Posts by chrishea

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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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.

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.

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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 …

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 …

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 …

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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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) …

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

Audacity is the best free (Windows) audio editor.

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

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.

I have used the php-excel-reader quite successfully. I don't believe that it handles the newer formats (xlsx) so if that is required there are other tools available. You can also have a look at this.

When I need to produce a PDF file, I use HTML2PDF. In this case it would require some extra work to read the Excel file and generate a report output in the format that you want in PDF. If you can get PHPExcel working it will probably be less work but if not, this is another way to do it.

If you Google it, you will find lots of lists for the S&P 500.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=stock+market+list+of+companies+s%26p+500+by+sector

Some of these (like the Yahoo one) are by sector. You will need to screen scrape to get the list into a file. I didn't see a list that you can purchase (as a file) but that's probably out there if you look hard enough.I'm sure that you can find info on any publicly traded stock if you search for it.

If you look carefully you will see that you have an opening double quote before the Select on line 6 but there is no closing double quote on line 7.

Errors in PHP often point to the first symptom of an error rather than the specfic cause. You have to work backwards on the preceding line(s) to look for missing quotes, brackets, braces or semi-colons. PHP is looking for a match for an opening (,{,[,",' and only recognizes that it has an error when it finds some sort of illogical situation. In this case, it finds another double quote on line 9 followed immediately by the 'Y' but recognizes that this can't be the closing double-quote for the preceding line so that's when it reports an error. There are probably good reasons why the error message isn't more direct but the result is a fairly obtuse indication of an error. This sometimes makes the finding of the actual error a bit challenging, especially if the code isn't clean and simple.

Attachments require the file name and a type as in:

$m->Attach( "files/file1.jpg", "image/jpeg" ) ;
$m->Attach( "files/file2.jpg", "image/jpeg" )

Use multiple attach statements for as many files as you want to attach.

I use a module called Libmail. It works for me every time.
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If other users sent emails classified as spam from justhost, then the spam filters may have blocked some/all of their IPs. You should read about spam filtering and you'll understand more about what the spam filters look for and what you need to do to avoid them. There isn't a silver bullet for this and you shouldn't expect that everything will get through. There are things that you can do to minimize the problem. You can start with this:
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If you understand how an interpreted language works, that's what it does whether it's a local test environment or on the server. The interpreter takes each line of code in your (PHP) program, parses it and then acts on the action words and data elements in that line.

Most of the servers are running a version of Linux/Unix but you don't need to know a lot about Linux in order to set up a site on a linux server and run your code. The same applies to running a local test environment. You do the install, you put your code into the designated directory within that environment and then you run the start procedure for the package. When you do this, you will actually have a local standalone version of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

PHP is generally run from the original source but there are some options to create "byte-code" and run from that instead. This isn't compiled code, it is a half-way measure. It does provide some protection for your code if you are selling it. Zend and IonCube both sell facilities that do this. IonCube also provides an online pay-as-you-go version as well.

I have worn glasses since I was 10 or 12 years old so for me that's normal. What I resisted for a long time was getting hearing aids. Loud music and genetics seriously reduced my mid and high frequency hearing. Getting hearing aids seemed like something that old people do so I didn't deal with it. About 1 1/2 years ago, I decided that it was something that I had to do. What I found out was the hearing aids helped to stabilize the hearing that I do have, gave me back an almost normal ability to hear people speak, watch TV etc and they are barely noticeable. Despite my advancing years, I'm now back in a band. I couldn't have done that without the hearing aids because the music was just getting too muddy. To stay young, I've also joined the fitness center and use it regularly. Thinking young and staying active is much better than the alternative.

Cobol and RPG.

If you are using a Linux server, you can set the access to the folder to 400 to limit it to reading by the system.

The previous post shows how many programs handle translation between different languages but it is still basically assuming the standard character set. In this case, you need to be able to encode the web page to display Hindi characters. That is beyond the normal translation approach.

Have a look at the link below as a starting point:
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You can also look at a page that has Hindi characters and see how the text is encoded. Here is an example:
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You can build your own PHP site on a multi-domain linux server as well. You can use the standard PHP mail function or you can use a library module that makes it even easier. If you have a specific question or concern, then you need to clarify what it is. Otherwise, you need to develop some code and come back if you are having trouble making it work.

I use a module called Libmail to send emails. There are probably more sophisticated mail modules but this one works for me. You can find it here.

If it is just a set sequence, why not save the page name each time in a session variable and check that variable on entry to the next page.

If this is an innocent question "...My friend suggested that I should try parcelbound.com" then why do you show a link to this company in your signature. Looks like spam.

This seems rather troll-like:
* First Post
* Hopelessly open-ended question with no real connection to Daniweb
* Lists location as "Washington" but shows company with Autralian web site

You have to take online ratings with a grain of salt but I looked at this one and the ratings for Media Temple seemed rather mixed. I have seen a lot of user concerns with GoDaddy. There are many hosting options and probably many that would be better than either of these (including the one that I use).

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Perhaps you have misinterpreted the word "help". Help in this context is mostly advice and sometimes ideas or just comments. The advice may include some code but this isn't a free version of Odesk or Elance. You are basically asking for development resources to do work for you (help with your website, build a licensing system...). A promise of some kind of payment in the future isn't worth much so you are really looking for people with skills and knowledge that you are lacking to spend their time doing work for you for free. People on these forums can come up with their own projects so they aren't highly motivated to build/modify someone else's project for them. They may be willing to provide coding advice to those who post code that isn't working properly but they aren't checking the forums hourly in the hope that someone will ask them to develop something for them.

If you have no money to offer, then the development is probably going to be up to you. If you run into problems, then you can post (a small amount of) code and ask for some help. On the other hand, there are free website templates out there that are quite usable and don't require a lot of custom work. A licensing system probably isn't something that you want to be building yourself anyway (or paying someone else to build). If your code is worth protecting and licensing, then it's worth the investment in a proper …

I don't have a specific answer for you but you may want to look at this document about caching (including options and issues). As a general rule, you don't want to force your whole site to be reloaded every time because there are probably significant parts that don't change very often. Caches are used to speed everything up, including the loading of your site. There are strategies available for forcing specific parts to be reloaded, so some version of that may work for you.

If I interpret what you're saying, you want to run a successful web development business but to do that you feel that you need more hands-on technical knowledge. You feel that you can't successfully hire and manage others to do the work without it. Even though you might enjoy doing this sort of work yourself, managing it successfully is your primary goal, not doing it. That's my interpretation so if that's not what you meant, please clarify.

It would seem that you are now dependent on this business to make a living so unless you have a large bank account that can keep you afloat for an extended period, you have to put some priority on getting work and somehow getting projects completed. That makes the learning a part-time activity at best. With IT projects, everyone wants it yesterday so that can result in long hours and pretty intensive work so it may not leave that much time to learn. The learning part itself takes time even in the best of circumstances. It's measured in months and years so it depends to some degree on the level of expertise that you need to acquire. If you want to be the lead designer and developer then it's a long path to have the expertise to do major projects.

The first thing that came to mind when I read your post is that you need a partner/employee who already has the technical knowledge but maybe not the business expertise. That would kill …

Apparently, you can trademark a color even though it is difficult.
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Cadbury Purple (Pantone 2865c) Click Here

Darker than Dani-Purple.

For PDF output, I prefer to get it right on the screen and then use HTML2PDF to produce the file. It uses TCPDF behind the scenes but the interface is very simple. The main requirement is that the html to produce the output has to be proper (i.e. closing tags for everything) with no shortcuts.

I presume in your post you meant 3-up labels (not 30).

Dani,
I think that it seems repetitive because the major category has an amalgamation of topics from the subcategories (e.g. Community Center conatins items from Geeks Lounge and Community Feedback). I'll get over it. Only a minor thing.

miniPHP Studio does allow you to build a desktop application using PHP. It's less than perfect and your app may require some re-engineering to go from a server to the desktop. It can work but you have to decide if it is worth the trouble or if you are better off just rebuilding it.

I find this to be the easiest approach. You need to format your output (in html) the way you want to see it saved to PDF. You write that output to a variable and then echo it initially to see that the format is correct. Then you can send that variable to html2pdf to convert it. This doesn't require a lot of special code in your program. The conversion process works pretty well. The most important rule is that your html must have a closing tag for all of your html (opening) tags. You can get away with taking shortcuts in html but this program expects everything to be matched properly

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If you want to pass variables to another PHP module, you probably want to use session variables. This is pretty easy. You need a session_start() in every module where you are creating/using the session variables. You can then create a session variable almost like creating a local variable:

$_SESSION["a"] = "xxxxx";

You can use an iframe to embed another site's page on your page. That way, you are seeing the original site (content) under a different domain/page. Links to other pages work but they are all displayed within the (same) frame so the page address in the browser bar won't change. This can be a very useful trick but it can also be an underhanded way to dynamically 'steal' other sites' content. The only obvious logic here would be that the person behind it likes your content and intends to promote his (her?) version AND/OR they expect enough mistakes keying .net instead of .ca that it will give them some traffic. I presume that in either case, they would want to surround your content with their own ads / links.

a (Javascript?) statement like:

if (window.top !== window.self)window.top.location.replace(window.self.location.href);

has been suggested by others as a way to determine that your content is running in an iframe and then redirect back to your page. If that is what this other site is doing, then this could negate it.

Most sites don't have this much traffic and yours may not either, especially at the start. You need a profile of how much activity would be associated with each user. 1000 users doing a single short query in an hour probably isn't a problem. If it is 1000 users who will all be active for an hour with a lot of bandwidth, cpu and database activity for each one, then it might be a problem. You might want to share the profile with some web hosting companies and see what they think.

If you realistically expect a lot of users and activity (but not immediately) then you may want to start with a shared hosting package with a web host who can move you to a dedicated server if you reach the point that you need it.

You might find this blog item helpful"
http://wassupblog.com/bluehost-cpu-throttling-and-dedicated-server-packages/

Hi Greg and welcome to Daniweb.

Some observations for you:

• Getting your own place, getting a job and learning web development are all separate items that might not be tied together. It might be ideal for you if they all came together (quickly) but that might not be realistic, at least in the short-term.
• Depending on your time-frame to move out, a minimum-wage job may be all that you can find so you may need to plan based on that. I don't want to be a pessimist but people with college educations are taking minimum-wage jobs in some cases because they can't find anything else.
• There are a lot of people with some amount of software / web development training, knowledge and experience. There are also people in third world countries with very good training and skills who can be hired online. Compared to what we expect to be paid in North America or Europe, they work cheap. I mention this because they would also be part of your competition.
• Before trying to use web development as your ticket to an independent life style, I think that you need to determine if it is something that you enjoy and if you have the natural ability and personality to be good at it. You can start small by learning some HTML and CSS and creating some web pages. Once (if!) that is going well, you can start dabbling in PHP and databases (followed by using javascript tools like JQuery).
…

There are other ways to produce a PDF file but I find it simplest to create the output in html first, make sure that it is all displaying correctly and then let HTML2PDF convert it. You need to ensure that the HTML is complete (e.g. every opening tag has a closing tag) but as long as you do that, it works pretty well.

Do a search on pagination

This is called pagination. You can find a lot of previous posts on this site if you do a search. You can find a lot of references on Google as well.

There are many good solutions. GoDaddy isn't one of them.

I think that the point is that we expect someone in the final year of a Masters degree to be a pretty capable person. Most people don't have a Masters degree so we expect you to be among the elite of educated people in society. Education is more than just learning a very narrow set of skills. It is also about being able to think and to tackle new challenges. You are but the latest in a long line of people with similar requests. That is part of the reason why you got some cynical responses. Seeing as many of these requests as we have has led us to the implicit question: "Is there something wrong with these programs or is there something wrong with the people going into them."
The results don't seem to be consistent with our expectations. If you had already done some analysis of the pros and cons of doing these particular topics and you were looking for some input to confirm your thinking or identify possible challenges that you hadn't considered, then that wouldn't be unreasonable and you probably would have had a warmer reception. We expect posts that say: "I have to do a project and I don't know what to do" from 15 year old's in High School. We don't expect it from people completing a Masters program.

You should start looking at the ads in Craigslist or commercial job posting sites like Workopolis and Monster.com. It will start to give you a feeling for what companies are looking for. Obviously, it will vary but a good knowledge of html and css is a given. A good familiarity with using SQL databases is also a given. Many will probably want some knowledge of Javascript or familiarity with Javascript libraries like JQuery. At least some knowledge of OOP and frameworks might be helpful as well. You'll want to be able to demonstrate what you know so having some well structured and well documented programs available that you've written would be helpful. You'll probably find that companies are generally looking for a pretty broad skill set and pretty strong ability in PHP and some of the other areas. It isn't too likely that you'll see an ad looking for just 'basic' skills. Thus, getting some experience working with advanced PHP systems would be to your benefit. There are lots of open-source systems available so you might want to pick one or two of the more popular ones, download them and then explore how they work.

I, for one, have never taken a forensic computing course / degree so without knowing what the course covered, it's hard to make any suggestions. I suspect others may be in the same situation. I imagine that there is some distinction but also some overlap between computer security and forensic computing but I'm not sure where that dividing line would be. Despite your comfort with PHP, I'm not sure that it would be the best language to do anything forensic. If you want to do something that is mainly desktop oriented (including the browsers), then a web-based language like PHP doesn't have the detailed access you would probably need. Even in terms of the network, PHP has limited access to information. I am guessing that C or some other language that has access to operating system routines (e.g. DLLs) would be a lot more useful. Since this your final year project, I assume that it needs to be something substantial.

If you deserve to pass this course, then you must have some ideas as to what forensic computing is and what the key problems are that forensic accounting must deal with. The same as if you were an entrepreneur trying to create something, you need to identify a need and try to solve it. If you want help from this forum, then I think that you need to give us a quick tutorial on forensic computing and identify some needs that you could possibly address in your project.