Swobodin v Brně

Today seems to be Tom’s day in my blog!
Tom asked me some days ago whether I can contribute to the first Tunisian OpenSource project QCM-Gen 0.1, something I cannot refuse; however, I spent my free time watching Jackass the movie and playing chess. Finally I decided yesterday to work on it seriously (well, not really) and I made some changes.
The 0.1 version has a cool interface and compounds many features. Nevertheless, the project can’t be professional for the serious security holes, non compatibility with some browsers and with some PHP configurations. In fact, you don’t need to be an expert cracker to find out that you can access to administration interface by simply pointing your browser to qcmgen.php?who=0 !
As says the Chinese proverb:

One who has time to complain has time to submit patches

Anyway, here are the small changes I made (I spent time on writing this post more than writing code )
Changed the authentication system: the new one is cookies based and relatively more secure than the former.
Modified database structure: passwords on table users are MD5 encrypted.
The login form (index.php) is now XHTML compliant; damn, I spent more than one hour to fix the some 30 errors! (DreamWeaver sucks)
 
As you can see, I did not do something great; however, I hope it’s the first step to (re-)promote OpenSource projects in Tunisia.
I beg all Tunisians who use PHP and OpenSource softwares for living: PHP and OpenSource help you, please be grateful to their developers and contribute to some projects. Even if you don’t code, your documentation, design, mirroring, comments, suggestions and ideas are welcome. Just dare it!
TODO:
Too much stuff, more than you expect
 
Regarding the patch, you may download it from here.
Usage:
unzip /path/to/QCMGen.0.1.zip
cd QCMGen.0.1/
bunzip2 -c /path/to/patch-QCMGen.bz2 | patch -p1
Have fun!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 11:50 am and is filed under General, OpenSource Softwares, PHP, Tunisia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.