Yes, what is open source? A lot of people will answer differently to that question and quite large is the number of people who mistake Open Source to be a synonym of FREE(as in beer, meaning free of cost). These kind of people are really annonying, especially when they make statements like they prefer FireFox over IE because the former is open source while the latter is not!! Apart from anything else, when you hear such comments from people using Windows, you’d feel like banging a big iron hammer on their head!! Apparently, its evident that they are mis-informed and consider open source to be synonym for free, but even then their comments wouldn’t make any sense since the last I knew, Microsoft weren’t charging anything for IE, it comes free with the Windows operating system along with other goodies!!
Read MoreBad Behavior!!
No, this is not a rant about someone’s Bad Behaviour, but the Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress!! 😉
I’ve just installed it & lets hope it’ll stop the bandwidth wastage to some extent, its really getting out of hand as the domain almost used 2GB of bandwidth last month, with more than half of it going to this blog only, most of which was due to referrer spam!! :curse:
Read MoreChecking empty values properly!!
If you take some kind of input from a user in an application(whether its online or offline, it hardly matters) and then perform some action using that input, then you must check if the input is empty or not before proceeding with the action, its common programming sense, unless ofcourse you also allow NULL values.
Read MoreRuby, finally!!
Yeah, I finally started on Ruby, more than a year after I considered learning it. 🙂
Installing it was a breeze as I downloaded OneClick Ruby Installer for Windows which is an EXE file that installs Ruby painlessly. Took less than 5 minutes!! 😉
Now starting on Ruby wasn’t difficult at all. The OneClick Ruby Installer installed two editors, FreeRIDE & SciTE Editor. Any of them can be used to code & compile Ruby, & they are both good. I first tried FreeRIDE, its written in Ruby itself. It looked OK, not as cool as other editors like Zend Studio or DreamweaverMX. But then I noticed, it was quite an older version of FreeRIDE. I downloaded the latest version of FreeRIDE, it weighs almost as much as the OneClick Ruby Installer, about 14MB. Then I noticed that the SciTE Editor bundled with the OneClick Ruby Installer was also quite outdated, so I downloaded & installed the latest version of SciTE Editor as well. 😉
Read MoreSearch & Replace in MySQL tables!!
The Webmaster’s Weekly #12 is out & the Quick Tip tells you about a simple way of doing a search-replace in a MySQL table.
Well, it might be something new for Chrispian but I’ve been doing this for ages, infact I don’t know of any other search-replace technique for MySQL when you don’t need to replace the data of the whole column of a record, but just some text from between it, like in “hello world, today is wednesday” you want to replace “today is wednesday” with “yesterday was thursday”. This is ofcourse quite a simple example which can be done with a simple SQL. The tip however says that its quite simple to just download the data as SQL using phpMyAdmin, open it in a text editor, search-replace and then upload back after saving.
Read MoreAJAX? Another fad?
What is AJAX? Its a buzzword? Its a fad? Yes and No. Its cool if you know what it is, its a fad if you don’t know what it is. Possibly there’s not a single web-designer or developer on internet who’s never heard of AJAX, & thats just about it. A lot of them have heard about it quite a lot & quite often but just a few know what it really is. Though the number of people aware of the meaning of AJAX is quite less, the number of people buzzing with the word, as if they are the know-it-alls on the subject of AJAX, is quite quite high.
Read MoreInstalling cURL on Windows/IIS
As I move into some advance PHP stuff, I came across the cURL. Now some of you might not know what is cURL, so here’s a definition from the cURL Website.
Read Morecurl is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, GOPHER, TELNET, DICT, FILE and LDAP. Curl supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.
Worming my Way Out!!
Yes, a bug was reported in iG:Syntax Hiliter v3.0 that can stop the plugin from working, or in other words, can break your plugin and the post. This was due to the fact that a new RegEx was used for the tag parsing and I uh well…………..
So, if you used any square brackets like [ ] in your post, well, you can understand…………..
Let the CODE be Colourised!!
Yes, its about time, I know, & you’ve been waiting for long, so without further ado, let me present, iG:Syntax Hiliter v3.0!! As always, a detailed READ ME and MANUAL is provided with the plugin to get you going. 😀
This is truly one update which I think that every user should(must) have(or atleast those who are running WP1.5 or above). The whole plugin has been overhauled & re-written, the code size is less than the last release(400 lines versus 750 lines of last release) even though the features have multiplied!!!
Read MoreNot a Tale, this Time!!
Yes, its not a tale this time. 😀
This time I’ll give you a sneak preview of what’s waiting under the covers, while I wrap up the documentation.
I’m ofcourse talking about the iG:Syntax Hiliter Plugin, for whose next version you’ve been waiting eagerly(atleast thats what sounded like in your emails). 😀
Read More