GS Design Just another developer blog

I dont know about you but i have a lot of times when i hear about a new song, or i just remember an old song and i want to listen to it. I dont want to go and buy it … i just want to listen to it once or twice maybe.

You could go to some stores and listen to some samples, but that really stinks. Or you could go on google or youtube and search it, but that usualy takes some time.

Well i found a solution that really does the trick for me. Its called GrooveShark Lite and its a music library that allows you to listen to music, full songs, in theyr flash web application.

For me this is not “lite” its pretty awesome, they have a verry large music colection, and i mean verry large, i was abble to find almost all i searched for with the small exceptions of some romanian songs, but even then i did not get the song i wanted, but the artist was there with some of his songs and that for romanian artists is something, trust me.

You can even register and save your own playlist, it loads pretty quiqly, overall i really recomend this site to anybody.

As a note you can use TinySong.com and type any song name you want and it will give you a link to that song on GrooveShark Lite, wich you can place on your website or maybe share it with some friends by email, IM or whatever.

hope you like it too,

Cheers

Thanks to a Chris Pirillo video i recently discoverd a new website that some of you could find interesting. This is Tinypaste. The ideea beside this site is to transform a big text you want to send to someone into a tiny URL.
This is similar to the tinyurl.com service just that is intended for text instead of URL’s.

The site is very simple to use, you just copy & paste your text into the textbox and pres submit and you get the URL. This should really come in handy when you have large bits of text from a document or a webpage that you want to send fast to a friend online.

Tinypaste also come with a Firefox Extension. Using the extension you can post the text from a webpage, by selecting it and click “Tinypaste selected text” from the right click menu and you will receive your link, pretty nit huh ?

Hope you find this interesting also,
Cheers.

Manuel Lemos from PHPClasses has announced the launch of a new section in the website dedicated to jobs for php professionals.

This new PHP job site allows companies to reach a large number of professionals with specific PHP skills eventually taking less time and money to find qualified professionals to fill their job openings.
This new section out of demand for profesional developers. After the rapid growth of the php professionals directory which currently has over 2,100 professionals available for taking PHP jobs in 124 countries, company’s looking to hire a php profesional didnt have the means to do it in a easy way. Contacting each professional and checking who is free and can take the project was not quite the fastest option.

Company’s can now post jobs, set up the skills needed for the project, the same as the ones in the php professionals directory profile. After they post the project, the job beside being visible in the website will be sent to all the professionals that have joined the directory with an option set to receive e-mail notifications when a new matching job is posted.

Although the job posting is not free, i believe that it will be money well spent since you will have more confident in the skills and professionalism of the candidates that apply for your job.

I await to see how this new section will develop in time. What do you think, will it be a success in the php community ?

An mcse certification helps one in the actual tests that come later, like mcts as well as mcitp. Only then can one continue with comptia a+.

Cheers.

Just a few minutes ago i read a shocking news about Google/Yahoo Search Partnership Announcement. It turns out that Yahoo will outsource all or part of Yahoo search marketing, and possibly search itself, to Google.

As this news not yet official but very likely to be true since there have been announces before about this potential partnership, controversial debates about if this is good or bad, and about that a competitive search market is needed for a healthy Internet are starting to apear.

Yahoo and Google will make a joint announcement at 1:30 California time this afternoon and then we will know the oficial side of the story.

Never the less this is big news for the internet marketing, SEO, and Affiliate Marketing industries.

I have been using Gmail for a while, and it is a great service. It has 6GB of free space wich is great, and i belive it is one of the fastest web based clients at the moment. But i have to say i am not a big fan and it is not my main account ( wich is a yahoo based account mainly because i use theyr IM more ).One of the reasins why is because i like the 3 side look from Outlook, ThunderBird or Yahoo. It is more fast for me and allows to browse through emails with more ease.

Recently Google went live with Gmail Labs, wich allows you to enable new experimental features for Gmail. To do this you must log into your account and click Settings, and switch to the right-most tab, titled Labs. There you will see a list of features that you can enable with an explination for all of them.
These features have been developed by the Gmail staff in order to improve your Gmail experience. For now they are experimental and you can test them, and lator on Google will track which features are most popular and introduce them into the Gmail core. This is why along the way you might see some new features appearing in the list, or some features disappearing.

Here is the list of the current features that you can enable:

Quick links box:

This will add a box to the left side to which you can add any Gmail URL… like, for instance, a Gmail search for in:inbox is:unread to see all your unread messages of your inbox. This could come in very handy.

Different stars icons:

Lets you define a couple of different star icons. Traditionally you can only either add or remove a yellow star to a mail. With this feature you can click the star several times to rotate its image. (Google names this feature “Superstars”, which is a bit of a pun that might make some mistake it for a “automated icons for VIP friends” feature at first.)

Fixed width font:

Enabling this will trigger a new entry in the “Reply” menu that lets you switch to a non-proportional font.

A Snakes game:

Well, perhaps something to surprise your friend, though not useful (or a terrific novel game) in itself; enable this, then enable shortcuts, and press “&” to bring up a game of snakes.

Mouse gestures:

When you enable this feature you can hold the right mouse button and then move the mouse upwards to jump to the inbox, from any place. Moving left-ways goes to a previous conversation, moving to the right goes to the next.

Random signature:

This will load one of several signatures available in an RSS feed file.

There more features but i will let you discover them on your own.

I think Google decision is a ground-braking one because it lets the user build the product in a certain why. This brings beta testing to a whole new level.

The sad part for me is that although i had the Google Labs announce for a while in my Gmail Account, they decided to only luch it for US and UK users . So please tell me what do you think of the plugins and how usefull they are since i wont be able to try them for a while it seems.

Cheers

Go for new web page designers each time you start on a new online marketing project. Try a unique approach for web site hosting as well as some like email marketing or the more popular ppc.

This article is meant to help you to speed up your application by by tweaking the php configuration. The time gained might not be to visible to the user, but i should relief a little of the load on the server. Also this tweaks are going to help you a little in security.

If you are on a shared server and dont know how to change your php configuration you might want to check this article also.

But enough talk and lets get right into it. I will write the configuration name, the recommended setting and how this helps your application.

short_open_tag = Off

This will turn off short tags ( <? …. ?> ) and have the php engine one problem less to worry about.

asp_tags = Off

Do not use ASP like tags: <% echo “hello world”; %>

memory_limit = 32M

This is one configuration that you might need to tweak once in a while. But for start it is better to set it to a lower value and adjusting it when you need it. This will help you keep track of your aplication memory usage.
An article about memory usage you can find here.

register_long_array = Off

This will tells PHP to not register the deprecated long $HTTP_*_VARS type predefined variables. The default value is On. Since almost nobody ever uses them any more ( unless they have some compatibilty problems with old scripts, and they need them on ) it’s recommended to turn them off, for performance reasons. Instead, use the superglobal arrays, like $_GET.

This directive became available in PHP 5.0.0 and was dropped in PHP 6.0.0.

register_argc_argv = Off

This is more or less the same with register_long_arrays referring mostly to GET informations so it should be set to Off as well.

auto_globals_jit = On

This makes php stop generating the SERVER and ENV variables at script start ( default behaver ) and generating them when needed (Just In Time). These should help performance by cutting down the memory used by your scripts.
For this to work you need to have register_globals, register_long_arrays, and register_argc_argv disabled.
As an inside info : i tried this on a server .. .and it didn’t seem to create any SERVER or ENV variables, but i guess it was the server configuration because on a different server it worked .

magic_quotes_gpc

From my experience having this on can be a real pain in the [****]. When this is on, all ‘ (single-quote), ” (double quote), \ (backslash) and NUL’s are escaped with a backslash automatically. Why this is bad ? because you dont have a control over it. For example you use a mysql wrapper for youre database interactions that already has an escape function, this will make your values double escaped, and you endup after a few submits with a bunch of backslashes. So better have it off and do your own escaping, and maybe use a cleaning function to prevent SQL Injection ( more info here )

always_populate_raw_post_data = Off

Raw Post data is one of the more advanced knowledge, so if you dont use it, relief php of it concern and set always_populate_raw_post_data = Off.

Even though i tried to install linux on my laptop several times, and have about 5 linux distribution in my CD colection, i never managed to stay to long in the linux enviroment.

But it seem like the day has come for me to go fearsly into the unknown teritory of Linux. Recently i have received the assignment to build a new network for a Mall to offer them internet service. And since in Romania people are still to to glad to spend money on licence software, we came to the conclusion that the best option was to install a linux OS on all the network computers. This will ensure that the store owners will save quite a few buck with all the software licenses.

So far so good i would say. From here comes the tricky part, i had to find a linux distribution that had to be verry user friendly, since the users would have no knowledge of linux and all cammed from windows, have as much driver suport as possible ( to avoid any hardware recognition problems ) and preferable light weight ( to work OK on oldder desktops and laptops ).

So i took my little knoledge of linux and my trusted friend google and got to work . After a few hours of forum and reviews digging, i decided on 4 distribution to test:

1. Linspire

Seemed like a good distribution, and i read good things about it’s ability to make windows user at home with linux. I read a few bad reviews about it that question it’s stability, but the overall opinion was that it is a good distribution for first time windows users. I should mention that the distribution is not free, below there’s a link to buy it from amazon :

I bought the Cd and i can say that indeed for a windows user it’s a real help and will not drive a person away . I first install it on my desktop computer and it worked fine, but when i tryed on my laptop as a LiveCD it didnt boot up properly and the looding progress would stop at like 35%. Even if somepersons might comment on my decision, i decided to look for another distribution.

2. Kunbutu 7
As i was browsing the internet in search of a new distribution to try, i cama acroos a forum thread that discused the Linspire distribution, and one of the members was saying that instead of the Linspire Distribution he whould prefer kubuntu that is more stable but also keeps the user friendly look & feel. So i downloaded it in a hurry and decided to give it a try. The instalation went perfectly, and after this i got a warning about my Intel wireless card, that its driver it’s in the ‘restricted’ repository. Still the device was enabled and working. I spent about 45 minutes trying to connect to my wireless router, and the lack of the wireless assistent in the original distribution install ( i know you can download one ) convince me to look some where else.

3. Unbutu 6.06
If you didnt figure it out Kubuntu is bassed on Ubuntu distribution . So my next choise was the original thing ). I remembered i try’ed it once in the past and it seemed OK. And also i had a CD with it laying arround ( i had that ordered of the internet a year ago ) so i went right to work and install it. Everey thing went perfectly, all the drivers were found. The wireless connection was up&running in a minute with the wireless assitent. The only problem that i experienced was the wireless router security encription ( WPA ) that as far as i saw wasnt suported. But as soon as i changed the wirelless to WEP encription i got a conection . But i searched the internet and found that it is possible to do a WPA encription with unbuntu ( as soon as i managed to do this i willl post the results here ). Overall i think this is my distribution to be .

4. SUSE 10
I also heared a lot of good things about this distribution. Unlike the previus distribution i wrote about that have usualy 1 CD, Suse has 5 CD’s.
One of the flagship features of SuSE is YaST, SuSE’s installation and system management tool. A key to a easy life with Linux is being able to easily manage the system and install software. Also i heared that this last version has an emproved Wireless Network Suport. Althogh i also have this distriution in my CD collection i din’t get a chanse to test it. As soon as i do i will inform you of my thought about it. The only thing that doesnt make me to excited about it is the fact that it need a lot of installation space.

That is it for now. I will keep you updated with the problems i face in linux and the solution i adopt, maybe some of you will use them and save some time.

Looking to you’re comments.
Cheers

Those who are looking for a career in network plus, need something more than a ccnp. That means at least a basic mcsa certification and an advanced credit from either ccna certification or an itil certification.

Enjoy!

today as i was checking on my forum subscribtions i saw a new word WebOS. This made me quite curious so after a small google search i found out that obviously it stands for Web operating system and it’s been arround since 1999 acording to Wikipedia.

So i starting digging in on the subject, and i found out that the main competitors on the market are YouOS, Goowy and DesktopTwo. To make things easy’er for you i took the first 10 and posted it here with an image, a link to they’re website ( so you can check them out too ) and a small description of what i found people think about them. I will try them myself and tell you about my finds in a later entry.

So here they are … the order is random.

1.EyeOS
One of the fews that gives you the posibility to download it and install it on you’re own server, otherwise prety basic.
It does not use a database, it can be put on any free server.

Get Flash Player to see this video.

2.G.ho.st
It’s main features include your own email address, 3 gigabytes of storage, and your own desktop to work on with all the benefits (Menu, task bar, system tray, icons,Widgets)! It allows all the basic file operations (upload,download,copy,move, share ).The downside is that it requires a good conection because it has a flash a flash engine.

3. Desktoptwo
One of the best WebOS on the market. It has a big range of aplication ()Hard Drive, Mail, Address Book, My Website Editor, Blog, IM, MP3 Player,Programs, Message Boards, RSS Reader,My Sitestwo,Live Chat). All on a flsh engine.

4.Glide
A flash based solution with free and comercial packages ( the main diference being space – 2GB for the free version ). It has a unique interface, diferent than the windows look.

5.Goowy
One of the best WebOS, based on a flash engine. It includes including an instant messenger that lets you chat with your buddies from multiple networks, powerful e-mail, contacts & calendar, customized news, rss, minis, file storage, sharing & finally some fun games when you just want to relax.

6. Orca
Another WebOS but wich has a big “bug” … it doesnt work under Firefox. They annonced that soon they will lunch a new version that will work on all browsers ( curently they’re own website is down. ). It includes a variaty of aplications, and the use Zoho for the office ones.

7. Purefect
It’s not one of the best WebOS, and it’s at it’s start so it still has some problems, even some security ones ( !!! )

8. SSOE
It is an small project and it’s still very young . But it offers an ideea of what it could become, few of the feature are fully functional.

9. XinDESK
it’s can’t be yet tested, because it isn’t launched. But you can check it out by visiting the website

10. YouOS
A very serios WebOS that includes a good chat client, and IM, an RSS client and a bunch of other aplications. The design is not yet perfect but other that that it’s a very solid aplication.

For a government web site, the mode of search engine optimization is different from others. The web hosting is not an issue but the differences start from domain registration. Later online advertising creates even more drifts.

That is about it. I wait you’re thoughts and comments.

Cheers