my precious time working around IE6’s many flaws just because you insist on using outdated technology. It’s like the Analog Cellphone switchoff, and the Digital TV transition, lag behind and you’ll get left behind.

As of right now, I’m refusing to add any kind of hacks to any of my websites to make them IE6 compatible. It costs me time and money, which I could spend on more important things.

I can understand if you’re using IE6 at your workplace and you don’t have the ability to upgrade, but you should also understand that:

• IE6 is 8 years out of date
• IE6 is full of bugs and security flaws
• Many websites don’t work correctly with it
• Your administrators are doing a poor job if they’re making you use insecure and outdated software

IE6 will be officially supported by Microsoft until 2014, but it’s already been condemned by most web developers. If you’re one of those people still using it, PLEASE UPGRADE. It’s very simple, go to the website below:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/default.aspx

Click the “Download Now” button. Go ahead, you’ll like it! It will make many websites start to look correct, as well as being more secure and giving you useful features like Tabbed browsing.

Alternatively, why not try Firefox or Google Chrome? They’re more secure, and you’ll barely notice the difference!

If anyone emails me from now on to tell me that the site doesn’t work correctly for them, or the formatting is broken, I’ll be asking what browser they are using. If it’s not the latest Safari, Chrome, Firefox or IE I’ll be insisting that they upgrade and refusing to fix the problem.

Futurama Alien Sign Replica

I actually made one of these into a fridge magnet for my desk, it looks quite good!

For anyone who doesn’t recognise it, it’s a modified version of the alien sign from the Futurama episode “My Three Suns”, as seen here:

The joke of the episode, of course, was that Fry drank the Emperor while delivering an English version of the “Don’t Drink the Emperor” sign. Classic Futurama!

How to import a large SQL file into MySQL

As a PHP/MySQL developer I’m regularly having to download backups of my databases, and occasionally I have to import them back into MySQL.

The problem is that phpMyAdmin has a file size limit for uploading an SQL file (usually 8MB, depending on your server configuration). Some MySQL backup files are in the hundreds of MegaBytes!

The solution? If you have access to the MySQL command line prompt:

1. Put your SQL file in a simple path (such as “C:\database.sql” on Windows, or “/home/username/database.sql” on Linux)
2. Login to MySQL
3. Create the database (if not already created, or if the SQL doesn’t have a “Create Database” statement)
4. Select the database (“USE databasename;”)
5. Run the “Source” command, like so:

SOURCE C:/database.sql
or
SOURCE /home/username/database.sql

This should import the SQL file into the database, it can take a few minutes depending on the size of the file.

I post this here just in case anyone else had trouble importing large database backups into their MySQL databases. Hope this has helped a few people!

Gmail FINALLY removes ‘on behalf of’ from headers!

Via the Official Gmail Blog

Until now, whenever you send an email from a custom address in Gmail, it would automatically add “From:” in the headers. This reveals your Gmail address to people who you may not wish to see it.

In Outlook and Hotmail, it shows your email as coming from:
myname@gmail.com on behalf of myname@mywebsite.com

Personally, this put me off consolidating my email addresses, because I didn’t want to give my Gmail address out to people, I’d rather they contact me via myname@mywebsite.com.

Well now, finally, Gmail has allowed us to send mail from a custom address without the “on behalf of”!

The way it works is instead of sending the mail out via the Gmail servers, it connects to your other SMTP server and sends it through there. This avoids any problems with spam filters thinking you’ve falsified your headers.

The way it worked before:

The way it works now:

For more info on how to enable this option, visit the Official Gmail Blog:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/send-mail-from-another-address-without.html

Rise of the Idiots

Warning: I’m about to rant here, big time. I really don’t care if anyone reads this or not, I’m doing this for my own benefit so I can try to move on. Whether you agree or disagree with me is something I have no interest in.

My blog title is a reference to the UK TV series “Nathan Barley”, in which one of the characters (Dan Ashcroft) wrote a magazine article called “Rise of the Idiots”. Every day I’m finding myself thinking about this more and more.

Whatever happened to critical thinking? What happened to healthy skepticism? Why don’t people ever question things and try to learn/grow?

Every day I’m bombarded with ridiculous emails and messages, such as:
“If you don’t forward this email on to 5 people, your Hotmail account will be deleted!”
and it includes “proof”, which is a link to a BBC article from 2004 saying that Hotmail is CONSIDERING adding a paid account option. But nothing about them forcing everyone to pay, and nothing about them deleting accounts. And what kind of company says “We’ll only protect the accounts of the people who forward a chain email”?. They probably make billions from the advertising of the free email accounts anyway, why in the world would they delete a huge revenue stream?
But people don’t question the email, they just panic and forward it on without thinking.
Another one I get:
“Join my Facebook Group to protest the mistreatment of people in Some Country”.
Because joining a Facebook Group will help. The Government of Some Country says “Well we were going to be brutal dictators, but 30,000 people on Facebook were opposed to it so we decided to become a democracy instead”.
Be honest, you’re not joining the group because you really care about the issue, or else you would be out protesting, lobbying politicians, or donating money to charities to try to help.
You’re only doing it because it’s a quick and easy way to say “Hey look everyone! I’m a good person, I joined a Facebook Group!”.

Let’s look at another aspect of society, the news. In America, you have Fox News. In the UK you have those tabloid newspapers. In Australia you have Seven News (the others aren’t perfect, but this bunch of morons really stands out).

They have reporters who turn news reporting into opinion pieces. No serious journalist should ever use the word “Amazing.” as a sentence during his report. Or using the word “disgraceful”. Those are opinion words, you’re being paid to present the facts without bias or opinion. It is up to the public to form their own opinions, the minute you start doing that for them then you’re taking away something important from society. “Seven News said I should be against this, so that’s how I’m going to be”.
So much for journalistic integrity.
Nine News was just as bad the other night, interviewing a woman who had been dead for 45 minutes before being revived. She talked about how she could see and hear everything that was going on, how she floated around the room before re-entering her body. Sounds like a classic Near Death Experience, where a simple hallucination caused by the lack of blood to the brain gets interpreted as a religious experience. It’s the exact same thing that happens when test pilots black out in centrifuges during training, they hallucinate too. But this isn’t the point, this woman is entitled to her opinion (even though 5 minutes of research on the internet would show there was nothing religious about her experience at all). What is the point is how Nine presented the story, at no stage did they present the woman’s opinions as her own personal beliefs. They made it sound like fact. Perhaps the reporter who wrote the story is religious, or they believe in life after death, but this kind of thing should not be presented as fact.
And using the word “miracle” is a total cop-out to the paramedics who revived her. God didn’t save her, the paramedics and science saved her. They’re the ones who studied hard for years to learn how to revive patients, there was science behind everything they did. Science which has been tested over and over in controlled conditions with hard evidence to back it up.
If I saved someone’s life and they thanked God instead, I’d be more than a little irritated.

Of course it’s just as much the fault of the public that the news can get away with this kind of behavior. We don’t have good attention spans anymore, we want emotion rather than the facts, entertainment rather than knowledge. The news are doing whatever gets ratings, if the public wanted truth and facts then that’s exactly what they would be getting.

Don’t get me started on A Current Affair and Today Tonight, it’s depressing that these poor excuses for entertainment are classified as part of the “News Hour”. They’re opinion pieces with the power to destroy criminal cases by biasing the public, getting facts wrong and ruining people’s lives.

If anyone is reading this, please join with me. Be skeptical in a healthy way, don’t accept things as fact without at least making an attempt to check for yourself. If someone forwards you a chain email, just quickly Google it to see if it’s backed up by a news article from a credible source. Don’t do something just because everyone else does it. Don’t be afraid to think outside the square. Don’t be afraid to miss a terrible TV show that everyone else watches just because you’re afraid of being left out of the conversation the next day.

Read books, watch documentaries, expand your mind. Never take news articles and TV stories as the absolute truth. Watch TV shows that point out the errors of the media, such as Media Watch, or Jon Stewart, but have a healthy skepticism of these shows as well as they can also get things wrong sometimes. Make sure you’re getting all the facts and all sides of the story.

Life isn’t meant to be easy, it shouldn’t be. Overcoming challenges is what gave us many of the greatest innovations of the human race. It gave us literature, science, technology, music, and the great works of film.

What has the Human Race accomplished in 2009?

You only have yourselves to blame.

Important Info Re: IT Crowd Series 3 DVD Easter Eggs

I’m writing this as a personal favor to anyone working on decoding the IT Crowd Series 3 DVD Easter Eggs. There’s a lot of incorrect info going around, and although I have no interest in the hidden messages myself, I feel I should point out a few important things.

Firstly, my website www.reynholm.co.uk has NOTHING to do with the DVD. It’s a personal fansite, it’s been around for several years and I have no affiliation with Channel 4 or the IT Crowd. Please don’t email me asking for the password to the intranet, it’s easy to find. In fact I believe it’s on the Wikipedia page. And most of the sequences of numbers on the site (the password file, etc) have no meaning. Either way, nothing on my website will help you with the Series 3 DVD.

Secondly, and this is the most important one, all the IT Crowd sites are hosted on the same web server.

The IP address is 89.16.172.246

If you visit the IP address on it’s own, you get a blank placeholder site that says “The cake is a lie” and “Coming soon…”. http://89.16.172.246/

Here’s a list of the sites that I could find sitting on that server:
http://www.hokerspoker.com
http://www.itsveryblue.com
http://www.friendface.co.uk/
http://www.fiendface.com/ (Yes, FIENDface, without an ‘R’)
http://www.ilovewillies.com/
http://www.howlonghaveyougot.com/
http://www.bluffball.com/
http://www.bluffball.co.uk/
http://www.cuke.me/
http://www.cuke.co.uk/
http://www.reynholmindustries.co.uk/
http://www.ilovewillies.com/
http://www.itcrowd.com/

As with all these sites, if you go to a page that doesn’t exist you’ll get the standard “Coming soon…” and “Cake is a lie” error page. The same thing will happen if you replace “www” with something else. “Coming soon…” should be interpreted as actually meaning “Page Not Found”. I can pretty much guarantee that http://fakefakefake.bluffball.com/ is not just “coming soon”.

I hope this helps, it’s just basic knowledge to anyone who has ever run a web server or setup DNS

How to use the new Amazon AWS Signature in PHP

I’ve just spent 3…no…4 hours messing about with this, until I finally got it to work.

The new Amazon Associates (or as it’s to be renamed, Amazon Product Advertising API) requires that by August all requests include a Signature.

Documentation here:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/rest-signature.html

Here’s how I implemented it in PHP (I had to make some changes to support multiple keywords, such as ‘dan aykroyd’. The space was causing huge problems after being urlencoded and decoded, parsed, hashed, etc).

define('AMAZON_ID','YOUR AWS DEVELOPER CODE');
define('SECRET_KEY','YOUR AWS SECRET KEY');
$keyword = "steve martin"; // The keywords you're searching for
$aws = array();
$keyword = urlencode($keyword);
$url = "http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService";
$url .= "&AWSAccessKeyId=".AMAZON_ID;
$url .= "&Operation=ItemSearch";
$url .= "&SearchIndex=DVD";
$url .= "&Keywords=".$keyword."";
$url .= "&ResponseGroup=Small,OfferFull,Images,Reviews,ItemAttributes,SalesRank";
$url .= "&Timestamp=".gmdate('Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z');
$url = str_replace("+",urlencode("+"),$url);
$url_a = parse_url($url);
$url_a['query'] = str_replace(',',urlencode(','),$url_a['query']);
$url_a['query'] = str_replace(';',urlencode(':'),$url_a['query']);
parse_str($url_a['query'],$params);
uksort($params, 'strnatcmp');
$qstr = '';
foreach ($params as $key => $val) {
$qstr .= "=".rawurlencode($val);
}
$qstr = substr($qstr, 1);
$qstr = str_replace('%20',urlencode('+'),$qstr);
$qstr = str_replace(',',urlencode(','),$qstr);
$qstr = str_replace(';',urlencode(':'),$qstr);
$sig = "GET\n"
. "webservices.amazon.com\n"
. "/onca/xml\n"
. $qstr;
$sig = base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha256', $sig, SECRET_KEY, true));
$sig = str_replace('+','%2B',$sig);
$sig = str_replace('=','%3D',$sig);
$params['Signature'] = $sig;
$p = array();
foreach($params as $k=>$v) {
$p[]=$k."=".$v;
}
$qstr = implode("&",$p);
$rebuilt_url = $url_a['scheme']."://".$url_a['host'].$url_a['path']."?".$qstr;
$aws['url'] = $url."&Signature=".$sig;
$xml = file_get_contents($aws['url']);
echo '';
var_dump($xml);
echo '';


I know what you’re going to say, why didn’t I do it ‘this way’ or ‘that way’?

The problem is that you don’t just encrypt the query string and tack it onto the end of the URL as a Signature. You need to split the query string up, re-sort them, and then join them back together again first. And if the query doesn’t come out looking exactly the same as the original, then the Signature won’t validate. I tried dozens of other ways and in the end I had to go for the most longwinded and seemingly illogical method.

I *could* probably waste time finding a way to condense this and make it simpler, but I’ve already lost my entire night because of this. And at least I know it works.

Update: In the end I used a modified version of Ulrich Mierendorff’s code from here:
http://mierendo.com/software/aws_signed_query/
It works with all the queries I can throw at it, including searches with single quotes.
View it in action here:
http://www.bluesbrotherscentral.com/profiles/willie-big-eyes-smith/
(The Amazon box at the bottom of the page)
It looks like I was on the right track, if I had the time I would have fixed the bugs myself (but why reinvent the wheel?)

Amazon.com can be so hopeless sometimes…

For the record, I love Amazon.com. I order dozens of CDs and DVDs through them all the time.

On my site I wrote a function to use Amazon Web Services to download product data for actors. For example, you visit Dan Aykroyd’s page and all his DVDs appear at the bottom. Simple enough.

Then today I get this confusing email from Amazon:

In addition to the new name, signatures will be necessary to authenticate each call to the Product Advertising API. This requirement will be phased in starting May 11, 2009, and by August 15, 2009, all calls to the Product Advertising API must be authenticated or they will not be processed. For pointers on how you can easily authenticate requests to the Product Advertising API, please refer to the developer guide, available here.

Sounds fair enough to me, I figure I just have to add a line of code to my script or something.

So I read the documentation:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/rest-signature.html

TEN Extra Steps!!!

I’ve now spent an entire hour trying to update my code. It works fine without the Signature (and it will continue to do so until August), but as soon as I add the Signature it gives me a 400 Bad Request.

According to the documentation this is the crucial line:

base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', $sig, "1234567890", true)) 

Anyway I’ve had enough for now, I’m going to drink something.

Update: Well it turns out that the part of the documentation they don’t include is that I need to get  a Secret Key, they didn’t mention that “1234567890″ is a fake number.

Now I have to see if using my Secret Key will fix it…