crmacd

So I’ve been criticized before for having my computer science students play poker in class. I usually have some type of card game in my beginning level programming classes I teach. Blackjack, poker, or some other card based problem/simulation/game is usually a semester long project. I think it is and excellent example of using some basic CS related skills regardless of the language it is programmed in. It’s great to see there is actually a group that supports this and more importantly has some very significant people backing it. I personally am not very good at poker however I always enjoy a good game.

So last time I wrote an entree I was in the middle of a very large project at work. It was pretty big… big enough to end up in Wired magazine. It was weird seeing my work as a published article in a magazine I normally read. The success of this of course led to larger projects which have kept we working 12+ hour days at work. The whole life/work balance has really been off. Thankfully, I have a partner who understands — I love what I do. I’ve also been busy working on a museum exhibit. Hard to believe. I helped design and build a museum exhibit. I’m also exploring some serious media encoding thanks to my new Apple TV. Which spawned me starting up a small on the side software business. We’ll have to see where it goes from here. Lately I’ve been doing some traveling. A definite change of pace.

All in all life is good. Now if only I could get my ToDo list a little smaller.

Check out the results of a recent project I am working on.

Every web programmer has their own way of dealing with XSS but here is an interestingly simple way to deal with XSS attacks.

function filter_xss($oValue, $sValidCharacters = "1234567890!@%-_=+:,./abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ")
{
for($iCounter = strspn($oValue,$sValidCharacters); $iCounter < strlen($oValue); $iCounter = strspn($oValue,$sValidCharacters))
{
$oValue[$iCounter] = '_';
}
return $oValue;
}

An Image is Worth a Thousand Words and in this case that might be very true. How interesting would it be to see all your photos with a text filter. Now you can. These articles seem well written and appear to decent job of explaining the process. Excellent contribution to the PHP community.