Allow me to bitch and moan about how it sucks having to treat every piece of user input like it’s garbage or a malicious hack, but if you don’t then you will have all kinds of coding problems.

Fortunately there are some built-in PHP functions that help you deal with cleansing user form input like: htmlspecialchars, htmlentities

In the three fields I’m using, I just want to allow specifc data (see last entry screenshot).

Player Name - alphanumeric only, 15 characters max
Password - alphanumeric only, 10 characters max
E-Mail Address - valid email address

I’m going to amend the password to be a minimum of 6 characters. Through the use of the functions strlen (get the length of a string) and some basic regular expression handiwork I’m going to force this user input checking. I know that some folks use JavaScript to do this, but you still have to check form input on the server side. I’m going to go work up this code. I’ll share in my next blog entry.

Bill is hiring again according to this this this story Wonder if any of the new projects will have anything to do with Linux?

Boy, this egg timer sure sucks! It isn’t reliably ticking off the minutes like it should. It’s a good thing I have other timers running. I saw somebody suggest that and I wouldn’t recommend using an egg timer for anything important. What a piece of crap.

Uh oh, I’m starting to get a little moody hehe. I think it’s time to put away the nachos and get back to working on that game. You were interested in that game, right? The one we hopefully will get to play right here in this blog. [puts on mining hat] … back to da coding mines!

Wow, this is the 100th blog entry since I began this site on July 4. It’s the 26th however since 6am PST this morning for the Blogathon 2003. We’re about to go undercover of the night!

Was just surfing around the other blogs via the webring and I was starting to see a few blogathoners throwing up the white flag. For my fellow blogathoners: it’s way early yet, we’re only little more than halfway through this and besides, I haven’t even gone through one bottle of Tabasco and/or eaten dinner yet. Here are some folks who are still going strong:

Alex is answering questions about what it is like being a phone sex operator.

Some contributed third party band songs and a single relationship story from dobbs

Recipes are being shared by Jen Yummy!

We’ve all had help desk nightmares, so help desk humors is a blog that will get you through with a smile.

Stay at it folks. I will too.

One of the greatest things about being a webmaster is we get to build stuff with our own hands. We are architects of a vast expanse of virtually limitless real estate. There is no end to what you can produce with the only real limitation being your imagination. This is also what I enjoy about programming because pretty much if it can be thought of the next step becomes how to make it happen. It’s exciting, fulfilling and rewarding on many levels.

OMG, It’s official: my first signs of yawning! Mark the time down. It’s straight up 12 hours into the Blogathon 2003. I’m a big half-time fan in football. Has everybody got their DirecTV setup for this season of gridiron? NFL regular season is like 6 weeks away! Right on.

This should make Gary Kremen, owner of sex.com very happy: story: Owner of stolen ’sex.com’ can sue Verisign Since the 9th circuit court of appeals has agreed that domains are property and now reversed this earlier decision this should help in holding domain registrars with more liability. Verisign who purchased Network Solutions, has also inherited a legal monster. In the, Their Prices Still Suck department, I place Verisign. Hmm

If anybody wants to chat with me live, I’m down in the Script School commons chat: irc.scriptschool.com channel name of #scriptschool or http://www.scriptschool.com/commons/ for Java. Depending on what I’m up to at the moment, I might be busy, so be patient if you stop by and want to chat for a few.

The official Blogathon chat details are located here. I’m going to peek into that IRC channel a little later and see what’s happening. I figure things will start getting real interesting around midnight tonight PST. That is when the final six hour stretch starts.

oh no … I’m feeling the nachos urge again! Think it’s time for another munch break.

I have made some screenshots of the intial forms. I’ll be integrating these forms with this page somehow later. Or at least that’s the goal. I just realized my last entry was #21, which is blackjack, how appropriate to start the game!

Nothing special there, but you might notice I gave my game a working title: Comment Keno. I even gave it a version number (talk about premature!).

I started a script that would act as a basic outline for these forms to interact with. When the user registers, he/she will then be able to login and play.

BTW, for those who might be curious what that green background is behind me in the webcam pictures. That’s a green screen for video, so that if I record videos I can change the background. Hollywood in our office. Hmm

Thank you Carrie from Netpond for stopping by and commenting with words of encouragement. It’s a source of inspiration, indeedy! If you are just stopping by, feel free to drop me a message using the comment function. I also saw a few of my buddies at the Adult Netsurprise Newbieboard have been enjoying my raw, uncensored webcam pics LOL

Well it’s time to really get down to it. 

The game that I’ve been planning on working on today and mentioned in the first entry earlier this morning. Here’s we’re almost halfway through, but it’s time to get moving on this, that is if I’m to have any hope of getting this game done before the 24 hours is up.

The game I am going to be making is going to be done in the PHP scripting language and will be a varation on the casino game Keno and be combined with this blog script (pivot). Long term I have a different blog I’m going to use this game for, but for the Blogathon 2003, I’m going to go through how I am making this game, per the objective I mentioned in my first Blogathon 2003 entry.

The first step is laying out what I wanted to do. A game is nothing without somebody to play, so my first move is to organize the forms to register to become a player of the game. The game will keep track of player name, password and a valid email address, also credits and scoring (I’ll get into the difference between the two in a future entry). In my next entry I’ll have some screenshots of the forms I just made.

I am adding a note to emphasize that I have no intention of selling, renting or using the email address for anything other than game-related information. When you collect email addresses from folks, and in this day and age where spam is rampant, it is important to point this out.

Ok, I had to ditch the jeans and t-shirt, as you can already see by following the LIVE webcam. Now I’m sporting shorts and my black Club Aladdin shirt. If you ever make it to Vegas, you should check out that casino. It’s not a spectacular casino, but it’s one of those places on the strip, like New York New York, MGM Grand, Venetian, Paris, etc, that you have to take in on your Vegas trip. I’ve been noticing a trend for more and more sites to use quite a bit of Flash. Search engines are one good reason not to fall too in love with Flash.

One of the things I said I would do today is visit my sponsors websites who pledged at least $50 (you can still pledge, so please do) and take some screenshots of what they have going on at their respective websites. The first sponsor I took a look at was prohosters

I wrote an article some time ago comparing virtual and dedicated hosting. Prohosters offers both packages to suit webmaster needs with starter packages for virtual hosting:

500 MB space
Unmetered Bandwith
Unlimited Email Access
Guaranteed 24×7 Tech Support
FREE New Domain Registration|
$59 per year Unix (no setup fee)
$79 per year Windows ($19.95 setup fee)

You can drop in and chat with their tech support live using their prohosters live java tech support

They also offer premium custom solutions and the owner, Ted, you can get a hold of. He was a guest on my radio show not long ago. He’s a nice guy, even though he likes country music LOL.