SPACEBUG

Morphfolia – A New Open Source CMS is Born. 0

Morphfolia – A New Open Source CMS is Born.

My friends, Adrian Kearns, finally released his excellent CMS, Morphfolia, as an open source project.

Morphfolia is two things:

  • A Content Management System (CMS)
  • A web application framework (for the typical Microsoft ASP.NET stack)

Morphfolia provides a suite of tools and capabilities that make website development and management flexible and easy.

This is achieved by a mature architecture and good design principles; the pages, content, page-layout and look & feel are all separated.

Content is served by HTTP Handlers, and APIs exist to support “standard” ASP.NET WebForm development so that your custom forms are consistent with the other content.

It provides (amongst other things) a built-in search engine, auto-generating site map, content indexes, web traffic monitoring, centralized system and audit logging.

Tableless and Secure One-Time Password (OTP) 12

Tableless and Secure One-Time Password (OTP)

A one-time password (OTP) is a password that is only valid for a single login session or transaction. It is commonly used in the internet for registration and password reminder process in which OTPs are provides to the user in a form of a link that the user uses to access in order to create/reset his password.

Common requirements of One Time passwords are:

  1. Statistically unique – using the same password for all requests is probably not the right security choice.
  2. Hard to ‘guess’ – using sequential number is again, probably not the right security choice.
  3. Can be authenticated by the server – the server needs to distinguish between real OTP and bogus OTP.
  4. Good for one time – after the process is done the OTP should no longer be valid.
  5. Time limited – the OTP usually expires after a configurable amount of time.
  6. Secure – hackers should have a hard time changing the expiry date, username context and so forth.

Most OTP implementations use a Database table to persist the OTP and to manage their expiry date, a DB table might look like this:

id User Id OTP Expire date
1 Amir Asfsd3434bgddh 1/1/2010
2 Someone Ddfsd3345ssfsss 7/1/2010

While this is a valid solution, it is not the most efficient and elegant one, the truth is that you do not need an additional table enable and manage OTPs.

The answer is simple – the seed for this OTP is already persisted in the Database in the form of the old password (or more exactly the old password hash)

Here is how it is done:

How I Save Time Filtering Spam Comments with Mollom 1

How I Save Time Filtering Spam Comments with Mollom


I get spam comments all the time, it drives me crazy and make me wish I didn’t have a web site at all. Spam really bring the evil side of most site owners.

Yesterday, I finally had enough, I got 300 spam comments and only 4 real ones – I had to go over 3 pages and read bogus comments like:

“I have a question [link to gambling site]”

or “nice post [link to viagra]”

and the ho-so-known “dgsdgsdghsdfhdf [link to a SEO company]”.

I went to drupal and looked for the most popular anti-spam module they listed and found Mollom.

Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website. When site moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your community.

Open source presentation at the Wellington Architect forum 0

Open source presentation at the Wellington Architect forum

Just finished my presentation on Open source and Architecture in the Wellington Software Architect Forum.

We have covered these topics:
1) Definition, Licensing & players
2) Open source based architecture examples
3) Best practices
4) ROI, TCO and other TLA
5) Open source tools for architecture
6) Want to be an open source developer?
7) Future FOSS trends

You can download the presentation here.

IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.2 Released with TinyMCE support 7

IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.2 Released with TinyMCE support


IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.

Up until now IPWEditor has integrated only with FCKeditor. The major feature in this release is integration with TinyMCE, a popular WYSIWYG editor.

Developers can now choose to run IPWEditor with either FCKeditor or with TinyMCE editor using the same IPWEditor code.

Drupal crashes when adding module in Modules admin screen 1

Drupal crashes when adding module in Modules admin screen

Drupal is a popular CMS that enables 3rd party development of extensions such as themes and modules. In order to get a good value site out of Drupal you need to install several modules and theme that provides functionality such as cool look and feel, SEO improvements, support for content types such as images and a lot more.

The problem:

When adding several modules to Drupal you try to enter the “modules” page in the administer menu and Drupal crashes with this error:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1476899 bytes) in . . .

How to SELECT a Random Record in SQL 0

How to SELECT a Random Record in SQL

Sometimes we need to retrieve a random entry from the Database. An examples for that could be trying to display “random posts” or “a random image”.

Some developers pull some or all of the records and then preform the randomization in the application tier (AKA in code).

In most cases letting the Database return random eateries could prove to be a better option performance-wise.

Here is how it is done:

IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.1 Released 0

IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.1 Released


IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.

As reported by some members of the community, due to jQuery issue with IE 7, IPWEditor 1.0 had some issues around IE usability.

Thanks to these inputs and some refactoring around the jQuery limitation, these issues were resolved in this IPWEditor 1.1 release.