colocated at C7 Data Centers
administered by Anavi Design
If you’re ever in Ontario, Canada, you’ll take comfort in knowing that the local chapter of the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association relies on PHP to help save lives. Seriously — if I was lost or stranded in the Canadian wilderness, I wouldn’t want my rescuers relying on ASP . . .
Olate has an interview with Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, who are the principle developers of PHP. It’s an interesting (albeit brief) look at the men behind the technology.
We are excited to announce that the UPHPU is now 100 members strong! Congratulations to webdz9r, who has just registered as our latest member, giving us this much anticipated milestone. He/she will be receiving a free copy of a book from our library to commemorate this event.Thanks to all of our members and participants. We are glad to have you here and look forward to continuing our growth. We know that the UPHPU is going to continue to become a stronger and more effective resource to our community.
A new article by DevShed discusses backing up, transferring, and restoring databases and discusses options and utilities to make this task simpler.
Do you need to change your web host or switch your database server? This is probably the only time when you really think of backing up your MySQL data. If you’ve got a website with a database or your custom database running for your applications, it is imperative that you make regular backups of the database. In this article, I will outline two easy ways of backing up and restoring databases in MySQL.
The easiest way to backup your database would be to telnet to the your database server machine and use the mysqldump command to dump your whole database to a backup file. If you do not have telnet or shell access to your server, don’t worry about it; I shall outline a method of doing so using the PHPMyAdmin web interface, which you can setup on any web server which executes PHP scripts.
Dev Shed has an article about common PHP security mistakes, and how to avoid them. It’s fairly basic stuff — but a good review for even the most expert programmers. If you’re not following their advice, you should be.
On a completely unrelated note, I noticed that Dev Shed appears to be using mod_rewrite or something with very similar behaviour. I checked it out at Netcraft, on the off chance that Dev Shed had that information exposed. Interestingly, Netcraft replied that it has been asked not to report on Dev Shed — which is a request I didn’t even know could be made. You learn something every day . . .
Pardon a small note regarding user accounts on our website. We have a handful of accounts that appear to be inactive. The user has never logged in and (therefore) has not personalized their profile. We imagine that a few of these could be users that made a error when registering and left an artifact when re-registering, since the ability to delete one’s account was not originally available. We also were not originally moderating the registration process and suspect that a few accounts might be from the bots that left us the poetry last week.
To assist us in verifying active accounts, we would like to ask each user that has not logged in since registering or has not added their full name to your profile, to please take a moment to log in and do such. If these inactive accounts remain unused they will be purged.
Thanks for your help. We hope that you are finding the website useful.
Ryan Erickson presented on dynamic PDF and image generation with PHP.
Presentation slides / notes
(Special thanks to NYPHP for the GD tutorial)
A friend taught me something cool today that I thought that I would share with the group. With simple modular division, you can test for evens and odds and “cycle” between different results.
Follow me through the following scenario. My actual code for this was done in SMARTY, but whether done in a script or the template, it applies the same.
I had an array of values…
$array = array(‘A4′,’A6′,’A8′,’TT’,'allroad quattro’);
I wanted to loop through them and print out some HTML along with each value in the array. A simple foreach takes care of this nicely, but I needed something more. I wanted to print out a different set of HTML for every other value. In other words, the loop progresses and the values in the array are printed out with/into the HTML, the first would be printed out with/into “HTML chunk A”, then the second with/into “HTML chunk B”, then the third with/into “HTML chunk A”, then the forth with/into “HTML chunk B”, and so forth through for all the values. I needed a way to say “this… then that… then this…. then that.”
My friend introduced me to modular division. It does some math and returns the remainder of the fraction, making it easy to detect odds or evens. Each item in the array already has a numerical value assigned to it automatically in the array (the key), so I decided to use that to compare against.
So, if my code were in PHP, it would look something like this…
foreach ($array as $key => $value)
{
if ($key %2) // divide by two; ie, every other
{
echo ‘HTML chunk A’ . $value;
}
else
{
echo ‘HTML chunk B’ . $value;
}
}
And, using this modular division, you would be able test for more than two possibilities as well.
Hope this helps someone,
wade
Thanks to everyone that has been involved in our quest to find the most convenient meeting location and schedule. A lot of footwork and strenuous thinking has been be exerted in an attempt find the best solution.
In addition to the work that David is doing to secure a location for our June meeting, we are also looking for a possible permanent SL valley location, as part of the options we are investigating. We know that it is impossible for us to pamper every member, but we would like to try.
It is time, however, to bring this issue to a close. So, we have narrowed down our decision to two options…
…one of which will be implemented by our July meeting.
Because of the increase in membership of individuals that live North of the Point of the Mountain, it was decided at our May meeting that we would ‘test the waters’ and hold this month’s meeting further North.
Things have continued to progress since then though and in addition to this information, feedback from the poll we took a little while back, and additional increases in membership the past few weeks (we are 61 registered members strong now with 81 on the mailing list) we are leaning more and more towards the idea that two meetings, one in each valley (Salt Lake and Utah), will offer the best opportunities for attendance from the group. The only foreseeable drawbacks are having to find two presenters every thirty days. It will be well worth our time and efforts however if we have enough interest and participation.
So, please cast your vote and if you have any connections to a location that is very near I-15 and in the middle of Salt Lake Valley, please send a note to our Events Manager, Dave Turnbull.
We’re excited to report that uphpu.org ranks number five on google for ‘PHP User Group’. Pat yourself on the back, give yourself a hug, or put on that lavender tie your’ve been saving for a special occasion…. we’re famous. Thank you to all our sponsors, volunteers, supporters, members, and friends.
