Coding Horror has an article today about a little-known extension to the http cookie protocol: HTTPOnly.

Essentially, HTTPOnly makes any browser cookies from the site unreadable to javascript (in supported browsers anyway: IE7, Opera 9.5, FF3), thus raising the bar for XSS attacks considerably.

So how do we turn it on in PHP?
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Whether it’s a campaign speech by a presidential contender, or a 300 page bestselling novel, large bodies of text are among the most requested topics for condensing into an infographic.

The purpose can vary from highlighting specific relations to contrasting points or use of language, but all of the following methods focus on distilling a volume of text down to a visualization.

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The magazine American Scientist has a cover image this month featuring a circular vizualization of similarity between the human and canine genomes.

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A minor wordpress annoyance that i’ve run across lately is that every time you update a post, the date on the post changes, so it moves to the top of your RSS feed. Thankfully, Ciaran Gultnieks has a solution.

Wired.com’s Threat Level blog is reporting that the judge in the only file sharing case to actually go to court is holding a hearing today on the issue of “Implied” copyright infringment, or the act of making copyrighted files available, where the copyright holder has no actual evidence that they were actually downloaded.

According to the article “The RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America have told the judge that it’s impossible to know whether others had downloaded copyrighted music from Thomas’ Kazaa share folder.”

Supposing the judge rules that the RIAA needs to have actual proof that the files were downloaded, what would that mean for current file sharing protocols?

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I’ve installed the WP-Syntax wordpress plugin for code highlighting, and am very impressed, except for a nasty bug that was causing code snippets to escape html special characters.

Thankfully Gergely Hodicska has a solution on his blog.

Hopefully this sees integration into the actual plugin’s codebase at some point.

So unless you live under a non-Web 2.0-enabled rock, you’ve probably heard of the magic of the Google maps API and google maps mashups. If you’re saavy, you’ve probably even heard that now Google Maps offer translation of addresses into latitude and longitude, aka Geocoding.

What you may not know is that the folks at google exposed this geocoding as a regular old URL-based webservice, which means that whatever Nifty mashups your devious little minds can come up with (as long as they fly with google’s TOS) can be powered on the backend without ever loading a google map!
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