Posts by chrishea

I used to visit Daniweb daily. The old format worked for me. I could quickly see what had been posted in the few forums that I normally visited and decide to read some of the posts or get back out. Since the new format was introduced, I feel that there is a barrier between me and the content. I don't know how to get that same quick overview in descending date order (by forum) so when I do come here now (which is infrequently) I dabble a bit and then leave feeling dissatisfied. There may be a way to get the same sort of overview as in the old format by using tags but I haven't figured it out so I've pretty much given up on it. Obviously, some thought and work went into converting to the new format and maybe it works better for some users but I must admit that I don't really understand the benefit.

Not quite a former user (yet) but pretty close. That's my two cents.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5398674/get-users-current-location-in-php

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15017854/geolocation-without-requesting-permission

The situation in the UK with "countries" within a "country" is pretty unique but the end result may not be that different from other countries with states or provinces. People in a small state or province have fewer representatives overall than a large one and may feel that they don't have much influence.

A difference in the UK is that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own very distinct culture and history and see themselves as separate and different (more like a separate country). There is also the huge difference in population between England and the other three.

One or both situations also exist in other countries (e.g. culturally here in the Canada with the French population in the Province of Quebec or in Spain with the Basques) but maybe not in the same combination of being distinct and relatively small. For most States and Provinces, the divisions are arbitrary and the cultural differences aren't that great.

I think that the tyranny of the majority applies in a lot of places. In multi-party situations, it doesn't require support from the majority of the electorate in order to form a government so that also seems to be a flaw in the system, given the limited influence that the other parties and their MPs have once a government is formed.

Electors tend to support the status quo rather than take a chance on the unknown. Thus, there has to be a pretty compelling case for something like the Scottish referendum to …

It would be a bit unusual to do it this way but you would probably have to link to the html module (from the PHP module) with the variable as a command line parm ( module.html?parm=xxx) and then handle the variable with Javascript.

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There are a number of JS libraries that provide plugins that are pretty easy to use. JQuery is probably the most popular. There are many, many image sliders (JQuery and others) and it is relatively easy to embed the calling code in a PHP program. You shouldn't need any help from this forum to do a search to find these or to write the relatively simple code to use them.

2014 Stats - Police Officers killed In The line of duty. This is from all causes, including auto accidents and heart attacks:
* In 2014, 127 US Police Officers were killed.
* In 2014, 5 Canadian Police Officers were killed.
* In 2014, 0 UK Police Officers were killed.

New York City has lost more officers in the line of duty than any other department, with (a total of) 697 deaths. Texas has lost 1,675 officers, more than any other state. The state with the fewest deaths is Vermont, with 22 [figures as of Nov 2014).

The City of London Police Department has lost 30 Officers in the line of duty since 1857. 19 of them were killed as a result of enemy action during the first and second world war.

1. Do you really need the snapshot? If you have the URL, you can display the actual page any time you need it in an iframe.

2. I have never used imagegrabwindow but it has limitations and issues that you may not want to live with. Link.

3. There are services available (with APIs) that are built to take such snapshots. Some have a limited free service so if you are only doing this occasionally, that might be good enough. You have to pay for the service if you don't want the limitations.
   Link

4. You could save the page to a PDF using HTML2PDF (or some other PDF creation tool). You should be able to save the resulting PDF file directly to a folder on your server. You don't necessarily have to save the PDF file into the database. You can just save the (unique) name of the PDF into the database record and leave the actual PDF in a folder reserved for that purpose.

Resolved but not really solved!

Other options could be to use the IP address or to install a local program that would start the browser and pass a (logged-in) user name (or possibly an encrypted version that could then be cross-checked against the IP). I use Autoit to build local desktop apps and it would be capable of doing this. It requires a little bit of setup on each machine but once that is done, it would be dead simple for the user to click on a desktop shortcut to start his login to the php app.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9518092/javascript-how-to-get-the-name-of-the-current-user

http://bit.ly/1zKIW0a

You'd probably want to use a session variable, that is set when a post is done (with the unix time stamp). On every post, check if these are set and if the time difference is less than 1 minute, then take whatever alternative action (a message?) that you want to take. You might want to go back to the entry page with the user input intact in case it is legitimate.

I changed the -250 to 250. I used my own image. I can see it and I can hover over it and click on it (but obviously nothing happens when I click it).

3 Toyota Camrys: 2000, 2006 (Solara 2 door) and 2010 Hybrid.
All very reliable. Hybrid gets pretty good gas mileage for a fairly large car (35+ mpg in the summer). It has a lot of technology in it but Toyota engineers did a really good job so it doesn't break easily.

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I haven't used any of them but there seem to be a lot of options.

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This topic comes up on a very regular basis. Some of the confusion on this is that the availability of free services depends on where you are and which Carrier you need to send to. This service is at the discretion of the Carriers and they don't seem to publish any detailed Terms of Service with respect to how many (free) email-SMS messages you can send at one time / per day / per month etc. They do have the right to cut you off but I think that the limit is fairly generous (but that does depend on each Carrier).

A catch is that you have to know more than just the phone number to do this right. You need to know which Carrier each recipient uses so you can build the appropriate email address. If you just bomb all of the Carriers with all of the phone numbers in the expectation that this will get everything through in a very dirty way, then that might lead to you being cut off (if you are persistently sending a lot of volume this way). Thus, it works best when you have people registering to receive things from you by text and they can then tell you which Carrier they use.

This article provides quite a lot of info on this topic, including the SMS email addresses for Carriers in various parts of the world.
WikiHow

If you need to send text messages for a serious business purpose (you …

Thanks, I'll have her try that site as a starting point.

The scenario is like this:

• I am using a CMS that uses FCKEditor (that's what came with it not CKEditor).
• I use this CMS a lot, I'm pretty familiar with it and I have never had a problem on my machine or anyone else's using the Admin facility for the CMS. I don't believe that the CMS is the source of the problem or that it is matters much what CMS it is (and few people here are probably even familiar with it).
• A copy of the CMS with the setup for a specific site is installed on a server. I use this web host a lot so I am pretty familiar with them and have not had any problems with them.
• From my Win 7 (64 bit) machine, I can access this site and use the Admin facility with no problem. It gives you a WYSIWYG view of each web page with all of the FCKEditor icons along the top of the box.
• From another Win 7 (64 bit) machine belonging to a client, running from the same site, the Admin facility does not provide a WYSIWYg display and the FCKEditor icons aren't displayed. There is a (small) box displayed that contains the html rather than the WYSIWYG display.
• I tried it from a third Win 7 machine and everything displayed properly on that one as well.
• I have looked on the Forum for the CMS, posted the problem there (no response) and looked on the internet at …

Click Here for an $8 solution.

As some of you may already know, there are significant health risks that can result from too much sitting. Research shows that it can contribute to weight gain, cardiovascular disease and cancer. This is different from the effects of a lack of exercise. Even if you exercise once a day, it doesn't offset the negative impacts of prolonged sitting. To compound this, there are negative impacts for our eyes when we sit and stare at a computer screen for a prolonged period.

Given the nature of what many of us do for a career and / or a hobby, I would guess that we are probably near the high end of the scale with respect to sitting in front of a computer screen for many hours at a time. If you then add time sitting in front of a TV and time sitting in a car (e.g. while commuting), it can add up to many many hours per day. I wasn't aware of the research on this until very recently when I was given some info on it by a Chiropractor that I know.

A way of minimizing the effects of a lot of sitting is to get up and move around on a regular basis. The suggested approach is the 20-20 Rule: Get up and move around for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. For the health of your eyes, the 20-20-20 rule is to get up and look into the distance at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

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It could be passed to PHP as a parm on a php program link.

Link

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There is a certain amount of natural ability and interest required. Not everyone is suited for this type of work. If you take some courses or do some learning on your own, you will start to see if it comes to you easily and if you enjoy doing it. If so, then you will need to decide where to focus to start building your skills and knowledge. I am assuming that you will want to do more than just develop web sites in HTML because that would severely limit your job prospects.

You have already narrowed it down to Web Development but it isn't clear what crieria that you used for this. There are still a lot of developers doing mainframe / desktop development and many others working on programs for phones and tablets. If you want a job in development in the area where you currently live, then you should probably do some research on which companies have local development shops and what kind of people they hire. By "what kind" I mean both their specific knowledge of languages, development methodologies, frameworks and so forth as well as what formal training they are expected to have (e.g. College or University). Understanding what the companies in your area are mainly looking for will help you decide if web development is the right place to focus/start. It can be difficult to get the first job without any formal experience so you'll want as much info as you can on which companies …

HP I don't trust HP. Had one and it broke down after a couple of years because of overheating. This was a widespread problem but no help from HP.

Dell Limited experience with these. My son had one that had a serious overheating problem.

Toshiba's reputation (as per the example above) is good machines but very poor customer service.

ASUS Seem to be pretty good machines at pretty good prices. I believe that Asus and MSI manufacture their own where most other companies outsource the manufactuting. I have had one for a few years that is still running fine. My son recently bought one and he is happy with it.

Lenovo/IBM I bought a used one of these (T510) about 6 months ago. I had Thinkpads at work for many years and I always found them to be very solid. I am very happy with the one that I bought. Don't know if the more recent Lenovo's are up to the same standard.

I tried mini PHP Studio, one of the programs designed to do desktop PHP. It worked but it wasn't really a serious development environment that you'd want to invest a lot of effort into.

If your real question is "can I use my PHP coding skills for a desktop app" then I think that the answer is a qualified yes. I've been using PHP for the web and Autoit for the desktop for quite some time and it's pretty easy to go back and forth. I think that the developers of Autoit had quite a bit of PHP experience so there is a lot of similarity.

Here is a simplistic PHP example:

<?php
/*
     A very simple PHP example intended to compare to an equivalent
     Autoit program.
*/     

     echo "<br>A simple PHP example"; 

     $a   = 5 + 1;

     $b   = $a + 1;

     echo "<br>The result is ".$b;

     echo "<br>The End";     

?>

Here is some equivalent Autoit code:

    ;  A very simple Autoit example intended to compare to an
    ;  equivalent PHP program.


         MsgBox (0,"Example","A simple AUTOIT example");

         $a   = 5 + 1;

         $b   = $a + 1;

         MsgBox (0,"Example",@CRLF & "The result is " & $b & @CRLF & "The End");

I know this is really simplistic but the point is that the processing code is quite similar. Since there isn't a default output window in Autoit (equivalent to the browser window in PHP), I used MsgBox which pops up a small message window. I could …

If you don't need to do it very often, just do it manually using PHPMyAdmin.

It looks as if someone has already done this:
Click Here

They used something called "Cloud It Up" to convert Open Office to an online version.

These aren't free and PHP probably doesn't really come into. Doing something in PHP probably means re-creating Open Office using PHP and that would be a pretty massive undertaking.

In my experience, it's more effective scraping content (especially when it's complex) using a local program rather than PHP. This gives you the same vantage point as a user sitting in front of a browser so you see everything regardless of what technology was used to put it there. I have used Autoit for this because it has a good (COM) interface to the IE services built into Windows. When I need to use that data online, I have the local program upload the data to a custom PHP program that stores it in a DB. If this needs to be done on a scheduled basis you can set it up in the Windows scheduler so as long as your machine is on, it can be done hands-off and the data will be available for use online. Not a great solution if it needs to be done on-demand from multiple end points.

Amadeus is a high-cost commercial system. They provide consulting to those who want to integrate with their system. Why aren't you addressing your question directly to them?
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Maybe doing it with PHP isn't the easiest / best way to do it. You can create editable pdf files with the full Adobe package.
Click Here. This is supposed to work online. The (free) reader can accept input to form fields but won't save them. That may still be enough if all you want to do is immediately print it.

This is probably the correct link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/who-made-that-nigerian-scam.html?_r=0

A free developer account only allows you to send to your own phone.

You could create a temporary table (using PHP) to combine the data from the other tables and then export that using PHPMyAdmin. You can also create a report putting the data into an HTML table and then write that to excel (if you want to avoid the manual intervention).

Cell phone companies in North America provide an email address format that you can use to send an SMS message. This is outgoing only and will probably have a limit on how many can be sent per day. You have to know who the carrier is to know the email format (because it isn't standard). In other place (such as India) this may not be available.

There are many companies offering paid SMS gateways. I have used Twilio. It has good documentation and examples so it wasn't difficult to get it working. You can signup and use it in a test mode for free (you will be the only receipient in test mode).

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A simpler way than printing might be to have a version that you can run on a local file server using a backup of the database.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki

There is a larger "womb-to-tomb" picture that applies to all types of cars (and everything else as well). This article talks about the difficulty (impossibility?) of getting the "all-in" picture. One interesting point they make is that keeping a car (running) for many years is a good thing because it means spreading that initial (high) environmental cost for the mining and manufacturing across a longer time thereby reducing the average annual impact.

In the case of the hybrid battery components, you have to look beyind the lifetime of the car itself since those components can be recycled (and Toyota does that). There is also the cost of recycling that has to be considered but that is probably a much better option than more mining and throwing the old one in a landfill.

This paper (by a freshman University student) tries to highlight the negative aspects of hybrids. It raises some legitimate points but I think that he is trying too hard to make the case (but it does highlight some of the myths, half-truths and misinformation that exists around this topic):

• Disposal: Toyota doesn't dispose of the hybrid batteries it recycles them.
• Aluminum: I believe that the Camry and the Camry Hybrid (as an example) are essentially the same car (except for the Hybrid components). I don't believe that the hybrid version has a significantly higher use of aluminum. On the other hand, Ford is now using a much higher % of aluminum in its (non-hybrid) …

The longevity of the cars and the batteries depends to a significant degree on the make and model (and how well they are maintained). The Prius and Camry have both earned a reputation for reliability and durability. With good maintenance, they are certainly capable of going well beyond 10 years and 150,000 miles without major repairs. This article from Consumers Reports based on a survey of 36000 Prius owners confirmed that the Prius has outstanding reliability, even after 200,000 miles. I am in Ontario and my 2000 Camry is still running fine and the body is still very good despite all the salt that goes on the roads.

Agilemind may be correct in saying that the average lifespan (in Canada) is close to 10 years but it has been rising for all brands and I believe that the average for the Camry and Prius is probably quite a bit higher. Despite (unsupported) claims that hybrid batteries are dying much sooner than 10 -15 years, you don't hear that when you look at reports from Prius owners. It seems that Honda is having that problem but again it is back to the make and the model.

As shown in this chart, there are more emissions from the production of a hybrid than for a conventional car but over the life of the vehicle, the total emissions are less. It may not be as dramatic a difference as we might wish but it is still something.

If you're willing to pay $40 then TrakAxPC is your best deal.

Audacity is the best free (Windows) audio editor.

This hybrid thing is off topic but I was interested in the comment about problems in extreme heat and cold because I am a Camry hybrid owner. From what I was able to find in forum posts, people in Arizona aren't experiencing any significant problem with batteries in their Prius (and Camry) hybrids. The cabin temperature in the car is the key factor in how hot the battery gets. Many owners in AZ use solar shades on their windows to keep the temperature from rising too high when the car is parked.

I did find an article about battery failures in Honda Leaf's but that is a more widespread problem that is causing many Honda hybrid batteries to fail after as little as 2 years. The batteries themselves are probably quite similar but Toyota seems to have done a very good job in the software that manages the charging of the battery pack. NiMH batteries don't like to be fully charged or discharged. The Prius has been around for 12 years and they are proving to be very durable. Some battery packs have failed but the % is very low. I'm very happy with my Camry Hybrid.

On the original topic, you should be able to find decent motels at $100 / day and sometimes less. You'll want to do some research using a site like tripadvisor.com to find the good ones. With the saving in gas compared to a camper van, the price probably won't be much different. Motels …

You have fields within single quotes within the longer string that also uses single quotes. Simplest fix is to use double quotes on line 25 and 38. I don't see a purpose to your closing bracket on line 39.

Some suggestions on this topic:
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This is probably going to be more than a simple add-on to what you already have. You may not be able to justify the extra cost and complexity unless your customers have a legitimate requirement for high reliability and availability; and, the internet connections to some / all customers are pretty unreliable. They have to be willing to pay to get it. If it is strictly data entry, that's not too bad but as soon as you have to do local validation of the data (in an offline mode), you will need to keep a subset of your central data in each location and then the complexity starts to increase significantly. If you discover entry errors when you are trying to sync the data later (possibly hours later), how will the sync program handle that? You may find that low tech solutions (like keeping local manual records and entering the data later) may be more practical.

I worked on maintaining very large mainframe systems written by others and I have developed some pretty large (PHP) systems myself. I have also dabbled in adapting and changing quite a few open source (PHP) systems. Generally, there was very little program-level documentation so what you have is the code and the comments in the code as your primary source of information.

If you are building a system or if you are deeply involved in making changes to a system built by someone else, you become very aware of the structure of the system, the utility functions that it has and the coding style that was used. In the individual programs, as you work with them, you become very aware of the program structure and it's relationship to the rest of the system. There is a learning process that you go through with someone else's system (and a construction process for your own system) and that requires some startup time. I often end up using some debugging facilities to trap some of the data to give me a better picture of what is going on. Obviously, it is going to be easier if you can work fairly intensely on a system until the job is done rather than leaving it for a while and coming back to it.

In my own systems, I try to structure things logically, keep the code as simple as I can and use lots of comments. All of the code that I work with is …

The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." uses every letter of the alphabet!

Building your own SMS Gateway would be a pretty challenging task. Using the API for an existing SMS Gateway to send and receive SMS messages is pretty easy to do. I have used Twilio and I was able to get it running quite quickly.

You need to look at reliability and service as well as price and features. If you read enough reviews, you often find that unlimited often doesn't really mean unlimited (and most users don't need it anyway). It's very nice to have a web host who responds quickly and tries to help with any problems. I have a web host like that, the prices are reasonable, their reliability is very good and they have multiple sites (including one in Europe).Click Here

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Have you gone through the Google documentation / tutorials like this one:

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It sounds as if you are trying to do something that may be very difficult if not impossible.You want some sort of control of the process but you have no control of the actual processing code. To see what is being "echo'd" to the user, you could possible have your own module that issues an ob_start to buffer the output and then includes the normal processing module. This would potentially allow you to see the output (and modify it!) before sending it to the user. There are probably situations where this would not work properly; to use this against a production program would require your program to be executed not the actual app; and, it doesn't provide info about what the program is doing (e.g. reading and writing from the DB) unless you are running some sort of trace where you can access the output.

Trying to parse buffered output or a trace file and then do something with that info would be very tricky, especially if you want to make it generic and can't predict what the exact format of the info will be.

You didn't really say why you want to do this but it seems that whatever you are trying to accomplish probably needs to be done some other way.