Month: September 2008

dotProject Recipe: speeding up DotProject

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I run a dotproject site on a hosted server. Once more than a few people began using the site at once, we found that peformance was dropping enough to warrant looking into optimization possibilities. So far, it seems that there are two main steps to take: turn on caching, and add indexes to several tables in the database.

1. Turn on caching in gacl.class.php

In the file gacl.class.php, change the following settings to TRUE and FALSE as shown:

/** @var boolean Caches queries if true */
var $_caching = TRUE;

/** @var boolean Force cache to expire */
var $_force_cache_expire = FALSE;
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Cleaning up and Preventing HTTP Injection Attacks

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I recently had the (undesired) opportunity to learn about HTTP and SQL injection attacks. It took a great deal of effort to diagnose and clean up, but hopefully what I learned from the experience may help you prevent these attacks on your own site or clean up after such an attack.

I first found out my site had been compromised because one of the subdomains started displaying “403” errors (permission denied) and one of the users notified me that the site could no longer be reached. At this time, the rest of the site seemed fine, so I had not noticed anything was wrong with it myself.

On examining the subdomain files, it turned out that the .htaccess file had some new directives written into it, which had the effect of blocking all access to the site. When I further examined the file, it appeared that the actual intent had been to redirect only the users that arrived at the site through a search engine, while allowing direct visitors to see the site as usual.

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Autism – anecdotal evidence and possible link to gastrointestinal infection

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Research on the causes of autism is still at the stage where many etiologies seem possible. Althought a genetic link is likely, it may play a role of predisposition to another factor rather than being the only necessary and sufficient cause of autism.

One such connection being explored is the role of gastrointestinal infections in promoting autistic type behaviors.

This blog entry written by an occupational therapist refers to improvement in a young patient’s autistic type behaviors after she was treated for a Clostridium Bacteria infection.

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