Category: Code Snippets

Short code fragments for different occassions

A Mathematical Captcha – Reinventing the Wheel

I had seen numeric computational captcha or Mathematical captcha where one has to calculate the answer of an equation with simple arithmetic and supply the result for verification.

For a long time I have been using the image captcha with random characters, and got fed up. I had seen numeric computational captcha or Mathematical captcha where one has to calculate the answer of an equation with simple arithmetic and supply the result for verification. Last night I was pondering over this while watching a movie on the TV. Well the out come is obvious.
Continue reading “A Mathematical Captcha – Reinventing the Wheel”

Formatted XML, the php dom way – Best for debugging

Recently in a discussion on linkedin PHP webservice – Logging Requests/Responses, Roy de Kleijn had asked “how can I print the XML in XML structure, in stead of a single line of text”, which triggered me a thought.

Recently in a discussion on linkedin PHP webservice – Logging Requests/Responses, Roy de Kleijn had asked “how can I print the XML in XML structure, in stead of a single line of text”, which triggered me a thought. This may be trivial for veterans, and still a new information for newbies.

Continue reading “Formatted XML, the php dom way – Best for debugging”

Posting to wordpress using php cli and xmlrpc

A reader once asked me if I could build a command line tool which takes title from one file, and content from another file to create wordpress post. I tried, which finally gave an outline to this script. I dont think that this is very high fly, but for those whom the xmlrpc is mumbo, this might be somthing worth looking into.
Continue reading “Posting to wordpress using php cli and xmlrpc”

php MsSQL Backup

A php script to dump database as sql from MS SQL

We started porting (provide dual support) one of our application from MySQL to MSSQL, sorry, actually we were trying to run the same code base on either MSSQL or MySQL as the client wishes. And those who knows both, will agree to the level of toughness and agony when considers the fact that all of us are on MySQL and are new to MSSQL. In this context, we wanted to provide backup and restore to the application administrator through the system itself, and was not contented with the .bak files provided by MSSQL backup.
Continue reading “php MsSQL Backup”

Migration from MySQL to MSSQL our solutions – Continued

In the previous post, I had specified that a code analysis would be presented later on, which is happening now. Though I am not permitted to abstract the whole database abstraction, which would otherwise divulge the core business logic of the system too, I do expect that the following would be enough to guide a MySQL PHP developer to port his application to MSSQL 2005. Mostly the compatablities are maintained. But for the database design, we had to let away some of the wonderful features from MySQL.

We started by a code auditing and reworked the system such that we did not use any group_concat through out the system. Also all timestamp and datetime fields were changed to varchar(19) since we were already feeding those fields with the php function date’s return value or ‘now()’. But there was quite a handful of areas where we were using STR_TO_DATE and with different formats. So this had to be handled in its own way. And it is here we started our regular expression war path.
Continue reading “Migration from MySQL to MSSQL our solutions – Continued”

Porting application from MySQL to MSSQL

At first I thought it should be a challenge, though I did not expect it to be too tough, since we were already using a custom db wrapper. Well it turned out to be well too heavy a nightmare. And there was situations where I even considered retiring from life. I pity those who are paying thousands of hard earned money to buy such filthy crap.
Continue reading “Porting application from MySQL to MSSQL”

Convert MySQL Database to SQLite3 Database

For a cd based time limited working copy, of one of our products, I decided to port our mysql application to sqlite3. Since we had about 70 tables, and all with optimized indexes, and about 24 user defined function 3 triggers and 12 procedures, normally anyone would have thought of simply getting along with the mysql system itself. But I wanted to face the challenge. Thanks to Rob Cameron for the shell script published on his blog RidingTheClutch, Convert a MySQL database to a SQLite3 database, which sparked my thoughts.
Continue reading “Convert MySQL Database to SQLite3 Database”

Automatic image sizing with static delivery – WordPress Enhancement

Recently I got fed up trying to convince the operators of a client, for whom we had implemented a wordpress site. The operators, even after we repeatedly asked to upload only relevant sizes for certian positions, were trying to make one size fit for all. Hell, places where thumbnails of 1 to 2K would suffice, were being used up by 30K images, resized by our theme constraints. We were running wordpress on lighttpd.
Continue reading “Automatic image sizing with static delivery – WordPress Enhancement”

Short PHP twitter-counter

While strolling around I found some bits and pieces which I put together to get a short twitter counter in php.

<?php
ob_start();
 
$json = file_get_contents("https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/php_trivandrum.json?count=1");
$data = json_decode($json, true);
ob_get_clean();
 
echo $data[0]['user']['followers_count']; 
?>

Nothing more to write now..