Random question, hoping someone can help. A company I do work with bought the source code to a 3rd party terribly written PHP application in order to make improvements to it for one of their clients. Just found out today that apparently the software is reporting back to the original creator, namely on the creation of vhosts (and who knows what else) which we have set up a bunch for testing/development there was also never an agreement that it only be set up once or anything.

Does anyone know where to start looking to find this offending piece of code? I tried searching the codebase for $_SERVER but it's in about 1000 places and nothing stood out at me. I guess the question is, if you had to set this kind of reporting on vhost set up how would you do it?

Report it to management, so they can figure out what is best way to contact original developers.
Also if they broke the agreement by violation of something, then its best for it to be reported, then having to deal with it again and it probably is just a mistake that could be ironed out with a phone call.

I would block all outgoing communication to their servers, through whatever system file needed, depending on server OS and configuration.

Use some IDE to start searching all files for the domain of server or the ip addresses.

I'm not a php person, so I would be googling "php communicating between servers" and just searching for methods that relate to the code found in typical ways of doing it. Yet their code must have some structure, so it would be better to put some debugging by output to file, when certain code is executed and you could figure out what php file is firing the communication by that way which is slow but always works. If you had a good php IDE, you could setup breakpoints and do it that way instead.

jj,

You do realize all options are unqiue and talking about them in anymore detail than simplifications is just asshattery (since it may or may not apply)? Some of your comments are so strawman-ish that they are really really dumb. Like valuation is an arbitrary term attached to a funding tranche that likely isn't representative of the value of the company (See LinkedIn's Series D information on how Reid was willing to raise between a valuation of 1.1b and 1.7b). This number may be important as a way to buy back options from companies that strictly control secondary market sales (very smart to do). Then again some companies let their shares get resold in a wild west fashion (Facebook).

So those are cool stories, but kinda whatever. The stuff you're saying is generally correct, but anyone who thinks that the valuation of the company is the number to use to represent the value of their shares is just such a massive moron that it doesn't even matter. Maybe most engineers are profoundly stupid and unable to hire basic advisers for transactions that represent a significant portion of their wealth or learn about the how these things work.

daveT,

The idea that stores have "similar" prices is totally insane. Even more than the prior argument. Have you ever gone to a Wal-Greens, Wal-Mart, Target, or upscale grocer (Whole Foods, whatever)?

Like this isn't "I have a crazy and wrong view of ethics" this is 2+2=5 levels of insanity.

iosys,

What you think of someone with an Adobe Fusion neck tat interviewing today? You may well be that person in 20y.

If i'm not working and getting paid by my own project within 20 years or working with some great people.
There will be bloody butterflies, all over my personal laptop rofl.

Honestly, I would ask the person about what they loved so much about the language and if there is any story behind it.
I'm a huge fan of adobe software, not so much with flash but I grew up working on a pirated version of their professional suite and loved creating animation with no guide/help whats so ever.

Yet, the vulnerabilities, battery hog, action script and other junk has really put me off.
Some of the people at adobe, really try to please the developer world, i've even ran C++ code in flash but for some reason they don't get the same traction as they've done with the artist world. Hell, they're even ****ing the artist world up with the subscription model. Sure kids will still just pirate the copy but having a purchased license of photoshop that is forever on the computer, is something most artists demand/want. Who wants someone to take away your tools, if you fall in hard times and be stranded with nothing.

I have this tattooed on my lower back

I swear i've seen someone with that before.

I worked with a guy with an orange neck tattoo. He was a flaming homosexual working in the HR department. He was arrested for fraud a few months after I met him and then it came out that he had a significant criminal record.

Yea all people with tats are scumbags deep down /sarcasm.

I'd have to agree with DaveT on this one. At least in my local area if you go around to the chain stores the prices are either identical or insignificantly different (.02 or so).

Now if you wanted to argue a difference at specifically whole foods I couldn't comment on that bc I've never shopped at one.

When I was in Austin, TX the cheese + bread + meat from Whole foods were to die for... compared to what was available at Randalls.
Price was significantly higher at Whole foods but whatev; when getting paid more than majority of the public.

Vegetarian now, so no more meat with the bread + cheese.

I don't really find much wrong with people that have been in prison, besides the fact that they have no barriers typically and are capable of doing just a bit more than typical people; when they want or desire it. Some are wild cards though or jokers.

No one is saying that people with tattoos are scumbags. Face and neck tattoos however definitely have a strong stigma associated with them.

My brother is in prison. I have nothing against ex convicts per se, but they are certainly discriminated against. So intentionally altering your appearance in a way that will permanently and obviously associate you with that group is something that should be strongly cautioned against.

life altering vim plugin i somehow only just discovered: https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion

now every point on the visible screen is 4 keystrokes away.

Sorry not trying to be antagonistic I just thought it was funny that you started a story about a guy with a face tattoo who ended up being dishonest.

'Mihkel', I'm caught up on my mod forum reading so I'll just lol at you and then put you on ignore.

what the **** is going on in here

So when a company is bought out and the share holders receive their per share value where does the excess value end up exactly?

Market capitalization for a company is essentially the number of shares times the stock price, what else does one need to arrive at the actual valuation of the company?

What bugs you about source tree? I think I've figured out most of its quirks.

+1 on git bisect - it's awesome. Here's our wiki instructions for using it:

nice succinct explanation, suzzer.

I will look into git bisect.

Sourcetree is mainly "oh hey I see you're looking at a diff, I'll just randomly refresh for no reason and lose your place" and its slow as **** and a host of other stupid bugs that I'm too lazy to document. and I'm also too lazy to work at getting something decent like console2 working on my work pc so I just use git bash aka "oh you want to resize a terminal window? **** you".

I really like github's desktop program on the mac for managing repositories.
Sort of hard to mess things up with a GUI and most young programmers should be able to figure out that git is like a tree from using it.

Terminal commands, I tend to forget if i'm not using them frequently or they're important to me for knowing. I've used other GUI software for git, didn't look as nice as githubs but was fairly well designed to do the simple stuff.

It would nice if there was a way, to add public/group comments to someone's commit.

Re: forgetting terminal commands. The history search with Ctrl+R in bash is absolutely great for this.

Unless you have history disabled for pretty much everything you use.

Please go to Wal-Mart and Whole Foods, get the price of Jiff Peanut Butter from each, and post the price difference here.

This is one of those few topics that I will likely refuse to budge on, but I'd love to hear your input on this.

At a prior job, I single-handedly ran the $12 million arm of the business, covering everything from product listings, customer service, sales, inventory control, maintaining 2 databases and two servers. I went home and studied programming until midnight just about every night.

I feel like I'm more able to run a startup than a fresh-face from Stanford (or the guy who asked me for free work*), but then again, I'm far from interesting in doing it.

*To be certain, this probably has a lot to do with my thinking. I feel like anyone who is knowledgeable about people, quality products, etc, places a high value on the people they work with, and while it is perfectly honorable and okay to ask people to work on pride and use that as a tool of negotiation, I outright dismiss anyone's qualifications to run a startup if they are asking people to work for free. I absolutely refuse to believe that works in the owner's favor. They certainly don't have the management qualities I'm looking for in a founder I'm hoping to work with.

As for using "the job is interesting enough that you want to work here" as a negotiation tool, we are cutting opinions here, but there are very few companies that can really say this is a useful tool for them.

Emacs stole this from Vim about 4 years ago. It is nice.

Does it allow you to jump across buffers as well?