Binary Expressions

Background Knowledge

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The installation of Swish-e v2.4.5 is being installed on a system with OpenBSD v3.7 i386 and Perl v5.8.6 using BASH as the command prompt interrupter.

What is Swish-e?

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As quotes by Swish-e.org…

“Swish-e is a fast, flexible, and free open source system for indexing collections of Web pages or other files. Swish-e is ideally suited for collections of a million documents or smaller. Using the GNOME™ libxml2 parser and a collection of filters, Swish-e can index plain text, e-mail, PDF, HTML, XML, Microsoft® Word/PowerPoint/Excel and just about any file that can be converted to XML or HTML text. Swish-e is also often used to supplement databases like the MySQL® DBMS for very fast full-text searching. Check out the full list of features.”

(more…)

I began play with Visual Studio 2005 and discovered that Internet Explorer is used for debugging. In the past one could change the default browser before going to the file menu then to “Browse With” in Visual Studio however this seems to have changed. Here is a couple solutions I found out how to change your default browser in Visual Studio 2005.

Solution One

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1. Go to File menu > New > Web Site.
2. Go to File menu > Browse With.
3. The “Browse With” dialog will appear, click on Add and then select your preferred browser.
4. Click on your preferred browser in the list and click on “Set as Default”.
5. Click on “Browse” or “Cancel”.

Solution Two

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1. Left click on a aspx file in the “Solution Browser” and click “Browse With”.
2. The “Browse With” dialog will appear, click on Add and then select your preferred browser.
3. Click on your preferred browser in the list and click on “Set as Default”.
4. Click on “Browse” or “Cancel”.

Source: Changing your debug browser to Fire Fox in Visual Studio 2005

Background Knowledge

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This case was done on a machine running OpenBSD i386 v3.7 operating system with Perl v5.8.6 built for i386-openbsd using BASH as the command prompt interrupter.

I’ll be honest I have very little knowledge of Perl so if you have anything to comment on or suggest please do so.

Problem

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I tried to install a couple Perl modules and received an error message of “Out of Memory!”.

Solution

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Just to clarify I have very little knowledge when it comes to Perl, so this solution may or may not work for you.

On Unix machines each user has a ulimit or “user limit” which is basically from what I understand sets the limit for each resource to ensure the system is not over loaded or abused. In this case at least for me, my issue was not having a big enough data seg size. Type at the command prompt without quotes “ulimit -a” to see a list of the set limits. I increased my data seg size from 76800 to 200000. I did this by typing at the command prompt without quotes, “ulimit -d 200000″.

You may need to play with this value for your case or other ulimits. Don’t worry about the changes as none of them are permanent in this case, at least to my knowledge. When you use the ulimit it only changes it for the user you are using and for that given session. If you require more permanent changes look into using ulimit in the login script or better yet change your system configuration settings.

Comments/Thanks

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Many thanks to Scott Corley who posted an excellent blog entry entitled “perl Out of memory! (with solution)” on his blog called “Red Mercury Labs”. Without this I was getting know where fast.

If anyone can provide some further knowledge on ulimit it would be much appreciated.

Source: Red Mercury Labs - perl Out of memory! (with solution)

Background Knowledge

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The MySQL database v4.0.23 is using the default character set of “Latin1″. When the database was created I had no knowledge of character sets other wise it would have been “UTF-8″.
The web pages are using a character set of “UTF-8″.

Problem

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Data being queried from a MySQL database that contains French accent characters will not render correctly in the browser even after applying PHP htmlentities().

Example code: $string = htmlentities($string , ENT_QUOTES, “UTF-8″);

Solution

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The queried data from the database was inputted using the character set “ISO-8859-1″. I found this out by changing the browser’s character encoding to “Western ISO-8859-1″ and the French accent characters then rendered properly. With the use of PHP iconv() I was able to convert the data from “ISO-8859-1″ to “UTF-8″ character set and the French characters then rendered properly in the browser.

Example code: $string = iconv(”ISO-8859-1″,”UTF-8″,”$string”);

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If you are unaware of what MySQL default character set being used, you can run this SQL command “show variables like “%character%” and check your MySQL configuration file. Refer to the MySQL manual for further details.

I have learned by using the “find”, “wc” and “awk” commands one can find the total number of lines within files of a given directory and sub-directories. Thanks to NicM on IRC server Freenode channel #OpenBSD for his solution below.

Solution
find /path/blah -type f -name ‘*.php’|while read i; do wc -l <$i; done|awk ‘BEGIN { x=0 }; { x+=$1 }; END { print x }’

Note: Shell must be bourne-compatible.

One of the biggest complaints I’ve had with HTML_QuickForm is not producing valid XHTML Strict code. Well there is a simple solution to removing the name attribute of the HTML form element tag using remoteAttribute().

Example
$form->removeAttribute(’name’);

I was trying to use the PHP calendar API and immediately received this error message, “Fatal error: Call to undefined function cal_days_in_month()”. This error message means PHP was not compiled with the calendar extension.

Solution

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The only solution to this error message and other similar error messages relating to the PHP calendar API requires PHP to be compiled with the calendar extension by adding “–enable-calendar” to the “configure command” as stated in the PHP documentation on the Calendar functions page.

How to Tell if the Calendar Extension is Installed

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You can verify weather or not the PHP Calendar extension was compiled at install by using the phpinfo() function. When viewing the output of phpinfo() look under “Configure Command” just below “Build Date” and if you do not see “–enable-calendar” present then all PHP Calendar functions will not work.

Configure Example

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./configure –with-mysql=/usr/local –with-mssql=/usr/local –with-apxs –with-zlib-dir=/usr/lib –with-libxml-dir=/usr/local –with-config-file-path=/var/www/conf –with-iconv=/usr/local/bin/iconv –enable-exif –-enable-mbstring –enable-calendar

Well this upgrade went very smooth with no problems at all. It really only took 3 steps to upgrade WordPress from v2.05 to v2.3. I had to upgrade two plugins and I deleted all the obsolete plugins to keep things clean. I admit a fresh install might have been better but didn’t want the hassle of putting the pieces back together.

Akismet plugin didn’t require any upgrade.

Upgraded WP Plugins (installed fresh)

• WordPress Database Backup
• WP-phpMyAdmin

Removed WP Plugins

• WordPress Database Backup (upgrade required)
• WP-Cron (obsolete)
• WP-Cron-Mail (obsolete)
• WP-Cron Dashboard (obsolete)
• WP-Cron Future Pings (obsolete)
• WP-Cron Gravatar Cache (obsolete)
• WP-Cron Moderation (obsolete)
• WP-Cron Reminder (obsolete)
• WP-Cron UpdateLinks (obsolete)
• WP-phpMyAdmin (upgrade required)

Source: Upgradding Wordpress

I recently upgraded an install of PHP Free Chat to that latest version of 1.0 Final. However it was still lacking a feature to notify individual(s) that someone has joined the chat if they were not already in the chat application to begin with. I came across a posting explaining how to achieve this in PHP Free Chat at PHP Free Chat Forum. After a little reading and discussion I was able to implement the feature.

Here’s my modified version for the solution based on the forum posting. The pfcmail() function can be made to be way more versatile for any use, however for my use it was made to be simple and produce properly formated email messages.

Solution

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1. Create a new PHP file called pfcmail.php with the following lines of code.

2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

   < ?php function pfcmail($szChannel,$szNickname) { $szCurrentDateTime = date('F j, Y @ g:i:sa', time()); $szClientIP = getenv("REMOTE_ADDR"); $szHostName = gethostbyaddr("$szClientIP"); $szServerName = getenv("SERVER_NAME"); $szEmailWebmaster = getenv("SERVER_ADMIN");   $szEmailTo = "Webmaster <$szEmailWebmaster>"; $szMsgHeaders = "From: $szEmailWebmaster\r\n"; $szMsgHeaders .= "X-Mailer: PHP\r\n"; $szMsgHeaders .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n"; $szMsgHeaders .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8"; $szMsgSubject = "[WEB] Chat Login - $szNickname in channel $szChannel at $szCurrentDateTime";   $szMsgBody = "Date\t\t\t\t: $szCurrentDateTime\n"; $szMsgBody .= "Server Name\t\t\t: $szServerName\n"; $szMsgBody .= "Client IP\t\t\t: $szClientIP\n"; $szMsgBody .= "Client Hostname\t\t: $szHostName\n\n";   $szMsgBody .= "Join chat now by going to http://$szServerName/chat/index.php.\n\n";   $szMsgBody .= "---\n"; $szMsgBody .= "Email message auto-generated by PHP mail().";   $nSendEmail = mail($szEmailTo, $szMsgSubject, $szMsgBody, $szMsgHeaders); } ?>

   Note: The extra r, n and t’s should have a \ character before them to produce a carriage return, new line and tab. WordPress appears to remove the character.

3. Make sure to modifiy the code in pfcmail.php for the To, from, subject and body of the email message to your requirements.
4. Save pfcmail.php file into the following path, /src/commands/.
5. Edit /src/commands/nick.class.php at line number 84, just before “return true;” add the following code and save.

6. require_once(dirname(__FILE__).”/pfcmail.php”);
   pfcmail($c->title, $newnick);

You should now be receiving email notifications each time an individual joins chat.

Problem #1 - “[notice] child pid 13449 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)”

On a OpenBSD v3.7 i386 system running Apache v1.3.29 (not chrooted) with PHP v5.1.4 I upgraded HTML_BBCodeParser from version 1.1 to version 1.2.2 by running at command line “pear upgrade-all”. After the upgrades were complete the web site would not load a web page anymore. I looked at my HTTPD server logs and noticed I was receiving the following error message in error_log file, “[notice] child pid 13449 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)” whenever there was a HTTP request on port 80 or 443 to the web site. I couldn’t understand what the problem could be but then decided to uninstall HTML_BBCodeParser v1.2.2 and re-install HTML_BBCodeParser v1.1 to see if the web site would still function. Indeed the web site did load and function fine. So I decided to uninstall and install each version up to v1.2.2 to see where the breaking point was. As soon as the latest version of HTML_BBCodeParser v1.2.2 is installed the web site stops functioning. I was able to determine that there was something that has changed in v1.2.2 or something I did wrong in the Filters I created and existing filters I altered.

Solution #1

I uninstalled HTML_BBCodeParser then manually removed the directory /usr/local/lib/php/HTML/HTML_BBCodeParser. Then I installed HTML_BBCodeParser v1.2.2 and copied the BBCodeParser.ini example from /usr/local/lib/php/doc/HTML_BBCodeParser/BBCodeParser/example/ to /usr/local/lib/php/HTML/BBCodeParse/. After that the web site functioned as normal again.

Problem #2 - “Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter.”

However I discovered that when using PHP 5 one has to alter the BBCodeParser.ini file otherwise you will receive the following warning message when trying to load a web page using HTML_BBCodeParser, “Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter. in /usr/local/lib/php/HTML/BBCodeParser.php on line 354″.

Solution #2

Edit your BBCodeParser.ini and alter the line for the opening tag character and closing tag character to be enclosed by double quotes around the square brackets, [ and ]. Apparently this has been an issue for awhile now, http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=2580.

Example After Alteration - BBCodeParser.ini

[HTML_BBCodeParser]

; possible values: single|double
; use single or double quotes for attributes
quotestyle = single

; possible values: all|nothing|strings
; quote all attribute values, none, or only the strings
quotewhat = all

; the opening tag character
open = "["

; the closing tag character
close = "]"

; possible values: true|false
; use xml style closing tags for single html tags ( or )
xmlclose = true

; possible values: a comma seperated list of filters
; comma seperated list of filters to use
filters = Basic,Extended,Links,Images,Lists,Email

Vertically centering in CSS is not necessary simple to achieve as one would think. However saying this I have been able to achieve vertically centering without hacks and works in Mozilla Firefox, IE 5.5, IE 6, IE 7, Opera 9.10 and Safari for Windows.

Use vertical-align: middle with line-height. Make the line height is the same as the box height. If you do not see the alignment change make sure you have the height and line-height value set the same for the box in conjunction with the element you want to have the content vertically centered to.

Example

Source: Ten CSS Tricks You May Not Know - 8. Vertically aligning with CSS
Source: Jakpsatweb - Vertical Centering in CSS

I’ve come into a situation where I require to have BBCode parsed, this includes the standard tags supported by PEAR package HTML_BBCodeParser and custom BBCode tags I’ve added myself.

My problem is this, I’ve discovered that when an value has a space within the value the value is truncated at the first occurrence of the space. This applies to a URL, image file names and any additional attribute values (alt, style, etc.). This issue is present in the stable release and latest release in CVS for HTML_BBCodeParser. Here is some examples.

Before BBCode Parser
   [url=http://www.somedomain.com/Foo World?str=1]Foo World
After BBCode Parser
   <a href="http://www.somedomain.com/Foo">Foo World</a>

Before BBCode Parser
   [img w=100 h=99 alt=Enthalpy Wheel]/images/Enthalpy Wheel.png[/img]
After BBCode Parser
   <img src="/images/Enthalpy" width="100" height="99" alt="Enthalpy" />

Before BBCode Parser
   [p style=foo bar]something here[/p]
After BBCode Parser
   <p style="foo">something here</p>

Before BBCode Parser
   [div style=color:blue; font-size: 1em;]something here[/div]
After BBCode Parser
   <div style="color:blue;">something here</div>

This problem appears to exist across the board even without additional BBCode tags or additional attributes.

Any suggestions or directions on how I can resolve this problem would be much appreciated.