Josh Wieder

Lets say we have a form. The form is straight-forward: HTML radio buttons that posts to a PHP processing script that saves the results to a database. The radio buttons correspond to bindary responses to questions - Yes/No, True/False. These truth values are mapped to the integers '1' and '0', which are then stored in the database. When such a form is creating new records, this is about as brainless as web-development gets. But things get more complicated when the form is used to update existing records. A useful update form will typically have a few basic features; among them, the option to update all of the data in the form or just some of the data. To do this, we have to check whether a variable is being updated or not. One approach to checking on variable updates is to create an array with all of the variables to be considered, like this:  $stuff = array( 'fee' => $_POST['fee'], 'fi' => $_POST['fi'], ...

I've written a simple bash script that checks for new files in an AWS S3 bucket and emails any that it finds as a compress (tar.gz) attachment  - you can find it at my Github account under the name "S3-Filer-Mailer". I built it as a supplement for a contact form that relies on S3 as a back-end, rather than a php mailer or database. Using S3 for contact forms is attractive because it is so unattractive to spammers. There is no way to corrupt this sort of setup for spamming or to get hands on a database through the form, because it isn't connected to one. Why not use Amazon's Simple Notification Service (SNS) ? For one, AWS charges more for SNS than it does for S3 queries and downloads. For another, if this sort of functionality is available through SNS it is not clearly documented. Getting back to the topic of security, the script establishes two network connections - one a connection to S3 to retrieve the files, the other sending the email. The S3 connection ...

When restoring an MSSQL database, it is common to receive an error similar to this one:  " The database could not be exclusively locked to perform the operation ." Msg 5030, Level 16, State 12, Line 1   This error can occur in MSSQL  2005, 2008 or 2012. There are a number of workarounds for this. Some will tell you to disable the website's application pool in IIS, but this doesnt help if someone remotely is connected using SQL Management Studio. You can go into Performance Monitor and manually kill each process, but often the processes jump up faster than you can disable them by hand.  Where that is the case, perform the following procedure. Assuming your restore job task window is properly configured and just open, keep it open. You can right click on the database server and select New Query without closing the restore job task window, which wastes time when you must recreate it. Then, enter the following script into the query menu (be...