iDimensionz » Programming

Let the April Fools Stunts Begin!

iDimensionz Admin — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:35:44 +0000

As you are probably aware, today is April 1st a.k.a. April Fools Day. A day when people try to make fools of other people. If you weren’t aware or forgot, you may have already been tricked into believing or doing something crazy and didn’t even realize it. Techie types are stereotyped as being boring, straight-laced, and basically no fun. Today is a day to show a different side. And who else to start the day off than Zend.

Yes, the company in charge of our beloved PHP programming language has bolted out of the gate with today’s first joke. I was verifying the version of PHP on my dev server via the phpinfo() function when I noticed something strange about the PHP logo. At first, I thought my server may have been hacked or infected with a virus. So, I checked where the logo image was coming from and, sure enough, it was coming from the php.net site. So, I went to PHP’s site (http://www.php.net) and the logo doesn’t look quite right there either. Have a look for yourself. I contacted PHP but was told that the logo was supposed to look that way. Yeah…right! Oh, well, that’s only my first fooling of the day. Good one, Zend! If you find any other techie site’s pulling pranks today, let’s hear about ‘em in the comments section.

New Date and Time Functions in PHP 5.3.0

iDimensionz Admin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:09:04 +0000

While browsing through the PHP documentation, I came across some very useful new functions available in PHP 5.3.0 for working with dates and times. One of my current projects requires working with a date range. There are various ways to do this. I was originally going to use MySQL’s DATE_DIFF() function to calculate the number days in the range but connecting to the database for this functionality was obviously not the best solution. I browsed the PHP documentation and found a date_diff() function that is part of PHP 5.3.0. This function is just an alias of the DateTime class’s diff() function and returns a DateInterval instance which can be used to format the result. The DateTime class is part of the ext/date extension. I’m looking forward to the stable 5.3.0 release to be able to take advantage of this functionality.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

iDimensionz Admin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:17:06 +0000

Being a web programming company, we feel we would be remiss in our duties (and honor) if we did not celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. This day has been set aside to celebrate and honor all women “excelling in technology”. Fortunately, technology is a gender neutral “sport” where women can participate and excel on a level playing field with men. As technologists, we welcome and encourage the advancements that women bring to technology.

For more information about this day, please visit http://findingada.com/ .

For more information about Ada’s programming language namesake, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language) .

Fun with Dojo tabs

iDimensionz Admin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:34:15 +0000

I recently had a need (not a fleeting need but a resolute need…PotC reference) to create a page containing some tabs and wanted to use Dojo for the job. Dojo worked well for this application. However, Dojo’s TabContainer displays tabs starting at the left of the container. I wanted the tabs to align to the right side of the container.

Here’s what a normal Dojo TabContainer would look like (by the way, I’m using the “soria” theme):

Dojo TabContainer with the horizontal tabs on the left.

After a bit of CSS trial and error (made easier with the use of Firefox’s Firebug plugin utilizing its “edit” mode), I finally figured out a simple solution to my problem. With Firebug, I was able to see that the class being used for each tab was called dijitTab. So, I simply added the following CSS to my page to get the tabs to align to the right side:

.dijitTab {
   float:right;
}

Great! Now all my tabs were on the right side of the container. But, something wasn’t right…they were in reverse order.

Dojo TabContainer with horizontal tab on right but in reverse order.

This is because Tab1 was defined first and was getting floated to the far right. Tab2 was defined next and getting floated right, but to the left of Tab1, ditto with Tab3. To fix this, I just rearranged the HTML to define Tab3 first, then Tab2 and finally Tab1. This resulted in Tab3 being floated to the far right of the container, Tab2 being floated right (left of Tab3) and Tab1 floating right (to the left of Tab2). Voila! The result I was looking for.

Dojo TabContainer with horizontal tabs on right side in correct order.

Zend Framework now available to iDimensionz Web Hosting Customers

iDimensionz Admin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:49:29 +0000

iDimensionz made version 1.5.2 of the Zend Framework available to all of its hosting customers today. According to the Zend Framework web site, “Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors”. To view the current version of Zend Framework available from iDimensionz, visit our Zend Framework page. That page uses the Zend_Version class to display the current default version available. Other versions may be available. Contact iDimensionz Support for more information.

Getting PHP PDT 1.0 to work in Eclipse Europa

iDimensionz Admin — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 02:55:57 +0000

After downloading and installing the full version of the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools), I was ready to start using Eclipse in my SimplyMEPIS (basically Ubuntu) distro to edit PHP code. To my surprise, the PHP perspective was not working. Eclipse seemed to recognize that it was installed, but wouldn’t utilize it. Starting Eclipse with the “-clean” option didn’t make any difference (except that the GUI looked slightly different). I found out that PDT requires Java 5 (or higher). I already had Java 6 installed, but it wasn’t being used. Java 4.2 was still being used. I tracked down the symbolic link for the “java” command, renamed it (in case I messed up and needed it back), and created a new symbolic link to my Java 6 java command. I checked the Java version with “java -version” which verified it was now using Java 6. When I fired up Eclipse it now is able to utilize the PDT.

An interesting side note…when PDT wasn’t working, Eclipse was defaulting to using KWrite as the (external) editor for PHP files. I was impressed with KWrite’s built-in syntax highlighting and code folding capabilities. I will definitely keep KWrite in mind when I need to make a quick change to a PHP file.

Visit http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/ for more information about the Eclipse PDT project.

Creating HTML formatted e-mail in PHP

iDimensionz Admin — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:15:21 +0000

Here is some example code for sending HTML formatted e-mail via the PHP mail function:

$from="YourFromAddress@yourdomain.com";
$to="SendThisTo@TheirDomain.com";
$body="Add your HTML code here";
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$headers .= "From: $from <$from>\r\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: $from <$from>\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP\r\n";
mail($to,"Put your e-mail subject here!", $body, $headers);