From a strictly mathematical viewpoint it goes like this:

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give more than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?

Here’s a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E

1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And,

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

and, look how far ass kissing will take you:

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can then conclude with mathematical certainty that while Hard work and knowledge will get you close, and, Attitude will get you there, Bullshit and Ass kissing will put you over the top.

Chris explains how he’s deploying web applications and why you should follow this six-step-approach, too:

1. The first deploy will not hurt, but as soon as you change something and it breaks it will hurt.
2. Make sure you are able to undo changes in the productive environment if you change something.
3. Don’t forget that there’s more in your application than code!
4. Automate every step, else mistakes will happen!
5. Make sure the deployment and production environment are as close as possible.
6. Ownership of code is important, make sure it’s properly deployed.

Chris recommends Capistrano, which is originally a deploy-tool for Ruby but since version 2 it doesn’t care about what it deploys. I personally haven’t used Capistrano, but hearing Chris’ satisfaction I think it’s worth checking it out.

Regardless if you are just creating small templates for your blogs or if you already design websites for clients - You will benefit from Sitepoints free Photoshop book!

Download the PDF “The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques” right now!

After you submit your mail address you get an email with two links: One for the 64mb high-res PDF-version and one for the 23mb low-res e-book.

Don’t wait for better times, because the offer expires on June, 4th, 2008!

Todays xkcd comic also deals with fortune cookies

Today I had some guests and we introduced the new chip set. Although I now have dark gray wild-berry-vodka sprinkles on my white carpet it was an entertaining evening.

I got this very nice poker range Chip Set (sorry, couldn’t find an English product description), which contains 500 quality chips that make a nice sound if you throw them on the felt. (The felt wasn’t included, but I had one already.)

Here is a snapshot of the game where a pair of Kings beat a pair of Jacks:

Thanks Jeremy for giving free stuff away, I’m really happy about this chip set!

If you want to win some nice things yourself, follow Shoemoney on Twitter!

Here are more numbers, discovered in the German version of the “Technology Review” magazine:

Breaking into websites and forums: 50$
DDoS-attack a whole day long: 500$

I think you can’t take these prices as-is. Especially the DDoS-attack price has to correlate to the number of attacking machines. Else I would like to offer my notebook connected to a random WLAN for 500$ a day. I even would buy another one after two payments to fulfill your needs of using more boxes in parallel to attack your target

Can someone confirm or deny these price tags (and can send me a link to the actual prices)?

I used Zend_Mail and Zend_Mime to create HTML-mails with inline images. I used the last stable Zend Framework version available right now: 1.0.3.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 displays odd characters, Thunderbird doesn’t

Check if you use:
new Zend_Mail('utf8');
If you do, change it to:
new Zend_Mail('utf-8');
Outlook doesn’t like the non-dashed version of the UTF-8 charset.

Inline images are displayed as attachments

You need to set the type of the mail to Multipart/Related:
$mail->setType(Zend_Mime::MULTIPART_RELATED);
Add the images like this:
$mail->createAttachment($imageData, $imageType, Zend_Mime::DISPOSITION_INLINE, Zend_Mime::ENCODING_BASE64);
Add the HTML-Version of the mail like this:
$mail->setBodyHtml($htmlMessage, null, Zend_Mime::MULTIPART_RELATED);

The subject displays odd characters

There’s a bug in Zend_Mail that causes subjects longer than 200 characters to be malformed in the mail. It’s also causing problems in the Zend Framework version 1.5 preview. The solution is to use subjects shorter than 200 characters until a fix is integrated in Zend_Mail.

Zend_Mail throws a 501 exception on international mail-addresses

If your email addresses are pointing to domains like hpphör.de, your SMTP-server might prevent you from sending to them, causing Zend_Mail to throw a 501 exception. A possible solution is to convert the domainname to the IDN equivalent (hpphör.de results in xn--hpphr-mua.de). Currently, there is no ZendFramework module available to do the conversion. Maybe the IDN Pecl package can help you on this subject.

Note: Malformed mail addresses also cause a 501 exception to be thrown. Catching a 501 exception does not guarantee an IDN domain-address!

The HTML layout is totally messed up

Don’t use CSS for styling, go back to Table-based styling. Most mail-clients still don’t display HTML correctly. Use inline-style definitions, even though they produce redundant code.

Get more information on HTML mail styling here:

• How to Code HTML Email Newsletters
• A Guide to CSS Support in Email

I hope this helps a bit if you find yourself in the position to code a PHP mail-script.

At SitePoint I found a very good article that covers how to design HTML mails from the content point of view. I recommend to read the first two pages if you need to write the content by yourself!

I guess 100 simultaneous requests over a minute raises the red flag. I’m not 100% sure if it was the amount of requests, the duplicate keyphrases, or both combined, that lead to the ban.

However, I made the experience in the past, that only one request at the same time will not raise a red flag. Even if you do it over half an hour.

I hope they will unban my IP, soon. In the meantime I will add proxy-support to my scraper

I certainly can.

If you’ve read “Think and grow rich” from Napoleon Hill you probably remember that great success comes after all these small setbacks. The people who had success in realizing their goals all had one thing in common: They kept focused and didn’t let those setbacks drag themselves down.

My friend Javier just published a very good post that explains what you should do, too: Recheck your goals!

Are you still focused?

You must be a real skilled cracker to press a button to search for vulnerable servers and another one to execute the defacement script…

I’m still angry about this, but I see it as a chance to begin with a new and clean setup. Although I have two hard weeks in front of me I hope I will get at least 50% of my sites back up with some improvements.

Here’s a screenshot of the defacement to remember me whose ass I will kick when I find the time to do so: