code-diesel
/* PHP & MySQL Journal */
Creating win/win projects using Project Value Analysis
Posted in: software | ( 1 ) Comment
17 Dec 2009From a client’s perspective, the most important criteria when developing any new software is that it adds some ‘value’ to his company. Every software application has some financial and some intangible value attached with it. Without it there would be no reason for a client to invest in developing new software or for that matter, upgrading an existing one. The client has some financial goals in his mind when he proposes to develop some software. He plans to make some profit (financial or otherwise) from the development of the software. Whether the financial gains are immediate or peripheral is a different matter.
7 essential php command-line options
Posted in: addins, php, tip | ( 10 ) Comments
11 Dec 2009Most of us use PHP from a IDE or using a simple text editor with a browser, rarely dropping down to the command-line for running php programs. But php provides some interesting and quick options you can use to perform various common tasks or to debug some nasty installation problems. Below is a list of some useful options you should be familiar with.
Sorting PHP arrays with substrings
Posted in: algorithms, data, php | ( 4 ) Comments
10 Dec 2009A couple of days back I encountered the following request on a forum for sorting a single dimensional array. The programmer wanted to sort the following array by the substring after the colon. For example ‘CDF’ in the string ‘66345:CDF’. Those values that do not have any colon should be ignored and pushed to the end of the array. Also, the length of the strings are not constant.
$values = array("66345:CDF", "61179:HGT", "64146:ABA", "68768:BNG", "68015:ZCZ", "80231:LPO", "64146:QWP", "68736:HHB", "86801:MNV", "80178:OIU", "80178:ASE", "88178:BRT", "801782OIU", "801378ASE", "881578BRT"); |
Scanning web pages for malicious scripts
Posted in: javascript, php, security, tools | ( 2 ) Comments
8 Dec 2009With the recent surge of malicious JavaScript injections on web, it has become necessary to regularly check for malicious code injections on your web sites. I created a small php script that checks a list of urls for malicious Javascript code. This can come handy if you have many client websites under your control.
The PHP script reads two text files – ‘malicious.txt and ‘urls.txt’ : the first containing a list of web pages to be scanned and the other containing malicious script signatures. The script scans the urls for malicious scripts and if any infections are found it saves the result in the ‘infected.txt’ file. The script needs to be run from the command line as you can easily see the progress of the scan if you are scanning a large number of urls.
Reading MP3 file tags in PHP
Posted in: pear | ( 1 ) Comment
7 Dec 2009I recently had a small task to scan some MP3 files on a server to check whether the files had any metadata in them, and add them if necessary. All MP3’s have a metadata section that allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number etc. to be stored in the MP3 file itself. The metadata is stored in the ID3 format. Of course I could have used a desktop tag editor, but the files where on the server, which frequently kept changing. So a server solution was the only way to go.
The myth of Tableless design
Posted in: html | ( 1 ) Comment
1 Dec 2009HTML tables have received a lot of unnecessary bad press over the years. The problem lies in the fact that tables were never intended as a layout tool. So during the initial years of web design when people started using tables to format their web pages – adding 1 pixel spacers, padding cells to align content, nesting tables n levels deep and more, it was time something had to be done. CSS was the answer. CSS rescued developers from the awful practice of using table for content layouts. It was all very fine until word started going around that tables were an absolute no no in any html design. Even if you had to display some kind of tabular data, you had to do it using CSS. Creating a tableless design had become the hallmark of an expert web designer. That was the last straw, and the myth persisted.
Running Selenium TestRunner slowly
Posted in: testing | ( 3 ) Comments
23 Nov 2009By default Selenium TestRunner executes the test blindingly fast. You can however slow down the execution by using the speed controller slider in the right pane, which adds a maximum delay of 1 second after every command execution. But you have to do that manually for every test, and the maximum delay you get is 1 second. You can however increase the delay and also set the default delay rate by editing the selenium-testrunner.js file.
Where did that bug come from?
Posted in: software, testing | ( 1 ) Comment
16 Nov 2009This is the second time this week that I encountered a annoying bug, introduced just by a small change in the code. Just when you think you can get away with minor changes without testing, you are in for a surprise.
The most common sense thing you can do is to test your code even for small changes; whether you are testing it yourself or sending it to the testing team. Seems simple, but how many times have you really done that. Its not that we are stupid, rather software was never so simple. Maybe we are careless sometimes. The moral is plain – treat even small changes important, and move it through a test before committing it to a version control.
Easy manipulation of URLs
Posted in: pear | ( 2 ) Comments
9 Nov 2009Whether you are dynamically creating urls or changing existing ones, manipulation of urls is a frequent coding requirement during development; doing the same on short urls is easy, but quickly becomes complex for urls which have larger query parameters.
In this post we will see how we can use Net_URL2 Pear package to manipulate URLS.
Programming puzzle #2
Posted in: puzzles | ( 5 ) Comments
8 Nov 2009The last programming problem, though not difficult, was interesting for the variety of ways readers tried to solve it. Here goes the second one:
