Why I still use PHP  Tags: webdevelopment.
Everbody seems to be against PHP nowadays. Well, not everyone, just the people with the loudest voices. In real life, I've never met anyone who disliked PHP. Online, there've been plenty.

So why is this? It's usually like this with something a minority finds bad. Cookies aren't really harmful, but people shouted enough until they got banned in the EU. Even before the ban, cleaning programs and even anti-virus makers (who you'd think know better) removed tracking cookies.

And yes, tracking cookies are slightly harmful for your privacy, but so is using the internet. You can be identified in numerous other ways, a cookie is more of an easy solution and a fail-safe.

Same with PHP, it's an

OpenArena error: bad surfacetype  Tags: software.
Because there was no good answer on Google: This post :)

Games this applies to: OpenArena, Quake 3, Enemy Territory, Warsow, Urban Terror, Quake Live, and basically any game running the ioquake3 engine.

Symptom: You connect to a server, possibly autodownload something, then the map starts loading. Just when you expect the loading to start progressing (moments after the levelshot appears), it kicks you to a screen telling you "bad surfacetype". After that screen you end up in the main menu again.

Fix: Find out what map that was, and delete it from your disk.

Comments  Tags: my blog.
Whenever a comment is posted, I receive an e-mail notifying me of that. This afternoon I received such notification, but clicking the link to the comment, it was not there.

This happened once before, and I discarded it as "The author probably deleted the message for some reason". This time I decided to check it out, and looking in Disqus' admin panel, there was a message showing in red.

Red? Does that mean it's been deleted or something?
Turns out it was automatically detected as spam.

I approved the comment and checked for any others with a red overlay.

Amplification attacks explained  Tags: security, networking.
A Google search for amplification attacks returned a disappointing number of appropriate hits (none, actually); all results are specific for the DNS protocol. This post will explain in more general terms what an amplification attack is and does.

Definition
An amplification attack is an attack where the attacker triggers a big response from a third party to be sent to the target.

Basics

Javascript type conversion  Tags: programming, webdevelopment.
I used to have a lot of problems with Javascript on this back when I was just starting to program and had no experience coding besides writing HTML. Nowadays I don't have any trouble with this anymore, especially since the discovery that you can see the errors, but only now I think I can guess right 100% of the time.

Let's do a show-by-example, but try to guess for before clicking the button!

var n