PHP Lessons 8: Server Constants and HTML Forms

by
Guest-GS

Hello there, it’s been a while, I’ve been very busy with work and some personal project, so i had to delay the PHP courses, but anyway, I’m back and today we’ll have a look at Server Constants.

Take a look at www.geekscribes.net, on the right side, we have a search form, when you type in a search keyword and press Enter, the page loads and it fetch every results according to what you typed. Ever wonder how it works? Don’t go any further, today I will show you bring a boring html form to life.

Before I start, if you missed the array tutorials, then please, go to the link below, and read the post, give it a try.. because you’ll need to understand how arrays work in order to understand this lesson fully.

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3 Features Mobile Phones Should Have But Most Don’t

by
Inf

I don’t consider myself to be a very heavy mobile user. Apart from the usual SMS and receiving calls, I sometimes use the camera, or the included Wifi-capability of my phone to browse a bit around while on the go and use the mystic messenger emails android chat. However, there is a set of features which I sorely miss in my device, and other devices I’ve used. I’ve compiled a list here, and I can only hope some developer stumbles on this page, and decides to implement those. Apart from affordable phone plans, they could still go a long way in making a device much more usable. They are not too difficult to implement I think, so here goes nothing…

Timed Profiles

I think it must be Nokia that came up with this bright idea years ago. Indeed, it’s a very good feature (at least it is for me). I don’t have to remember to set my device to Silent before going to lectures and such. But since it was implemented, the feature has hardly evolved.

Also, accessing this feature is a pain in itself. In Nokia devices, you have to dig through the menus down to Profiles, and there you get the option to activate it.

The only thing you can do is set a profile, then time another to expire at a time. After that, the other profile will activate, and when the time is up, the previous profile will be activated automatically. Easy to understand but not very useful.

What would have been useful is able to repeat the expiry time or even plan the expiry of profiles over the week. Say, General profile will be active from 18h to 23h, Sleep profile will activate from 23h to 07h. And Silent active from 07h to 18h. And that schedule will be applicable only during weekdays, while during weekends, you have another set of times.

But no, for now, you can’t have it in-built. Yet.

Delay SMS Sending

Another feature I sorely miss. It’s not even available on the networks as a service most of the time! Oh, I do agree there are ways to do without, like setting a reminder and have it sent at a particular date and time. This was possible in my old handset, but not now. It’s as if handsets are de-evolving! Now, on my N85, I don’t even have a stopwatch, while the good old 3310 had one!

Anyway, back to the point. What I want is a way to compose a message and save it. Then set it to be sent at a date and time. Sometimes, you need to remind a friend to bring you something, but only on the eve of the day you meet. You have to remember to send that message yourself, even if your device could have done the remembering with more ease.

Again no, it doesn’t exist yet as an in-built facility. Not in any device I know of. It may exist as an addon-application, but it needs to be in-built!

LED to indicate new stuff E.g. Missed Calls or SMS pending

My good old Sony Ericsson had a LED outside that flashed. But the problem is that it flashed just to indicate that the phone was on. Kind of a waste if you ask me. It could have been put to much better use as BlackBerry did.

BlackBerry devices have a small LED light that flashes when you have pending sms, calls or emails. Why don’t all devices have that? Even the high-end ones don’t!

Better yet would have the LED flash different colors for different things missing, maybe in order of priority. SMS pending flashes blue. Missed calls flashes red. But if you had both, the light would still flash red. At least you’d know from afar if you had something waiting, without having to touch the phone, or press a key to know.

If this is not possible, just make the LED flash at different speeds for different things.

But no, for now, I have to content myself with a dumb LED that tells me my phone is on. Very useful indeed!

All those small, but useful applications that were in older devices

Stopwatch? Timer? Alarm? Flashlight? Please, I bought a device that was multiples of the price of those lower-end phones, but still, it didn’t have all the features of those phones in them. I don’t have a stopwatch! I really need a stopwatch sometimes, and I don’t have one. Not in a device that costs nearly $300! What the hell! A device that costs $100 has it!

That is not fair developers! Give us those features back. We deserve them. And most of them are mostly software, so you can’t complain that it’ll take space inside the device as hardware.

There you go. I have completed my list of 3 features I really miss on any handset I’ve used, and really wished they were there. Do you have a feature that you wished was there, but is not? Let us know. 😀

Clean Up Font Clutter with Font Frenzy

by
Inf

I’m the kind of dude that install fonts by the buckets. I like fonts, and I like variety in my creations. Also, some programs that I install tend to place their own fonts on my machine on their own. After a while, this creates a huge mess and your fonts list in your applications grows excessively long. If ever the applications you use have font preview, this makes the matters worse! I’ve had Wordpad and some other programs crashing on me due to some corrupt font, or some font they didn’t like while I was browsing the font list.

Also, apparently, having a ton of fonts installed can bring down the performance of your machine, so before installing that font pack with a zillion fancy fonts in it, you might re-consider. Though I have to say, I never noticed the performance hit myself, despite the 1067 fonts I had installed.

Thus, there comes a time in the life of every font freak, where they must clean up their fonts folder. The problem is that Windows has a set of fonts that it likes and cannot work without. I’ll call these system-critical fonts. If you delete those, you will have a brick of a machine on your hands, and a re-install of the OS could save it, but lot of pains involved. Thus you would want a way to clean up that font folder of yours while keeping the essential fonts, correct?

Here comes Font Frenzy! Font Frenzy is a free software that will allow you to preview what fonts you have installed, but also manage them. By manage, I mean, install new fonts, back up existing fonts and uninstall those you don’t want. All this in a very simple interface.

FontFrenzy

But the most interesting feature of Font Frenzy, something that I have not seen in other font managers, is the ability to “DeFrenzy” your font folder. What this does is uninstall all those non system-critical fonts that you have installed. Before doing that, it’ll prompt you to create a snapshot of your current fonts. I’ll explain what this does later. After that, it’ll “uninstall” all those unnecessary fonts by removing them from the OS’ font folder, and place them somewhere of your own liking. Thus, you have a backup of the fonts, but at the same time, they do not clutter. You can then pick and choose which ones to re-install at a later time.

Now about those snapshots. They are in fact saved states of your font folders. Using snapshots, you can easily add or remove sets of fonts. For example, I have a snapshot where I have “DeFrenzied” my whole font folder, returning my system to its default state. Then, when I need all my fonts back, I just “ReFrenzy” using that snapshot, and get all my fonts back. Likewise, you can have different snapshots for different installed font-sets. E.g. A set with only default+graffiti fonts for example.

Oh, if you still want to clean up the your font mess manually, this list should be helpful to know what NOT to delete.

Summarizing, the good points of Font Frenzy are:

  • Simple interface
  • Ability to remove non-essential or non-default fonts from a system automatically
  • Can restore all removed fonts via snapshots
  • Can manage fonts (install, delete)
  • Can backup fonts to a folder you like (Unload and Store) in FrenzyMan

The cons are:

  • ReFrenzy, DeFrenzy, FrenzyMan… these terms can be confusing to the new user, but you get used to them after a while.
  • DeFrenzy (remove all non-essential fonts) does not remove all non-essentials apparently. It does leave some fonts behind. I don’t know if they can be considered essential, but nevertheless, Font Frenzy does a decent job at cleaning up things.
  • If you check the Fonts folder in Windows, you will see that not all the removed fonts are gone from that folder. I think Font Frenzy just removes some entries from the registry for some fonts, so they look as if they are un-installed.

So I’d say, if you need a simple, but good font manager, give Font Frenzy a try.

Phased Upgrade of Windows Live Messenger 8.x

by
Inf

Hello folks, been a while, ain’t it?

This post will be about Windows Live Messenger – WLM. Call me oldstyle, but I liked the lightness of WLM 8.1. Hadn’t even bothered moving to 8.5.

What do I see today? I cannot connect to WLM because of a forced phased phorsed upgrade instruction from Microsoft to correct a security flaw that had cropped up. Now, I’ve finally decided to upgrade to WLM 2009 and I’ll give you my first impressions.

I think Microsoft has gone haywire. I want to download WLM and what I get is a bloated package of 135MB something with tons of apps that I don’t want. What the hell is that strategy? I refused to comply and searched for a Standalone Installer. Softpedia came to the rescue. The installer there is just WLM in a 24MB package. Much better.

Update: Note you may also need to install other files to get the standalone working, most notably contacts.msi to solve a 80x error message. These, and some info, are available at this MyDigitalLife post.

The installation goes smoothly. Nothing to complain here.

There are some issues with the new WLM 2009 which I don’t particularly like:

  • It’s bloated! 8.1 used to take 15MBish of RAM. 2009 takes 36MB! It’s not terribly bad, but I still like my applications slim.
  • The interface is weird. I’ve been taught that the eye reads from left to right. What the display pictures are doing in the left instead of the right is beyond my understanding. I’d think that the chat text is more important than the display pictures. That’s not what MS thinks apparently. Good thing is, you can hide the display pics like before.
  • Whenever I open any menu, there’s a lag where my PC freezes for a bit. I don’t know if it’s just me, or for everyone else too.

The good points are:

  • Probably more secured.
  • More customizable, specially for the layout and contact list. E.g. The size of the display pictures can be changed in the list.
  • Reworked color schemes. The color frames around the display pictures indicating status is a good idea.
  • Generally more organized and pleasing to the eye.
  • The interface, despite some weird points, is better. Moving the emoticons and other icons down the conversation box and removal of the send button, etc… saves space.
  • You can now display “What you are listening” and your “personal message” at the same time.
  • You can sign in from multiple computers at the same time, and sign off them remotely.

Most things are already updated to work with WLM 2009, like for those of you who use MessengerPlus, it’s already up to date.

That’s about it. I’m not terribly satisfied with the WLM 2009. I liked the 8.1 interface best, but I am forced to use 2009. Let’s hope it’s as good as 8.1.

Your views on this, if you use WLM?

Swine Flu in Mauritius: A Tale of Mismanagement

by
Inf

By now, all Mauritius should be aware that there is Swine Flu – AH1N1 in Mauritius, and that there have been more than 5 deaths. I might be blogging this article a bit late, but I wanted to keep a record for myself, and everybody else about how this crisis was handled. I shouldn’t say “was” I think, since the worse may still have yet to come. But anyway, let’s be optimist for a tiny fraction of a second, and keep the “was” there.

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PHP Lessons 7: Functions in PHP

by
Guest-GS

Ok guys and girls, this is lesson 6 and I hope we can at least get to lesson 100! 😀

Today we will have a look at functions in PHP. First, what’s a function? It’s simply a sort of container for code. Whenever you call the function, the code inside gets executed. Also, functions can accept parameters, which are values that the function needs to work. If you remember a bit of your maths, “cos x” is a function, and x is the parameter or argument. Usually the result you get by doing the cosine operation is the return value. Just remember those terms for later.

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PHP Lessons 6: Break and Continue

by
Inf

Last time we saw how to work with the different kinds of loops: the While, Do While, For and Foreach loops. Today, we are going to see two keywords, “break” and “continue” that you may use to operate on loops and Switch blocks. You can consider this to be a continuation of the Loops lesson.

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