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    Contact Info

    Phone: +31 (0)85 8773879
    Email: info@future500.nl

    Post Address:
    B. Vethstraat 47
    2662 JJ Bergschenhoek
    the Netherlands

    Visiting Address:
    Goudstraat 99a
    2718 RD Zoetermeer
    the Netherlands

    KvK: nr. 17188772
    VAT nr: NL.8158.86.019.B01
     

Move from Eclipse to Netbeans and never look back

Friday 22 Jul 2011 by Ramon de la Fuente | 2 Comments
Filed under: Future500, Netbeans, PHP

Jasper and I were so seriously annoyed by the spinning beach ball in Eclipse PDT that it was decided to try a switch in editors. I used my free Zend Studio licence to check it out, and he tried Netbeans 7.0. I’m not here to write about the comparison, for me Zend Studio was -not surprisingly, as it’s based on Eclipse- even more beach ball prone and quickly tossed aside.

We now both use Netbeans, and we’re NEVER going back! Well ok… until we get annoyed with something else that is… (read on for some of my favorite improvements).

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PHP Certification (continued)

Wednesday 25 May 2011 by Ramon de la Fuente | No Comments
Filed under: Future500, PHP

Well it’s official. PHP Certification is feels a lot like getting a tattoo; you never leave it at just one!

We (Jasper and I) passed the Zend Framework exam a few months ago, and yesterday is was PHP5.3 time… our rainbow of goodness is now complete:
[insert  Doctor Evil laugh here]

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Wrapping your models snugly in ACL interfaces

Saturday 21 May 2011 by Ramon de la Fuente | No Comments
Filed under: PHP, Zend Framework

More and more we’re encountering Zend Framework projects where people have written up their own model implementations. Which isn’t a surprise of course, as the framework does not include ORM, and the models folder is still empty after running the “zf create project” command…
We are no exception, as we’ve rolled out an additional library to Zend Framework including models using the Datamapper pattern.

Wait.. ORM, Datamapper.. wasn’t this article supposed to be about the ACL interfaces? Yes yes, I’m getting to that. You see, when we started using our models we also wanted to add the default access control list and decided *not* to do it the Zend Framework way…
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PHP vunerability in floating point numbers

Thursday 6 Jan 2011 by Ramon de la Fuente | No Comments
Filed under: Future500, PHP Tags:

This morning, we received a notification from Zend, regarding a PHP vunerability. This is an excerpt of the message:

A critical vulnerability in the PHP engine has just been identified…

Due to the way the PHP runtime handles internal conversion of floating point numbers, it is possible for a remote attacker to bring down a web application simply by adding a specific parameter to a query string in their web browser.

Without stating actual examples from existing projects like WordPress and Drupal (what would the script-kiddies do with the rest of the afternoon if we enlightened them, right?), you would actually be very hard-pressed to find a project that does *not* have a variable that is used somewhere in the code. And, this is not limited to the query string. Posting variables would be just as hazardous, in fact any user input can cause this.

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Happy new year! (again)

Thursday 6 Jan 2011 by Ramon de la Fuente | 1 Comment
Filed under: Future500

A year has passed.. wow.. and we managed to write a measily 6 blog posts last year. Quite a bit short of the initial goal of (at least) one post a month. I guess the customers can rest assured that we’re spending our time coding instead of writing, but I’m also dropping the ball with regards to informing them about interesting new developments… sorry guys & gals!

About 12 years ago, I successfully took in effect a new years resolution NOT to make any new resolutions *ever* again. I have been clean since then and I never looked back… but now, it seems.. I’m falling off the wagon:

“In 2011, I shall do more blogging than in 2010.”
(aiming low I know, but I believe there is a serious risk of O.D.-ing)

Anyway, those who know me know they always get the same new year wish:

May the best of your past be the worst of your future!

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Moving house

Monday 12 Jul 2010 by Elena Kok | No Comments
Filed under: Future500

Or actually: office. The past 5 years we’ve been building the foundations for Future500. Growing and expanding, but all from our own attic, and in the beginning even our kitchen table.

We switched the kitchen table for real desks and now we switched the attic for a real office.

Our visiting address as of today is:

Goudstraat 99a
2718 RD Zoetermeer
The Netherlands

You are welcome to come and take a look.

Kind regards,

Elena Kok

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Magento 1.4 customer bug

Sunday 21 Feb 2010 by Ramon de la Fuente | 2 Comments
Filed under: Magento, PHP

I recently blogged that Magento was not all that great; and that once the honeymoon is over and the beergoggles are put down, the world will see it more like it is than what we want it to be. It is my honest opinion that we will see the same pains as with osCommerce and most other open source projects allowing plugins: some plugins won’t work well with others – some plugins will break with different updates of Magento and sometimes – like in this case – Magento will break itsself.

Update: The problem described in the article was probably limited to Cardgate and Paypal, and was resolved with help on the forum by a member of the Magento team: Anton Makarenko

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PHP.ActiveRecord

Thursday 21 Jan 2010 by Jasper Brouwer | No Comments
Filed under: PHP, Zend Framework

Once upon a time I stumbled across Ruby on Rails, a MVC framework on top of the programming language Ruby. Through RoR I became familiar with the MVC-pattern, ActiveRecord-pattern, and soon lots an lots of other patterns. About 4 months ago I came in contact with Zend Framework, which also follows the MVC-pattern.

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PHP Certification

Thursday 14 Jan 2010 by Ramon de la Fuente | 2 Comments
Filed under: Future500, PHP

Working for a company in the past I was always bitching about how diploma’s and certification don’t say a whole lot about a person’s capabilities. Of course I HAD to say that, since I dropped out of school and never actually finished my education.. but still. I’d seen too many so-called high level guys paraded in as the next salvation to a project, when all they would know how to do was repeat the tricks they had learned without actually understanding the reasoning behind it. “Why don’t we add another layer of abstraction…” Uhuh. I have always found that encountering a problem creates the mental space needed for understanding the solution.

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Magento sucks!

Saturday 2 Jan 2010 by Ramon de la Fuente | 1 Comment
Filed under: Magento, PHP

Of course the title of this article was chosen to shock the believers. But I think we are at a point in time comparable to when the only car on the market was a Ford Model-T. You could complain that it sucked, but pretty much the only alternative was a horse and carriage, and you didn’t have to scoop any steaming piles if you went with the automobile.

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