This post walks through some examples of using the geospatial functions provided by MySQL and Sphinx. Enjoy! Getting Started First of all, here are some helpful resources: We wrote about geospatial search with Sphinx in this blog post. It has a more Sphinx-specific focus than this post. Alexander Rubin wrote these helpful articles: “Creating Geo [...]

You probably already know that Sphinx supports MySQL binary network protocol. But, if you haven’t heard– Sphinx can be accessed with the regular ol’ MySQL API. Pretty much any language you use to query MySQL can be used to query Sphinx. So, in this post, to demonstrate how using ‘SphinxQL’ (our subset of SQL) makes [...]

There may come a time when you want to collect some of your emails, put them into a database, and search them with Sphinx. If that time has come, you may enjoy this blog post. It will outline one way to get emails from Gmail into MySQL (with PHP’s IMAP extension) so that they become [...]

With an ear to the interwebs, you’ll hear a few things about Docker. Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. In this blog post, I’m going to outline a very basic example of how to use Sphinx from within a Docker container. What is Docker? This [...]

Here are a few videos those of you who are just getting started with Sphinx may find useful. The first video demonstrates a very simple implementation with Ubuntu, PHP, and MySQL. The second video is also about installing on Ubuntu. And, the last video discusses fulltext query syntax. Check ‘em out. Quick Start with Ubuntu [...]

If you would like to see how to set up autocomplete and correction suggestion with Sphinx, PHP, MySQL, and jQuery, take a look at this. This quick video will walk you through the steps of setting up the autocomplete example that we wrote about a while ago. For details on how the whole process works, go [...]

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-01-12 through 2011-01-15:

• Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky
  An introduction to Mercurial (hg) by Joel Spolsky. Includes a special introductory chapter for Subversion users.
• lessfs | Open source data de-duplication
  Open source filesystem with de-duplication.
• UCS B-Series and C-Series Servers Log Memory Errors due to Intel 5600 Erratum Issue
  On a subset of Intel Xeon 5600 series processors, during packet C6 transitions, CPU circuit marginality or internal signaling noise in the may lead to an invalid memory DRAM state, system hang, reboot, memory ECC errors or unpredictable system behavior. This could …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-01-07 through 2011-01-08:

• The Services Used By Y Combinator Startups [Infographic] – ReadWriteCloud
  "The results show that the majority of Y Combinator startups depend on cloud services instead of self-hosted servers, traditional web hosting or co-location services."
• Tom Limoncelli on Time Management | O'Reilly Time Management for System Administrators | Sysadmins
  Video companions to to Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli.
• Guidelines …

Introduction

Clickjacking is a malicious technique of tricking web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages. A vulnerability across a variety of browsers and platforms, a clickjacking takes the form of embedded code or script that can execute without the user's knowledge, such as clicking on a button that appears to perform another function (credit: Wikipedia).

Clickjacking is hard to combat. From a technical standpoint, the attack is executed using a combination of CSS and iFrames, which are both harmless web technologies, and relies mostly on tricking users by means of social engineering. Additionally, the only server side technique against …