Woo that’s clever

I'm just working on an application for one of the departments and as it handles some confidential information, it has to be protected as per the data protection act. To do this I should encrypt the data that is stored so that in the event the data source get compromised I have some fallback that the data they get will be encrypted and thus useless to them until they can decrypt it. Anyway I have been looking about to find different methods for achieving this and came across a number of clever ways of doing it.

One which I have just been reading about uses the serialize() function to accept any data of any type put into it and allows encryption of that data which is quite cool as I know the problems with needing arrays or strings as the input for functions, for this purpose it does not matter as it will serialize the information storing the variables in whatever format and the best part is that when it is decrypted the unserialize() function can be used to turn it back into its original format be that array or string. Clever.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-01-11 10:46:38

Well it was snowing

Just went out for my lunch to see it snowing away unfortunately not lying on the ground, but very pretty.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-01-10 15:13:56

Rarr

As anyone who watches the news in the UK at the moment will be aware of the stories about money going into building new nuclear power plants, and of course some environmentalist has come up with a problem with this. Take the word environmentalist and split it into its component parts environ-mentalist, environ meaning the surroundings, the area around, which is fair enough. It is the second work I think that accurately describes them, mentalist which is defined as a derogatory term for someone who is "mental" or insane, and in this case that is so true.

Nuclear power plants can produce more energy per plant, than renewable energy, and it is cheaper than renewable energy per megawatt hour. They are safer now than they have ever been so safety is not even so great an issue. The argument presented against nuclear are as follows.

That it is too slow to develop when compared to renewable energy –
Partially wrong, it takes time to build renewable sources that could be compared, as you would need more renewable plants per single nuclear plant as they individually produce so little.

Nuclear waste has not been prepared for -
The government has said that the owners will pay for it not the government which feels like a bit of a cop out but fair enough, and there are facilities to safely store nuclear waste in the world today.

An accident could be disastrous -
This is true with even modern nuclear power plants, but, and this is the key but, there are so many safety systems to protect against anything happening, in addition to the fact that the grade of nuclear fuel used is such that it cannot be used to make nuclear bombs it simply is not reactive enough in non-military reactors.

High costs during the build phase, High maintenance costs, Decommissioning is very expensive -
This is also true, but weighed against the money saved on output power and the reliability as these systems are unaffected by weather unlike renewable which is dependant on the weather no wind near a wind turbine which will actually produce negative electrical energy as the system cannot be switched off and as such must be powered to keep moving, it has to be spun up to begin producing electricity.

Nuclear power stations could be potential terrorist targets -
This is a pointless "what if" scenario because of a combination of the safety systems which would shut down the reactor in the event of an attack, not to mention that the radiation shielding around the reactor is multi-layered and strong enough to protect against most things and the security from the paranoia around this potential event means that the likelihood of anyone getting close to a reactor to cause any damage is highly unlikely. It would be much easier to take a bomb to a shopping centre, train station, or other public place.

Distracts from environmentalism –
environmentalism generally does not affect the environment, it is a cost saving measure. I wouldn't have so much of a problem with this if they didn't lump them in together. An energy saving light bulb for example would cost the user 1/8 the amount of money to run which is great and in turn yes the amount of energy needed is less which means that you don't need as many power plants as the same energy goes further thus saving the power makers and governments money which is also good but it does not necessarily save the environment given the following example 2 nuclear power plants can create enough energy to power 200,000 houses and you have 180,000 people so you are using 90% of your available power and with energy saving you could potentially reduce the effective number of households which means more excess energy which means that the power organisations can sell the excess energies to neighbouring countries and pass one the cost savings to the customers, see money saving. Just because we don't use the power does not mean that the power companies are not going to use it.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2008-01-10 15:07:44

Restructured the side menu

I did this today to make it less cluttered, with 2 applications and 2 games there appeared to be too much and it is not necessary to see these on the front page. This also gave me the opportunity to publish the source code system which allows me to publish bits of useful code both I have developed and I have found but usually modded. This can be found in the Apps and Games section or here. Have a look.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2007-12-14 15:28:43

First month away

Currently getting the last changes to the School of music's site cleared away and working on the college's contacts list, a file upload system for conference sites so that they can submit the conference abstracts directly to a database (which currently works) and an image upload system that uses the same system which also works but with one big difference, the thumbnails. Due to restrictions of the servers certain functions like imagecreatefromjpeg, imagejpeg, imagecreatetruecolor, and even copy have been banned so that when they are used in a script it either produces no output (not working) or kills that script that called it, so it is a case of trying to figure out another way around that does not use the banned functions. At least it is interesting.

Last night I completed the backbone of the code which will run my source code publication system, I have developed a number of little functions and applications which I have found useful and I am going to publish them on this site. Really all these pages need is an initial bumf to explain what the application is but I like it and will probably publish its code as well once I build in an admin system to automate the process of publication, which is currently a manual addition system, a system which allows the files to be downloaded as a whole file rather than just the displaying the formatted code. Oh and if I really feel inclined to a function highlighting system which will make the functions used become links to the php.net website so developers could see what the individual functions that make up the application do.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2007-12-03 14:33:00

Second week done

Just finished my second week and the school of music website is complete, well the bit I was doing is done and it just needs content to complete it. I did have an interesting puzzle on the main department search page which was causing certain words to be interpreted wrongly. An example is the word 'description' which because it had the word script inside it was being interpreted as an illegal term so was being outputted to the search engine as 'deion' which is wrong. So I having found the bit of code on Thursday night which was causing spent Friday morning working through a solution which used a complex regular expression to find the word script but not flagging words which had script as a part so 'script','< script type=' would be flagged but 'description' and 'prescription' would not then I created an array of potential dangerous terms which would feed into this array and it would loop through them sanitising the script. I am quite proud of this little script, it is not big, you don't see it work but it does its job very well and efficiently.

Also on Wednesday I had a half day and presented a seminar for the ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) module on databases which was fortunate because I enjoy presenting and it was a topic I knew quite well after my work for IME where I had to learn a lot about MS Access.

This has been a good week. I decided on Friday that I would not get an i-phone, I still really want one, I think that it is a fantastic piece of kit, simply amazing, but I want an i-book pro laptop more and I've spotted that one I want at &pound;2000 so I put the money that I would have spent on the phone into my savings account until I get it. Then I can get an i-phone which by that point with the competitive nature of the phone market will have either come down in price or apple will have brought out a new one. There is so much potential but the apple i-phone is about passion it doesn't need all the gadgets in the world it just works and works well.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2007-11-10 21:18:57

So much fun

Started at my new jobs and after a bit of confusion and setting up of a wamp server and filtering through the news system code which is my first project. The news system was originally set up by my predecessor and I am very impressed as I have found that he added a lot of features which have saved me a lot of time adapting it for another site. I have also just been given another project to make a database to RSS feed generator for the English Literature department which is great because I did a similar system for this site so I get to revisit some code.

To top things off I finish at 5, no running through the rain, no coming home at night so physically and mentally tired all I want to do is sleep, it's great. Not only that I have found out that the Office of Lifelong Learning, the department that I worked in for my work placement, is one of our clients so I will get the chance to work with them again.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2007-10-31 23:51:39

Recent happenings

Well I have my first day with Edinburgh University tomorrow as a web developer which should be interesting and a belated happy birthday to Stuart McIntyre who had his birthday on the 19th of this month.

The cleaning of the flat now that I have moved in is progressing slowly, but any progress is still progress. I have constructed my table, and my PC, I have my clothes in the wardrobe and now have access to my books. Some good news I have some board games (monopoly, chess, battleships, agitation, and trivial pursuit) accessible, a host of DVDs, and space in the living room to have some visitors around now granted until I clear the rest of the living room it will be a bit of a squeeze.

Posted by Christopher Chestnut on 2007-10-28 18:02:11