who needs social life when you have broadband?

hello guys!

this morning I’ve uploaded the first preview version of my personal site. This is something I did just to play with ZendFramework, YUI and jQuery togheter (it’s slow and buggy, but I like it and I hope you like my idea as well).

Check http://www.bigodines.com/zf/ (I haven’t tested with IE yet…). And try to navigate inside the directories and explore some commands. There are only two files availble, both are inside “projects/zf/” and are just a PoC to show it works.

I’m working on a better admin area now and then I’ll add content e more commands (and webservice access).

comments are always welcome!

-bigo

I gave up moving to Canada. It is just too complicated to find an employer there and it takes too long to get a visa with work permit without it. So I decided to move to the lovely London to work on my English and try to find some part-time/contract jobs to improve my technical skills as well. If everything goes wrong, I can work as cleaner, as most of the brazilians do :(.

The visa should arrive by the end of march and I’m very excited about moving to a new place. If we have any visitors from London, drop me a line so we can meet for drinks and nerdy talking.

The Dev team has just released Joomla! 1.5 stable. This is great news (after two and a half years of development we finally can use the new baby in production environment) but I’ve seen that an old problem hasn’t been solved yet: people still get a lot of spam due to a weak (or nonexistent) mechanism to check if the e-mails sent through com_contact are from real people or spambots.

The beauty of open source is that anyone can change and improve a piece of software. So, here’s my $0.02: changing com_contact to make it can work with your favorite Captcha Plugin! (all files are downloadable at the end of this article)
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Hello!

I’m not sure if this post is going to help me or not but I’m blogging anyway

Fact is I wanna move to Canada. I had enough of hot summer and would like to experience living abroad (again). So, if you are a Canadian please check my résumé clicking here and hire me hehehe. If you want, you may contact me directly by e-mail: bigodines ||at|| joomla.com.br

If you’re not sure if it will be worth to read my resume, I’m the main developer of two of the most famous Joomla! sites around the globe: Porsche and UNRIC (please note: developer != designer). Ok, that sound like I’m trying to impress :/. I don’t like these self-promotion lines but sometimes we need it

Now, the bad news:
I’ve been reading about visas and it seems that a permanent work-permit for skilled professionals (According to those HSMP calculators I found on the web I am a skilled professional :-P) can take up to 14 months. A friend told me that if I manage to find a company interested in my services, this waiting time may be shorter (I’m still checking this information).

There is also another alternative: I can go to Canada as a student and work legally 20hrs/week while waiting for my permanent visa… but first I need some networking contacts in Canada.

drop me a line if you need a responsible, dynamic, nerd web developer

There are some tragic yet very interesting stuff happening to me.

As my undergrad project involves creating a group communication mechanism for mobile devices, I’m trying to become a Java programmer. I’ve never liked Java and you probably already know that. I don’t like it because it is slow and has too many fancy names for simple stuff (I guess this is just to increase the learning curve so Sun partners can sell more courses…). BUT, programming in JavaME is forcing me to practice/remember/learn a lot of techniques and algorithms I’ve never though I would need. So I’m almost saying that it is exciting to program in java (for mobile devices!! the standard edition still sux a lot).

I’m a programmer since I was 15 (7yrs ago), I started with mIRC Scripting (good times..) then I’ve learned PHP, C (in college.. I’ve used it professionally only once, to develop a socket client-server application), Java and Python (which I use just for fun…) in that order. Although I don’t consider myself a good programmer, I can say I’m proficient in PHP (it’s been 5yrs now since I wrote my first mysql_fetch_array() snippet :P). The fact is that, except for C, all these languages give you so much build-in features and facilities that you forget some basic principles of programming.

I would dare to say that it is impossible to become a good programmer if you only know how to program in PHP, for example (and “writing applications that work”, doesn’t make you a good programmer), because it makes programming too easy and too fast. You boss will like it and if you need some simple applications this is good enough, but if you learn PHP as a 1st language you probably won’t know how to optimize your code or will get crazy when you face more complex situations.

Even these JavaEE devs who think they are better than the rest of humanity should try to learn some “low level” algorithms (such as binary trees, linked lists, sockets, threading internals, schedule, etecetera) because learning how to use an API is pretty easy compared to how to implement these APIs

I’m not against PHP or Python and its classes/modules that make our life easier. I’m just concerned about learning how to use this stuff without knowing how they were made…

Here are my conclusions:
- There are languages that make you a faster programmer (or not)
- There are languages that make you a better programmer (or not)
- If I would need to choose between a JavaME and a JavaSE/JavaEE programmer I would definitely choose the JavaME programmer because he *should* write a more efficient code. And it is easier to teach someone how to use an API than teach someone how to implement a serialization mechanism and send objects through the network.
- I’m a terrible english wirter I’m considering start blogging in portuguese…

We all know SQL Injection and a bunch of techniques to exploit this... I've decided to blog about a "new" one. Please don't consider this as "advanced sql injection" because its not

MySQL is a great database management system and it allows you to do many things with the "select" statement, wouldn't it be TOO many things?

I guess everyone knows the basic "' or 1=1 /*" an its variants... but accessing restricted areas, changing user infos and dropping tables aren't the only cool stuff you can do with sql injections.

There is a feature that allows you to save your select into a file. It's called SELECT INTO FILE (duh!) and things can get pretty dangerous if you use it with a sql injection.

Isn't it clear enough yet? Ok, let me try to help you get the big picture.

what if someone inserts this code:

please notice that you'll need to know the documentroot path but this shouldn't be a problem with vulnerable php systems.

Well, I'm not intended to give you a cookbook and promote n00bism. So, if you still didn't figure out how to take advantage of this, you probably shouldn't use it. Google might help you as well

happy hacking.

PS: syntax errors were generated on purpose.

Which programming language should we learn? I wish I could say "the funniest" but the market doesn't seem to bother about it. While waiting the checkout (from my sloooooooooooow svn repository) of my final project @ college, I went to the biggest job search engine I know and started putting some simple terms in there. Here are the results:

languages:
PHP: 12,266 jobs
Python: 7,299 jobs
C#: 34,538 jobs
C++/Cpp: 52,305 jobs
ruby: 3,493 jobs
Delphi: 1,850 jobs (starting from delphi 7, delphi IS a programming language.)
javascript: 32,330 jobs
java: 77,395 jobs (omg!)

technologies:
ajax: 13,282
hibernate: 6.324
zope: 100
plone: 43
joomla: 151
jquery: 109.
SAP: 71,937 (OMG^3)

these results reflect today's situation (sep, 24th, 2007).

I know one might start thinking: "ok, its time to learn Java". I would recommend you to try a less painful programming language before loosing all your love for life. And I guess C++ salaries are higher (and the combo cpp+py seems to be quite funny though... think about it!).

I've spend the whole afternoon yesterday trying to port my dynamic form generator made with JQuery to Mootools. I'm almost there (but "almost" is not "there" yet and the script is rising some really weird arbitrary errors. odd...). But why would I change from JQuery to Mootols?

That's a very interesting question (I'm actually asking myself every 5 minutes). The [partial] answers are the following:
- Joomla! 1.5 uses Mootools. As working with Joomla! still pay the bills around here, I must adapt to them
- I don't wanna load two different JS frameworks that do the same thing (or not!) in my components.
- It is always good to learn new stuff, even if, at the end your conclusion is: It was a total waste of time learning this crap. This sux! (as I did with Dojo).
- I need to post new stuff in my blog, what could be better than a comparison between JQuery && Mootools from a regular developer point-of-view? It's gonna be fun

For now, all I have to say is: [IMHO] Mootools' learning curve is longer than JQuery's.

Hello!

This week I started in a new company as a web developer (still working with PHP and mainly with Joomla!, which is not bad but not that challenging...). Christian has also switched jobs and now he is a Java developer (at least he has left Delphi behind, which is good news). I would like to tell you that our distributed hash cracking system (aka Bifröst) is in "sleep" mode until we find some time to re-activate it.

I've presented a technical session at the Joomla!Day Brazil which occurred in São Paulo on the 11th. My plane got a 22 hours delay which were not funny at all. The event was great but unfortunately I had missed half of it :/ It is always nice to speak about new geeky features to an excited audience...

My new job is allowing me to create some really cool stuff with JQuery, Ajax and Flash. And I have plenty of time to keep this blog up to date.

I don't remember if i've mentioned this before, but I'm also trying to add Bluetooth capability to the great JGroups. DIdn't have much success so far. As many of you are new visitors, I was wondering if anyone knows how to do multicast with Bluetooth (someone told me I'll need a PAN Profile enabled device, but for now I just would like to test it on simulators). I've been trying to find answers and help in the Java community but didn't get many insights. I don't care to implement it on my on I just would like to know if it hasn't been implement by someone before.

anyway.. if you have any suggestion/sample/idea to share, please get in touch.

-bigo

Orkut is a plague! I have some "friends" that keep spamming my scrapbook promoting parties and other social events every single day!!! And the worst is that most of them don't even talk to me when we are in the same place. Now it's time for revange

I've made this small snip to flood their scrapbooks so they can have a taste of how I feel when I login and see lots of useless messages.

Open your orkut account (preferable a fake one, so when they feel ofended they won't report your original user ), visit your "friend"'s orkut, go to the scrapbook page. Now, insert this in the address bar:

Of course this is just a use case. Use your imagination and create your own version.

I guess now we'll finally have more visitors

good luck,
-bigo