Zend Certification for PHP5

As scheduled the new Zend Certification for PHP5 is being rolled out.

I wasn't too impressed with the PHP4 version that i took but this one looks more promising; i think it covers more modern and relevant areas of PHP than its predecessor, which i suppose would be obvious.

Unlike the PHP4 exam, this would be a shiney badge i'd like to show off.

[update] XSS / CSRF using AJAX

A couple of weeks ago i wrote about how cross-domain AJAX could be a nasty idea from a security perspective, today Chris Shiflett (whose writing prompted my post) addressed the subject: http://shiflett.org/archive/250.

A much more important concern is that cross-domain Ajax effectively eliminates the CSRF safeguard implemented by many web applications...

...In fact, there's nothing any web application could do about it.

Idea: quote tracker / favlet

Often when i'm reading blogs or other information sites i read a paragraph or soundbite that really sticks with me and/or defines the content and/or concepts. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a favlet or greasemonkey+ajax script that could let you highlight and then save a quote to a remote server (either a central repository or your own configurable receiver)?

You could use something like this to display a updating list of quotes, as a meta-data extension to Del.icio.us or to help you organise your bookmarks, perhaps to manage citations on your own website, build up an index of searchable quotes... lots of ideas i guess.

I suppose to be fair, Del.icio.us lets you do this if you select some text and hit the "tag" button... but it isn't specifically a quote that could be used later (unless you tagged it "quote" perhaps?) as the highlighted text is pasted into the "notes" field .

An idea to play around with i think, it could be some fun to experiment with "BJAX" concepts.

Yuck: another BBC News cosmetic change

I think this is what happens when you let a programmer loose with client-side design ;-).



I'm all for enhancing the user experience with nice uses of javascript etc, but this really does feel like it's been added for the sake of adding it.

• Visually, it looks horrendous. I'm no designer, but even i can see that this just doesn't work with the rest of the page.


• Why does it even need to be on the page at all?

I understand that they want to push their audio/video stuff, but this isn't the right place for it.

It's quite interesting to reflect upon my reaction, which was quite emotional over a small little change to this page (which happens to be my start page so i see it often). I kinda can empathise with the Netscape.com users who've had their old trusted site transformed into something "new and trendy" without actually wanting it to happen.

I wonder how long it'll take before it gets changed :).