Blisstering Solutions

If you need to have valid date and time on your server, you need to synchronize it with a time server as well. In order to do this in Linux (especially in CentOS),  we will follow my short howto.

1. Ensure you’ve got ntp installed. Run rpm -qa | grep ntp to find out if it already exists on your system and yum install ntp if it is not present.

2. Run ntpdate. On CentOS, you will probably get this error:

[root@server ~]# ntpdate
29 Jan 09:52:54 ntpdate[8463]: no servers can be used, exiting

As you should already know, register_globals is a php.ini directive that manages the way PHP deals with variables. It has been deprecated for security issues and we won’t see it in PHP 6.0. If the deprecated register_globals directive is on (removed as of PHP 6.0.0), then variables_order also configures the order the ENV, GET, POST, COOKIE and SERVER variables are populated in global scope.

Sometimes, for example, when you need to create a password, you need to change character case. I wrote the function that allows to generate a string with random case. Here it is:

function randomcase($word)
{
$output="";
for ($l=0; $l
{
if (mt_rand(0,1)==1) $output.=strtoupper($word{$l}); else $output.=strtolower($word{$l});
}
return $output;
}

It's very simple, but sometimes you need a ready code instead of writing your own. Hope to save some minutes.

Nowadays file upload is widely used on the web. We upload pictures, archives and videos and often don’t think how these files are handled by our server. In this post I’m going to show you several solutions for file upload in PHP, that allow to determine what kind of file was uploaded using a form.

The first option is related to the $_FILES array. When a file is uploaded, it is placed into a temporary directory and we use PHP functions to move it to the place we need. Let’s take a simple form to understand how it is processed.