cURL and SSL

cURL is a nice little extension to PHP. You can read an intro here.

I use cURL a lot. It seems that do a lot of web applications that connect to other servers for transactions (like payment gateways). You can do SSL or HTTPS requests to other web hosts without validating their certificates but you leave yourself open to man-in-the-middle attacks. While this seems unlikely if you are running out of a data center, checking the certificate validity is too easy to skip.

The one thing that you must do for this to work is tell cURL where the CA-bundle (or CURLOPT_CAINFO) is located. I am running CENTOS 5.4 and found CA info at "/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt". I can enable this with the following two lines added before curl_exec();

 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, "/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt");
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 1);

Group Text Messaging - Schedule Text Messages

I wanted to take a moment to promote another site I relaunched yesterday. It is ShortShout and it is a group text messaging platform. I've worked out some pretty low per-message rates to make it an affordable service. It can be used by any group and has some special info for churches who want to do text messaging. Check it out at ShortShout.com.

One of ShortShout's customers is a marketing team in Michigan led by Denise. Denise told me that she uses the system "to encourage and stay in touch with her friends/team members." Denise, in her own words, "is a motivator and keeps her team focused on their goals" with group text messaging and ShortShout.

MySQL and mysql_select_db

I was convinced that mysql_select_db() was not working today. I wanted to simultaneously connect to two different databases. However, when I called the mysql_select_db function, it seemed that both connections were changing to the database I specified. I couldn't get one link to stay on the original database while I changed the second link to a new database.

After a little digging around I found a helpful user comment about using mysql_connect. The fourth parameter of this function is "new_link" and if you want to simultaneously have two connections open and both connections use the same credentials, you must set this parameter to TRUE. If you don't, it sees that the credentials are the same and will reuse the same resource link, even if you set a different variable.

So, this:

<?PHP
$conn1 = mysql_connect(HOST, USER, PASS);
mysql_select_db(TABLE_1, $conn1);  
$conn2 = mysql_connect(HOST, USER, PASS);
mysql_select_db(TABLE_2, $conn2); 

turned into this:

<?PHP
$conn1 = mysql_connect(HOST, USER, PASS, true);
mysql_select_db(TABLE_1, $conn1);  
$conn2 = mysql_connect(HOST, USER, PASS, true));
mysql_select_db(TABLE_2, $conn2);

And tada, I could simultaneously connect to two (or more) databases.

jQuery and onKeyUp

jQuery has the method keyup to take the place of the html attribute onkeyup. So, for example, let's say want to run a javascript function each time escape is pushed. You would do this like so:

$(document).keyup(function(event) {
  if(event.keyCode == 27) { // Capture Esc key
      doSuperSpecialFunction();
  }
});

With this script anytime a key is pressed and goes up in the body of the document, the function specified runs. Simply replace the keyCode number (27, above) with the number that corresponds to your key (like 13 for enter or 8 for backspace). Remember, you must have jQuery "installed" in order for this to work.