This time, Google announced a new project named Google Chrome and it is a new open-source browser, with a lot of innovations and some typical search engine related functions. You can read more about it here.

edit: Chrome is released, get it here. It is so damn fast but I miss the huge database of Firefox plugins...

Connecting to an other server is useful for a number of reasons, think about content scraping or posting messages to a website or forum. Both PHP and Perl have great support for this, but this time I think PHP wins the prize for being the most useful. This is a very strange thing to say because exploits etc are mainly written in Perl.

When you're connecting to a website in Perl, you can use LWP::Useragent, in PHP it's easier and you can just use file_get_contents("http://www.randombase.com"). These are only suitable for HTTP servers so not that useful.

As soon as you're trying something more advanced (IRC bot?) you need more powerful tools.  In PHP, the way to go is fsockopen(), this is an awesome function that is very easy to work with, it can work with virtually any protocol and gives you endless possibilities. The same goes for Perl's IO::Socket. This extension is maybe more powerful than PHP's, but for some reason I think it's unnecessary complex, there is too much information to be defined before you can actually use it.

So, my final judgement of this PHP vs Perl series would be Perl if you're writing something intended for personal usage or when you need to write a quick hack. I also think Perl is just candy for people who are good with advanced structures, because good and efficient Perl code is almost unreadable in the end. PHP is easier to pick up because of the enormous documentation (Perl's documentation is shattered on the web), and still the unbeaten king for developing websites.

http://iron.randombase.com/monitor.php

This application shows the serverload, both graphically and in numbers. This example uses a random number generator instead of showing the actual serverload, so don't worry, our server isn't that unstable. I can give you the source code on request, just send me an e-mail!

I was working on a dumb game but realised it was dirt so I quit working on it, mainly because of the forced lag you get through AJAX and PHP. Little did I know at the time I wrote it because apparently there are ways to keep the connection open, even in PHP and AJAX, instead of resending the headers each time. This would reduce lag greatly, and get normal latency. I'm only going to discuss/explain one of two methods I read about because I didn't quite get the other one.

The method is, very simply put: you keep your PHP script running and use Javascript to dynamically update the things on the page. Using usleep() to define the amount of lag you want, and of course deciding what amount of server load you're willing to give to your script. I'm not giving any example, it's late already and it's not hard.

Using Javascript's function getElementById() you can easily manipulate things on the homepage, and use flush() to get the output constantly sent to the browser.

Imagine you have one of those lame "value my site" scripts, that connects to the Google PageRank server, Alexa, Yahoo Backlinks and what not. 99% of all scripts simply connect to the servers in one turn, making the script look frozen for atleast a couple of seconds. Statistics show all users leave if your script is running more than 9.81 seconds (OK, I made that up).

To fix the frozen state, add a flush() line between every connection, example:

<?php

connectToGoogle();

flush();

connectToAlexa();

?>

The moment the script is finished with connectToGoogle(), it will show the output it has already and continue to Alexa. Not clear enough? Here is my little example:

http://iron.randombase.com/flush.php

The code I have so far is quite simple, it works like this:

Step 1: generate a MySQL table filled with the so called "ranges" or "blocks", a block is a part of the amount of hashes you want to generate for cracking your hash. For example, the blocksize I'm currently using is 50. So if I want to generate a million hashes, I'd create 20,000 blocks.

Step 2: create a server file for the AJAX function in the Javascript cracker. The server file is written in PHP and returns a random, uncompleted range from the database.

Step 3: the moment a user visits a page, the AJAX function retrieves a random block from the server and starts cracking it (small blocksize so the cracking only takes a few miliseconds). If the block is finished, it tells the server. If the hash is cracked, it also tells the server. The server checks this (no invalid input by evil users, kthxbye) and if this is correct, removes all remaining blocks.

The main issue here is that you need a huge website to get really good speeds. RandomBase receives around 3 hits / second, which would mean only 150 hashes / second.

When you're sending an e-mail from php mail() to a Hotmail account, most of the times it will a) never arrive or b) get marked as spam. There is a fix though: you need to send some extra headers with the request, make it look like it was sent from a real mail client.

<?php

$to = "I Ron <iron@hotmail.com>";
$subject = "It arrived on Hotmail?";
$message = "Yes it did! :o";
$headers = "From: RandomBase <iron@randombase.com>\n";
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: RandomBase <iron@randombase.com>\n";
$headers .= "X-Priority: 1\n";
$headers .= "X-MSMail-Priority: High\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: RandomBaseMailer";
mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers)

?>

It's that simple. It would be even more simple if people stopped using this piece of AJAX based spyware that filters everything but spam messages.

I've been mainly busy with this Dutch Battlefield Heroes forum and playing the game (in beta), the addiction continues. But I've did a little coding too and I'll share the idea with you guys, not the code since it's not functional like I want it.

The very basic concept, and also the only thing it does now, is to start off with one keyword (say "php") and end up with a longer string with few results (say "php tutorial about creating games with mysql and javascript and all other things"). The point of finding these is of course to find less competitive niches that should convert well for marketers. The code uses a part of Google search.

The idea was fun, but it didn't work out very well, I'll put some more time in it later. Here are some examples:

Start: php

27200000 => php split
3920 => php split REG_EMPTY

Start: work

1030000 => worksource
173000 => worksource WA
165000 => worksource wage subsidy

Start: health

23900000 => health card
748000 => health cards ontario

I'm still trying to tweak it, I guess I should be breaking down the keywords and try to reorder them etc to reach the point of a niche with < 10000 results.

print 'Hello world.' unless $world eq 'Destroyed';

That all, in one line. PHP has (together with Javascript) a good but too long and confusing option for, the shorter version of if(), I use it all the time. It would look like this in PHP:

print ($world == 'Destroyed') ? '' : 'Hello world';

Ok, that's a pretty sweet function but it requires me to type too much special characters.

The second function I would like to talk about is ... well it has no name, it's just something you can do. In short, it is this:

($arrayOptionOne,$arrayOptionTwo) = @array;

That is the Perl version, PHP has this one too but they really had to add a specific named function for it:

list($arrayOptionOne,$arrayOptionTwo) = $array;

And then one of the functions I use all the time for things that involve editing files:

open(FileHandle,"<fileName");

print join("",<FileHandle>");

That's it! That's just it, we have read a complete file in two lines of code. The PHP version is horrifying here:

$fileHandle = fopen('fileName', 'r');

$data = fread($fileHandle, filesize('fileName'));

fclose($fileHandle);
print $data;

Now I hear some people say: what's wrong with file_get_contents() then? Nothing, except it doesn't allow you to change the mode parameters (you know: read, write, append, ..) which is quite useful.

After all, anything that I need to write quickly for a task is written in Perl, but in the end PHP is the most powerful language for websites so don't get all mad on me for not mentioning that before.