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I had some trouble compiling pcntl PHP module on OS X Lion so I thought I’d share this solution. In fact, you can use these steps to compile any other PHP module.
First download the latest php source from PHP.NET
cd into your php src directory, then:cd ext/pcntl
phpize
./configure --enable-pcntl
When I ran the last step (configure), I got the following error:
‘PHP_FE_END’ undeclared here (not in a function)
To get around the problem, you need to specify your system architecture before configuring your extension:
CFLAGS='-arch x86_64' CXXFLAGS='-arch x86_64' LDFLAGS='-arch x86_64' ./configure --enable-pcntl
Copy compiled modules into PHP extensions:
cp modules/pcntl.so /usr/lib/php/extensions/
Enable the extension:
echo "extension=pcntl.so" >> /etc/php.ini
Marko
TopI’ve wanted to write a few stored procedures in MySQL for a while now, but I found it very fiddly and was unable to come up with one very quickly. Tonight I was determined to read up on MySQL documentation and get one going.
For my reference only, this stored procedure will loop through a recordset and update a single row in a table upon a single row lookup in another table.
DELIMITER // DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS sp_test // CREATE PROCEDURE sp_test () BEGIN DECLARE done INT DEFAULT FALSE; DECLARE myid INT; DECLARE cur1 CURSOR FOR SELECT id from table1 WHERE firstname IS NULL; DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND SET done = TRUE; OPEN cur1; read_loop: LOOP IF done THEN LEAVE read_loop; END IF; FETCH cur1 INTO myid; UPDATE table1 SET firstname = (SELECT firstname from table2 WHERE id = myid) WHERE id = myid; END LOOP; close cur1; END; //
Once I got the procedure to compile, executing it was as simple as:
call sp_testMarko
TopToday I discovered a nice tool on Github which installs free Windows virtual machines using VirtualBox on OS X. The only reason I’d use these virtual machines is to have different versions of Internet Explorer browsers running side by side for testing purposes.
So here’s what you need to do:
1. Download VirtualBox if you don’t have it already.
2. Choose what version of Internet Explorer to install. Then type the following commands in your terminal window:
Install ALL versions of Internet Explorer: IE6, IE7, IE 8, and IE 9curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bash
Install Internet Explorer 7 Only
curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="7" bash
Install Internet Explorer 8 Only
curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="8" bash
Install Internet Explorer 9 Only
curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="9" bash
3. Open VirtualBox and launch your virtual machine. You will be prompted to type in account password, which is “Password1″. The password is also in the “Passowd hint” field if you forget it.
Cheers
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MarkoToday I discovered opendiff tool that’s native to OS X – provided you have installed the Xcode on your system. It allows you to compare 2 directories and perform actions such as merge-left, merge-right etc…
Opendiff simply launches FileMerge OS X utility, which is another one I didn’t know about, and displays differences between 2 selected directories.
The very simple command to compare 2 directories is:
opendiff dir1 dir2
This will then launch FileMerge utility and give you a nice visual representation of differences in your folders:


Marko
TopI’ve been using Charles HTTTP Proxy for bandwidth throttling and network monitoring in general. It’s a great little tool, but when it comes to bandwidth throttling, it will only throttle HTTP and HTTPS traffic on ports 80 and 443 respectively.
I thought there had to be a way to throttle bandwidth on any port using the native IP firewall and traffic shaper program. After reading up the documentation for ipfw, I figured out a way to throttle speed on any outgoing port.
For example, the following example will create a pipe that will allow 25Kb/s to go through port 1935.
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 25KByte/s sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 1935
To disable throttling, simply delete the throttling rule:
sudo ipfw delete 1
Marko
TopAt Learnosity I’ve spent last 2 days scripting virtual server deployment on Amazon cloud. For my reference, these are some useful commands I had to use to get the job done.
1. Hash “Hello World” string using SHA256 algorithmecho -n "Hello World" | shasum -a 256
You can also hash a file
shasum -a 256 myfile.ext
2. Display server IP address by stripping out all other network information, including the local 127.0.0.1 IP
ifconfig | grep 'inet addr:'| grep -v '127.0.0.1' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'
3. Read out first 64 characters from a long string
${mystring:0:64}4. While loop with 10 iterations
i=0; while [ $i -lt 10 ] do echo $i i=$[$i+1] done
5. Replace contents of a file. For example search for string1, replace with string2 in myfile.txt
sed -e "s/string1/string2/g" myfile.txt > myfile.txt_temp mv myfile.txt_temp myfile.txt
6. Display number of CPU processors on Linux
The command simply pulls out all instances of the word ‘processor’ from /proc/cpuinfo and returns the word count of it.cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l
Marko
TopI recently changed my ISP from Optus to TPG and when I tried to start my local apache instance and I got this error
httpd: apr_sockaddr_info_get() failed for 192-168-1-107.tpgi.com.au httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName
That gave me a hint that my local hostname had changed. I reset it back to what it was originally like this:
sudo hostname myoldhostname.local
Restarted apache and it was smooth sailing again.
Marko
TopI’ve recently been working on text file decryption using Railo server. My files were encrypted in ActionScript 3 with the powerful AES-128 algorithm. For more info on AS3 encryption see Hurlant Crypto demo.
My challenge was to decypt this heavily encrypted content on a different platform, i.e. Railo with underlying Java Cipher capabilities.
The 6 things I knew about the encrypted content were:
1. Encryption Method – AES
2. Mode – CBC (Cipher-block chaining)
3. Padding – PKCS5
4. Initialisation Vector (IV) – given hex string
5. Passphrase – given hex string
6. Encrypted text file saved in base64 encoded string.For my records, this is how I went about decrypting on Railo:
<cfscript> // Create some java objects IvParameterSpec = createObject("java", "javax.crypto.spec.IvParameterSpec"); Cipher = createObject("java", "javax.crypto.Cipher"); SecretKeySpec = createObject("java", "javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec"); BASE64Decoder = createObject("java", "sun.misc.BASE64Decoder"); Str = createObject("java", "java.lang.String"); MessageDigest = createObject("java", "java.security.MessageDigest"); encryptedFileContent = "base64encodedcontent"; password = binarydecode("somehexpassphrase", "hex"); iv = binarydecode("somehexivstring", "hex"); skeySpec = SecretKeySpec.init(password, "AES"); ivSpec = IvParameterSpec.init(iv); cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding"); encryptedContent = BASE64Decoder.decodeBuffer(encryptedFileContent); cipher.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE,skeySpec,ivSpec); decryptedBytes = cipher.doFinal(encryptedContent); decryptedString = Str.init(decryptedBytes); </cfscript>
Now that we know how the decryption works, encrypting data on Railo should be a piece of cake. For example:
<cfscript> password = "somepassphrase"; stringToEncrypt = "stringToEncrypt"; md = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5"); md.update(password.getBytes("UTF-8"), 0, password.length()); rawKey = md.digest(); skeySpec = SecretKeySpec.init(rawKey, "AES"); ivSpec = IvParameterSpec.init(rawKey); cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding"); cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, skeySpec, ivSpec); encryptedbytes = cipher.doFinal(stringToEncrypt.getBytes()); </cfscript>
The only thing you need to be aware of is the format of parameters passed into encryption/decryption logic, and convert them appropriately. These parameters can be either plain, base64 or hex strings.
Who would’ve thought that reverse engineering could be som much fun

Cheers
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MarkoI’ve had to reinstall apache server on my Mac and the only way to do it cleanly was to nuke my existing apache installation and compile a fresh one from source.
That’s all cool, but I could never remember what modules I needed and how to enable them. If you don’t load any modules at compile time, this is the most likely error you’ll get when you start apache web server:
Invalid command 'Order', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
So the following steps worked well for me.
1. Download Apache 2.2 source code
2. Extract the source code and configure apache with required modules. These modules are the ones I normally need. You can customise this to your needs:./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 \ --enable-mods-shared=all \ --enable-shared \ --enable-deflate \ --enable-proxy \ --enable-proxy-http \ --enable-ssl \ --enable-cgi \ --enable-cgid \ --enable-cache make \ make install \
Check /usr/local/apache2/modules directory and make sure required modules have been installed.
Marko
TopThe first of multiple files that make up a split archive created with WinZip; uses the same compression as a standard .ZIP file, but must be decompressed along with the related split archives (.Z02, .Z03, etc.).
Split archives are often used to shrink the size of large files for e-mail attachments or file downloads. They can only be decompressed if all the split archive segments are available.
To decompress a series of z01, z02… files you need to do the following
1) Change all .z01, .z02 extensions to .001, .002 and so on.
2) The last extension in compressed series will have a .zip extension. If you have 8 segments, change .zip to .008.
3) Join all segments using “MacHacha”
4) Change the extension of the file produced by MacHacha to .zip
5) Use “The Unarchiver” to decompress the .zip file produced by MacHacha.References:
Top
http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/z01
