Just a quick post for now. Do you know how PHP’s symbol table works? To put it in nutshell, symbols are stored in one place and values (also called ZVals) are stored in another. Normally, this abstraction will mean nothing to you, but take the following sample code: $foo = &$bar; $bar = &$foo; Pretty [...]

Just a quick update for a mild PHP Quirk/annoyance I have noticed recently while doing some manipulation of strings by character offset. Say you have a string, such as ‘abcde’; Now, suppose you want to check the value of the third character (at index 2). You might have done something like this: $str = ‘abcde’; [...]

First off, let me just say that I am by no means an expert cryptographer; there are all sorts of wonderful, terrible things about hashes and block ciphers that I just don’t understand (I’d like to believe that it’s because I’ve not been exposed to them, whoever’s fault that is, and that if given a [...]

In PHP, an object is always passed around as a reference, which allows one to deal with objects in a very transparent manner, since the only way to deal with a by-value copy instead of the real deal is to explicitly use the clone operator. Recently, I came upon a situation in which it was [...]