SYNTAX: string strtolower (string $mystring);

$myLowercaseString = strtolower ($mystring);

As with all PHP, test to make sure you've implemented correctly. Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment.

Often when I tell people that I work on Google video chat, I hear stories about how they’ve used it to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones... the list goes on. This got me thinking about how convenient— and sometimes even magical — the experience of video chatting is.

- Gmail blog (link below)

Check out the Grandmother's guide to video chat on the Gmail blog for more info and find out how to get a t-shirt, printable guide and VHS of the video.

GOOGLE VIDEO CHAT

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, you've already been able to open some other documents like this in Google Docs such as PDFs...

<?php
header( "Location: http://www.example.com" ) ;
exit;
?>

You can also use variables for the URL like so:

<?php
$destURL = "http://www.example.com";
header( "Location: " . $destURL ) ;
exit;
?>

NOTE: The code above has to be processed before any HTML headers, so it needs to be placed above ANY HTML code.

NOTE 2: Watch the code above, depending upon my current CSS in my current theme the single quotes or even double quote may change to fancy quotes which will need to be edited if you cut-n-paste the code.

MORE info available on PHP.net's header manual page

<?php
$myReferer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
?>

NOTE: Watch the code above, depending upon my current CSS in my current theme the single quotes or even double quote may change to fancy quotes which will need to be edited if you cut-n-paste the code.

MORE info available on PHP.net's $_SERVER manual page

Use this:

.allcaps {text-transform: uppercase;}

... and there's no need to re-type a bunch of text links.

MORE INFO

CSS: text-transform on W3Schools site

I've got a new computer running Windows 7 Home Premium and at 1024x768 the desktop icons seemed huge. I found a nice shortcut to resize the desktop icons (I still don't know the "right" way) that is right quick and intuitive.

Resize Desktop Icons in Windows 7

First, click the desktop once in an empty area to give it "focus". Next, hold down the CTRL button and scroll with the mouse wheel. Scroll forward (up) to increase icon size, scroll backward (down) to decrease desktop icons and make them smaller. Note this will resize the icons - not the text under them.

Now I've also changed my screen resolution to 1280x1024 and they look even better, but I think I'll monkey around with the size of the icon text some later.

Today's post Long lived new windows points out that Chrome users can now forget that last detail, and when they have logged out of the main Gmail window, their popout windows continue to be logged in.

MORE
Fast new windows

OTHER RECENT POSTS
Making it easier to video chat, voice chat, and group chat in Gmail
Google Maps previews in Gmail and Google Buzz
Gmail sweatshirts

Since "gmail" is 50% fewer characters than "googlemail," we estimate this name change will save approximately 60 million keystrokes a day. At about 217 microjoules per keystroke, that's about the energy of 20 bonbons saved every day!

You might be wondering what I'm talking about, and its the new option for UK users of GoogleMail to switch from their @googlemail.com addresses to @gmail.com addresses. If you 're a Brit and want to make the switch, there's a screesnshot below, and if you want more details have a read of the official Gmail post:  Google Mail is becoming Gmail in the UK.

Here's some PHP to generate paths: both server paths and domain paths good for use in all sorts of ways for include and require statements.

<?
// for INCLUDE statements - this is the local server path
$urlPATH = "http://" . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
$srvPATH = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
include ($srvPATH."/config-settings.php");
?>

More later.