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Aptana Studio is an IDE, Integrated Development Environment, that specializes in making it easier for web developers to organize and find resources for their projects. Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Eclipse are two popular examples of IDEs. Aptana provides a lot of the same type of functionality the Visual Studio does, but specializing in web development. Aptana, now at version 2.0.2 (though I did most of my developing in version 1.5), natively handles PHP, HTML, Javascript, and more web app languages.

I was recently inspired to refresh my PHP and MySQL abilities, so I assigned myself a little bit of a programming challenge. Part of my inspiration also stemmed from never wanting to choose a place to go out to eat with friends, so I crafted the challenge to create a web application that would allow me to randomly choose a restaurant that would please all members attending. What I came up with in the end, I like to call Friendstaurant.

Friendstaurant allows you to:

• Add Friends and state any restaurants they dislike (or don’t want to go to)

I’m now the proud owner of a Palm Pre and I’m looking forward to being able to possibly develop some Apps for it.

The SDK for the Palm Pre is currently in pre-release and early access form only. There is also a huge NDA to go along with it.

The SDK makes use of Java, Safari (for debugging), and VirtualBox (for emulation) on Windows.

You can sign up for early access to the SDK at the Palm Developer site. There you can also read the first chapter of the developer’s guide for developing with the Mojo SDK.

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I hope the past week highlighting different Google Code projects has been worthwhile for all involved. Google Code is a great resource for developers and others working with Open Source projects. It’s also a great directory listing for individuals to find the programs they need or a project to join if they are so inclined and talented.

If you want to check out the source code for any of the applications I’ve covered or any others you stumble upon, you’ll just need a Subversion client on your machine. One such client for Windows is TortoiseSVN.

Install TortoiseSVN (and restart if prompted). Create a folder where you want to store the source of the project. Right-click on that folder and go to the new TortoiseSVN context menu entries to ‘Check out from Repository…’. In the window that pops up, just enter the URL that is listed on the Google Code page under the Source tab like:

http://imcollaborator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

It’s a rare and exciting opportunity when I get to introduce something I’ve developed. I’m an administrator for a small phpBB forum and I’ve regularly installed mods to tweak the behavior of phpBB to match my user’s needs. I did some looking around but couldn’t find anything to match a direct request I had: Open all the unread posts in one click instead of having to click each link and have it open in a new tab or window.

After scouring the phpBB Mods database and other phpBB hack sites and not finding anything, I set out to develop this myself. In the end, it seems to work perfectly but it’s nothing too complex. It was a great one to start off with because of its simplicity, but still had enough issues to generate a feeling of accomplishment.

If you’re unfamiliar with installing phpBB mods, check out my quick guide or the phpBB guide. One of the best mods I’ve installed on my forum is the View or mark unread posts mod and I highly recommend it. It makes the ‘Unread posts’ feature of phpBB more accurate and more useful. It also perfectly complements the Open All Unread in One Click mod I’ve made.

Summary:

Follow the ‘View Unread Posts‘ link at the top of the Index page of your phpBB3 forum. When you’re on that page, you’ll see a little line that says how many posts are unread in the top-right corner. I have made this line into a link. If you left-click on it, it will open all the unread posts in new windows. If you have Firefox or IE* configured as such, it will open them as new tabs and not new windows.

Title: Open All Unread in One Click

Version: 1.0.2

Category: Add-Ons

Complexity: Template Changes

Time: ~2 Minutes

phpBB version: 3.0.4

Exploiting Software – How to Break Code by Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw is an earlier work by the same authors of the previously reviewed Rootkits. This one dives into the security risks for poorly coded software. Copyright 2004, the book provides lots of examples of exploitable code from wrongfully used functions and improper coding methods five years ago. Despite its age (5 years can be significant in the technology industry), the relevance is still just as potent for Exploiting Software.

The book contains chapters dedicated to:

1. Software–The Root of the Problem
2. Attack Patterns
3. Reverse Engineering and Program Understanding

Kalid Azad, the brains behind InstaCalc, (who is also a swell guy in general to talk to) runs a blog titled Better Explained. The name says it all as BE strives to explain concepts, software development tactics and tools, and even math topics in simple, image-based lessons. I’d like to highlight one of these posts as Worthwhile Reading: A visual Guide to Version Control.

If you’ve heard the name Subversion or Sourcesafe but had no idea what they were or wanted a better understanding of how these systems worked and their benefits, just clicky-click on that link. Here it is again if you missed your chance the first time.