My next job was to customize the board icons. I googled a mod for this purpose. It is cbi v0.5 (Custom Board Icons). I downloaded the latest version of the mod which is cbi172.zip. I tried to follow the installation process for the mod but got no result. Then I tried for the manual installation instruction for SMF version 2.0.1. But it was my bad luck as I found the modification wasn’t compatible with version 2.0.1. So I had to spent some time with the code to make it work. This is what I had done.

First file is BoardIndex.template.php which within the Themes/default folder. Snipet-1 is the original & Snipet-2 is the modified code.

Snippet-1

Snippet-2

Second file is MessageIndex.template.php which is also within the Themes/default folder. Snipet-1 is the original & Snipet-2 is the modified code.

Snippet-1

Snippet-2

Some of my friends asked me to release as mod, but I don’t have such intension. The reason behind doing such is that I have respect for Bigguy’s (creator of the mod) effort for creating and maintaining the mod. So this is a temporary solution till he releases compatiable version of this mod for SMF 2.0.1. If you like utilize the code choice is yours.

Tales from Lonely Highway is the forum I had worked for.

Now if you need to find out the some information like 30 degree C equivalent F or 8% tax upon $1200 or interest amount upon $4500 with 13.5% yearly compound interest etc. Best way is to find out pen & paper and a calculator to do the math. I found out an interesting search engine powered by computational power.

The tagline Wolfram|Alpha says that it is the computational knowledge engine. The home page contain a nice interface to search with self-explanatory hints. The interface also provides random link to generate search items in the search box randomly. IMO this feature is helpful for the newbie with Wolfram|Alpha. The tour is also helpful. Same way examples are really good to understand the we can use Wolfram|Alpha

I found lot of good resource in Wolfram|Alpha. Likely they have announced API version 2.0 with various features. It is free for personal/experimental use. They also provide commercial license. For webmasters & bloggers Wolfram|Alpha provides a wide variety of widgets in different categories. Here are two among them that I have used in this page.

Wolfram|Alpha is a result of continuous development effort from Wolfram Research driven by the key person Stephen Wolfram. Two most important key component of WA is Wolfram Mathematica & A New Kind of Science(NKS).

Though I have started using Wolfram|Alpha for few days but I need to admit its usefulness. I am exploring its features day by day. I am sure you will like this too. I will feel better if you share your experience with Wolfram|Alpha.

New biological race?

First check this working example here – CurrencyToWords, then the code is here:-

You can use it like

Hope this helps

To explore with Google Chart API for Image chart I chose the data set of browser usages by visitors on my blog for the month of January 2011. Here is a snapshot from Awstats from my blog cPanel.

Browse usage comparison of Cohesive Web for January 2011

Here is the chart produced by the Google Chart API.

Comparison Chart produced by Google Chart

Let me explain the process I have used for drawing this chart. If you send a request URL with parameters in GET or POST then The Google Chart API returns a chart image as response. The request URL is https://chart.googleapis.com/chart. Here I have used GET method to send the parameters. Here is my URL for drawing this chart

Here are the list of parameters with brief description :-

chs
This is the dimension for the chart. The syntax is chs=<width>x<height>. For both width & height max value is 1000 pixcels. However widthxheight should not exceed more than 300000.

cht
The chart type. The syntax is cht=<chart_type>. I have used p3(for 3D pie chart). You can use values like p(pie chart), lc(line chart), v(venn chart), s(scatter chart), bhs/bvs(bar chart) etc. Check the chart gallery for complete listing of available chart types.

chd
The data set for drawing the chart Basic syntax is chd=t:n1,n2,n3,n4…. n1, n2, n3 are floating point numbers with a value range of 0 – 100. Numbers below zero will be dropped and above 100 will be truncated to 100.

chdl
This is the chart legend text/label for each data/data series. The syntax is chdl=<data_1_label>|…|<data_n_label>. If you have multiple words as label then they must be used in encoded format(URL encoding).

chco
The color specification for each elements/series. Syntax for this parameter is chco=element_1_color|element_2_color|…|element_n_color. The color code is a string of RRGGBB format hexadecimal number format. With this each 6 character color code you can use optional 2 character hexadecimal number from 00 to AA. Hence the color code format used here is RRGGBB[AA]. The last AA is used as transparency value , where 00 means complete transparent and FF means complete opaque.

chtt
This parameter is for chart title. Syntax is chtt=<chart_title>. To provide a line break you can use “|“. However the chart title also should be in encoded format.

chts
This is used to mention the font size and the color of the chart title. Syntax is chts=<color>,<font_size>. Color is as RRGGBB format hexadecimal format and font size is in point value.

chf
This parameter is used for background fill. Syntax is chf=<fill_type>,s,<color>. Here I have used bg as fill_type which means background fill. s means solid color. Color code is in RRGGBB hexadecimal format.

Beyond these parameters there are more which can be used to draw charts as per requirement. You can draw more complex charts using this API. You can read Google Chart Tools. To use this chart API you don’t require any API key from Google. Currently there is no limit to the number of requests per day you can make to the Google Chart API, but Google have reserved the right to block any use that they regard as abusive.

There is Image Chart Editor which you can use to draw your chart. So happy charting then.

In PHP a new value of this type of field can be accessed after inserting a record in the table, using the function mysql_insert_id(). But you can many such cases where you need to access this value before inserting the record. Earlier I used a technique to get that value. Execute a simple sql query to get that value. The sql is:

Where prodId is the field name with auto increment and is the ProductTable table name. Now add 1 with returned value and you will get the new value for that field. However this process may produce incorrect result if you do delete operation upon that table. Let me explain a little more.

Say currently the ProductTable contains 100 records. So the possible next record Id will be 101. Now if you delete record no. 21 or 49 or 65 or 78 you will still have the next record Id as 101. But say if you delete record 100. Logically you should get the next record Id as 100. Your sql query will give the value as 99 and adding 1 with it will produce 100. Seem no problem, right? Wrong, just insert a record and you will find the prodId for the record is 101. How this happened? MySql database stores 1 as starting value when you create the table. Now every time you insert a record the auto increment value get incremented by 1.This way it produces a unique number every time you insert a record in the table. Generally table in MySql database don’t reuse the deleted Id. As a result the above said process will not work in case deletion of record.

Well here is a solution to overcome this problem. I searched a lot to find out some method to find out the auto increment value. I found out a sql statement produces information related to the table. Within those information I found out the auto increment value. The sql statement is:

So I wrote down a function in PHP to get the auto increment value of a table without inserting a record.

However I hadn’t found out any method in PEAR::DB classes to get the auto increment value for a table. It don’t have any method like mysql_insert_id(). So I had created another function to use with DB classes.

I will be very happy have your opinion or suggestion regarding this. Till next post

For myself I mostly use PEAR::Pager to display paginated data. If you are familiar with this package then you know that you can use 2 types of pagination display, as – sliding and jumping. In case of sliding display with a common practice is to use it with constructor option append:true and urlVar:<variablename>.

Let me show an example of this kind of usage -

Now if you print/echo the $PaginationLinks, then you will get pagination like 1 2 3 4 etc.

Now let me describe you the problem:
Say your page url is mydata.php. So mydata.php page will show the first page of paginated data. while using the pagination links you will get a page with url mydata.php?page=1. This page shows the first page of paginated data. Now you are having a page with 2 different url like mydata.php and mydata.php?page=1. In SEO this is known as duplicate content. This is not good if you are seriously deal with SEO.

Here is the correction for this. This is simple but effective.

Use this code section just after generating $PaginationLinks. Hope this will help you. As always comments/suggestions are welcome. But spammers please don’t waste your time.

In my current project I need to display multiple content pages within a web page. I require to slide the page numbers so that user can view the number of pages by sliding/scrolling. I was looking for some good plugin which could satisfy my need. I have tested some of them but couldn’t find out the ideal one. So wrote the basic code for the functionality and the effect. However I wasn’t satisfied with my work as I was looking for some plugin for it. I thought it is the best time to try authoring plugin in jQuery.

It took almost 9 days to convert the code into a plugin. I gave the plugin namespace as paginationslider.

Code example:
Script section -

Style section –

HTML Section –

I will eagerly wait for your reviews on this plugin. Here you can view the demo.

I am having an issue of compatibility with this code and I am writting this post for it. If you look at the code you will find that it uses the ADODB Library for database operations. In my case I am happy with PEAR::DB. Now for me to use this code I need to use 2 different database component as PEAR::DB and ADODB Library. It seems useless to me. So I decided to make the code compatiable with PEAR::DB. While working upon the compatibility modification I also made 3 changes as

1. I have written a function as show_debug_text() which is a replacement of debug_text().
2. I have removed the silly_list() function from my code as it was declared as deprecated.
3. I have renamed the main class file from freetag.class.php to freetag.db.class.php

Here is the sample code for use this

Here is the code modified by me.
If you use this code please let me know if you have any problem.

Think of a situation where you are working with some array. Now there may be some situations where you need to store the array and retrieve it back. If you are familiar with OOPS concept then objects are another type which you may need to store and retrieve.

Serialization is the process by which you can convert an object or data structure into a sequence of bits which can stored and retrieve back. Serialization is also known as deflating or marshalling. The opposite process (converting the serialized sequence of bits to object or data structure) is known as Deserialization or inflating or unmarshalling. Most of the important languages have their own implementation of these processes. In Java provides automatic serialization by implementing the java.io.Serializable interface. In perl there are modules like Storable or FreezeThaw. Python implements serialization through the standard library module pickle. In PHP there are two built-in functions as serialize() and unserialize() for this purpose. However as I will continue the discussion with PHP then you should be aware of the fact that – there is a difference in the implementation of serialization in PHP 4.x and PHP 5.x.

In last couple of months I need to work with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). JSON is an ideal data interchange format which is language independent. I had used the JSON to design some Ajax driven functionality in one of my projects. Over there I had encoded into JSON some normal and associative PHP array and passed them to access by JavaScript.

After successful completion of the project I started working upon the possibilities of storing data structure or object in PHP using JSON. IN case of PHP there are two function as json_encode() and json_decode(). Interesting thing with json_decode() is that it takes a boolean argument as second parameter[$assoc] which is by default false. But when TRUE json_decode() returns objects converted in associative array. After doing a lot R&D I find out certain facts which favors JSON rather than using serialize() /unserialize(). In general if you consider the size of the stream produced by serialize() with json_encode(), later produces small sized stream. While working with data structure like arrays JSON produces the same structure after encode and decode. So in my opinion usage of JSON is better than PHP serialize()/unserialize().

Now while working with objects, JSON produces the same result as PHP serialization functions. However if the object is complex or if you like to take the benefit of magic methods object oriented PHP5 then its better to use serialize()/unserialize(). As serialize() will attempt to call _sleep() [if exists] which can be used to do some last minute clean up of the object prior to serialization. Same way unserialize() will call _wakeup()[if exists] which can be used to do some reconstruction in the object just after unserialization. So if your objects are simple then use JSON otherwise go for serialize()/unserialize().

In the conclusion I will prefer to use JSON rather than PHP serialization methods. I won’t be surprised if I get good nos of comments for/against my preference.