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Other sites giving info to my database

yilduz — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:26:47 -0800

I've been thinking of tackling another project for the sake of learning.

This code will essentially track information on websites with a code that is voluntarily installed by the webmaster. I've been trying to think of the best way to get this information back to my database, though. I started looking around, trying to find the best way to do accomplish something like this, and I've noticed that many people use iframes to do it. I'm not too fond of iframes (although I used to love iframes and frames back in the day ), so what other good ways do you know of to accomplish this?

Making a living coding

yilduz — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:09:30 -0700

Do you make your living coding? What kind of coding do you do for money?

Common Table Expressions

d03boy — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:29:16 -0700

Anyone who does database programming beyond the simplest of queries should probably have a mild understanding of Common Table Expressions. I've only discovered them recently and they are extremely helpful to simplify complex queries. Here is a very, very simple example:

SQL Code

WITH x AS (
    SELECT id, Name, Cost
    FROM Meals
)
SELECT AVERAGE(Cost)
FROM x

Obviously you could do this with a single query very easily but this is simply to show you how the structure of it works.

Edit: I did intend to link to this thread so google would have some search terms to build from. Also, CTEs aren't available in all SQL databases. SQL Server 2000 doesn't support them but SQL Server 2005 does.

Your dream workstation setup

Matt — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:40:53 -0700

After I settle down, and once I can afford it, I've been thinking of a great workstation setup I'd like to build... sure, some of the gorgeous and powerful hardware would be a costly one-time investment, but a lot of it is software-based. Here's what I'm thinking:

My main desktop will feature a glass tabletop with a large LCD monitor just above eye level (for good posture). That computer will feature a nice little suite of security software I'm designing for my own personal use and experimentation. It'll have a mirrored backup to a central file server in the safe hidden away in the home. Of course, security is a concern and all the hard disks and flash drives would be encrypted.

I'd probably rip any CDs and DVDs I bought to a disc image so they were easily accessible later.

I'll have another computer, maybe a laptop, that is never connected to the Internet, or perhaps even the network. It'd be my ultra-secure workstation, complete with fingerprint scanner. This would be nice to have when travelling. If I needed to get online, I'd boot up a VM with Linux and, hopefully by that time, use Google Chrome.

And yes, of course I'd use only Chrome to browse, even in Windows -- so far the only "unbroken" browser. (On a side note, it's interesting that IE7 and IE8 have similar "sandboxing" features that make Chrome so secure, yet IE is exploited almost daily because of its tight integration with Windows among other coding flaws.)

If a flash drive was stolen, I could rest easy knowing it's securely encrypted and the password is stored on my locked-down file server at home (which, by the way, would not have a hard line to the Internet at all; I'd probably route remote backups through a different subnet entirely) -- also encrypted.

I could tunnel all my Internet activities including IM, email, browsing, etc, through an SSH tunnel to a server in a remote data center -- whoever/wherever my host happens to be -- which would certainly be locked down against intruders. This would encrypt *all* my outgoing Internet transactions until it reached the server in that secure data center.

I'd probably do all my coding in a VM on my main workstation, though. It would avoid complications and security risks by running potentially volatile and buggy code in a contained environment... I'm thinking of the times when I was writing some low-level C++ and caused some blue screens... hehe... oops.

Anyway, I think that'd be a pretty cool setup. It'd be hardcore secure, for sure. Okay, it won't be perfect (what is?), but it's like... hm, think of the Bat Cave. Or Tony Stark's garage.

For a pet, I'd probably have a cat, and also a nice virus farm. If I could set up a bunch of virtual machines on a totally isolated network (as in, no possible hard line or wireless link with my real network), I'd have them talk to each other and download spam emails and malware from the Internet, run the infected software, and distribute it as much as possible among themselves. It'd be fun to see how long they lasted.

What's your dream setup? Do you already have it?

New management to build the community

Matt — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 06:24:13 -0700

In a couple of weeks (September 22) I'll be stepping out of the Internet for two full years as I serve a mission for my church. (For more information, go to: http://www.mwholt.com -- type something like "mission details".)

Consequently, I won't be around to manage what's left of the forum -- but that's okay, since I have set up Yilduz and d03boy to take care of things while I'm gone.

Anybody in the Code Boards community can help to build up the forum; member participation and growth is excellent, and would make for a more helpful environment.

Code on!
-Matt

Google Wave

yilduz — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:20:52 -0700

I watched this Google Wave video with my friend the other day. He wants to keep up on any news and learn as much as he can about it because he wants to be on the front of this thing when it releases and start coding stuff into it.

Do you guys know about it? What do you think of it?

Finding words in a dictionary

d03boy — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:06:20 -0700

I couldn't think of a suitable title for this.. so I'll just give an explanation. I have a Palm Pre cell phone and recently a game called Word Ace was released. Basically it's Texas Hold'em but instead of using a deck of regular cards, you have a deck of letters similar to Scrabble. Each letter has a point value. You have to spell a word (up to 7 letters) using your cards. Your goal is to get the highest score to win the hand. More obscure letters are worth more points. I thought this would be a good opportunity to write a script that allows me to type in my scrambled letters and allow it to spit back words from a dictionary with the highest score using my letters.

So far this is what I've come up with:

Finding a suitable word list
I searched for the official Scrabble word list since I assumed that is what this game was using. I came across this website http://www.morewords.com/help/ and it pointed me to a word list called Enable2k. It contains 173,528 words and is 1.7MB in size. Loading this much data into a database isn't always the easiest thing to do when you have no local permissions on the database server.

Loading the list into a database
I tried loading it in using some SQL queries that referenced a local or remote file path but that did not work because there were permission problems. I gave up on that right away and decided I would just do it the slow way and load the entire list directly from my end using SQLyog (MySQL client). But before doing this I wanted to get rid of any of the extra size by removing any words that were more than 7 letters. I tried using Notepad++ to do this but I couldn't figure out how to make a regular expression work in this case. And it was slow. I resorted to asking some folks online and they suggested I use the Windows command prompt with the command "findstr".

TEXT Code

findstr /v /r ^.........*$ words.txt > shorter-words.txt

Basically this line calls the findstr command, the /v tells it to select only things that DO NOT match the regular expression. The actual regex is the ^........*$ part. It is just looking for any lines 8 letters or more. If a line does not match that regex, it is exported into the shorter-words.txt file. I've never used this command before this and I must say it is a nice tool to have in your toolbox. It's basically a poor man's grep.

Cutting out large words shrunk my list by a lot. It came down to 411KB. Unfortunately the next step involves adding in SQL code which makes it quite large once again. It ended up being about 2.3MB afterwards but originally it would have been more than 7MB if I didn't ditch the long words.

My goal was to create a words.sql file that just used the INSERT command to get all of these words into a database in one straight shot. To do this I actually could have used a macro in Notepad++ but that was a bit slow so I opted for some cmd prompt scripting (batch?).

TEXT Code

(for /f %i in (words.txt) do @echo INSERT INTO words ^(word^) VALUES ^('%i'^); ) > words.sql

Basically this performs a loop over the entire file and echo's the following text into a new file.

TEXT Code

INSERT INTO words (word) VALUES ('myword');

Thought Process
Upon receiving a query with a list of scrambled letters my initial thought was to programmatically come up with all permutations of those letters and search my database to see if any of those words exist. After trying this out it's actually not that great of an idea because you're dealing with many, many database calls per query. I thought of a much better way to handle it instead!

Instead of checking for each word, I decided to add a column to my 'words' table in the database. Originally the table was just a single column with the word in it. Instead, I introduced a new column called 'ordered'. This stores the same text as as the 'word' column but instead I sorted the letters in alphabetical order. This allows me to easily do a query for ALL words that have those same letters simply by passing in the letters in sorted order. This means I will not have to make more than 7 queries (actually 5) to the database for a request. This is because I will make one for each "level" of letters. One for all 7 letters, one for 6, one for 5....etc, one for 2. There are not any single letter words and actually the game requires 3 letters so really it would only take at most 5 queries. I could probably do some things to make it a single database query but that might be overkill and a lot more work than I want to put into this.

Here is an example of what the table looked like after the changes:

TEXT Code

word | ordered
-----|--------
dac  | acd
adc  | acd
flub | bflu
bluf | bflu

MORE TO COME ONCE I DO A LITTLE MORE
Edit: So I've encountered a problem. I'll update this once I solve it. What I currently have actually does work great up to 7 letters and works fine for the original purpose. I just recently decided I wanted to expand it to be able to solve larger words. Follow the thread.

random images from folder

areaba — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:29:00 -0700

Hi, I am using the script random image show from the folder but its not showing the image. plz. help me to solve this issue.
I am placing the script now .

PHP Code

function select_random_file_funny_image($dir) {
    if (is_dir($dir)) {
        if ($HD = opendir($dir)) {
            $files = array();
            while (false !== ($file = readdir($HD))) {
                if (is_file($dir.$file) && $file != basename($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])) $files[] = $file;
            }
            closedir($HD);
            if (is_array($files)) 
            {
               shuffle($files);      
               $file = array_pop($files);    
               $picpath =    str_replace(".jpg", "j", $file);
                $picpath    =   str_replace(".gif", "g", $picpath);
               echo '.$picpath.'.html>
               .$dir.$file.'& w=96& h=94" border=0>';
            }else { echo"";}
        }
    }
} 
 
$image_dir ="fun/pictures/";
select_random_file_funny_image($image_dir);

a[rel~="nofollow"]

areaba — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:26:49 -0700

Hi all.

I am just starting the validation of html and css , I have validate successfully the html and css files but when i shall validate my overall css from index file it shows me the css error like :

3 a[rel~="nofollow"] Too many values or values are not recognized : thin dashed firebrick

I did not find this "a[rel~="nofollow"]" can anyone tell me about that how can i correct this?

Thanks

BIRTHDAY!!

Matt — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:34:34 -0700

Happy birthday....

D03BOY!

Hope you have a good one. Any big plans?

What is JSON

d03boy — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:26:02 -0700

I know very little about JSON but I'm wondering what its uses are and why someone would use it. I do a bit of AJAX with JQuery and I'm wondering if I should be using JSON with it.

Here's an interesting one...

Matt — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:41:43 -0700

I have been trying to come up with a good algorithm for my website the past few days. My tests have not yielded very good results... here's my problem:

My site, http://www.mwholt.com, as it stands now, uses a strict syntax -- the user must type exactly what the site expects in order to show the proper page. But I don't like that idea: I want something a little more powerful.

I've been playing with the idea of letting the user type basically anything they want, then matching their request/phrase to any one page (such as 'about me' or 'send email' pages) that is then displayed. The "matching" part is tricky, though. I have each page attributed to a set of keywords, but I need to get the phrase to be a best match to the keywords.

The keywords are, right now, stored in an array: one keyword/key phrase per element. The request (that the user types) is, right now, stored as a whole as a string.

I've been playing with PHP's levenshtein(), soundex(), and similar_text() functions. While what I have right now works, it doesn't differ between two very different pages enough. Does anyone have ideas on how to accomplish this?

Ruby 1.8.x or Ruby 1.9

-JC- — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:47:03 -0700

While Ruby 1.9 will have some nice advantages, such as speed, it has some huge disadvantages. Well, at least for the time being.

First off, Ruby 1.9 has some core changes to syntax. This is not a huge issue and can be overcome, however. It will make updating your current applications to be Ruby 1.9 compatible a headache.

Second, Ruby 1.9 does not have extensive Gem support. Reason for this is no doubt due to downside one. But, this will only be an issue in the beginning. As Gems update their code to work wtih 1.9 and new Gems are released solely for 1.9, then this will not be an issue any longer.

Third, potential bugs in the core? I am not sure if this would be an issue or not, but since they changed how the core code works and operates then one can expect there to be some bug issues with the new changes.

For me I can make the switch to Ruby 1.9 with no major issues. Why? Well, I do not have any huge applications running Ruby 1.8.x right now, however. I will still need to use 1.8.x on my machine soley because of Ruby on Rails.

As I am aware of, Ruby on Rails is supposed to be compatible with 1.9 when it came out, but I am leary to make the switch just yet. Reason being, Ruby 1.9 will surely have the above disadvantages when it is first released, and even if Ruby 1.9 did not have any major bug issues that does not mean Ruby on Rails will not have any bug issues with compatibility.

I believe I will wait a couple months before making the switch to Ruby 1.9. Maybe on the first or second patch update and once some Gems have updated their compatibility with Ruby 1.9 I will make the move to Ruby 1.9.

De-Introducing img.la

Matt — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:21:13 -0700

Code Boards is teaming up with a budding new open source project!

img.la is social image sharing gone open source. img.la follows the principals of design and development from "Getting Real", a book written by 37signals. Simplicity, elegance, and a focus on quality over quantity will guide the core project. It will be extensible with community-created plug-ins: an image hosting site developed and driven by its members!

Details will be coming soon. img.la will be written in Ruby on Rails, fully compliant with the M-V-C standards, and well-documented. Code Boards members that have knowlege in Ruby on Rails or the desire to learn it are encouraged to participate!

You may discuss this either by replying or you can start entirely new topics in the new img.la Discussion Boards.

Wolfram|Alpha

Matt — Fri, 15 May 2009 08:35:02 -0700

I'm pretty impressed so far, after watching this screencast: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/i...alpha.html

Google's little "calculator" feature is about to be blown out of the water. What do you guys think of this?

Reg Expressions Resources

-JC- — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:34:01 -0700

Regular expressions are a thing of mystery! Master it and you have mastered programming

But regular expressions are very hairy pieces of code! In fact hairy code is commonly used to describe regular expressions regardless of language! Why? Well, because the code structure can get very confusing!

Yes, you might only have /find this text/ and that is easily understood as "take this string and find this text within". That will search the given string and find "find this text" and you can work with it from there.

Still, you might have a regular expression that looks like this: /^[A-Z0-9._%-]+@([A-Z0-9-]+\.)+[A-Z]{2,4}$/i

Now that is some HAIRY CODE right there! Hence why we call reg expressions: hairy code

I will not go into details and break this code down, but essentially you can use it to break down a string to verify that an email address is a valid string for when someone registers on your site. (this is just a pre-validation that the string resembles a valid email -- you still need to send email validation to determine for certain that it is a valid email and the user has ownership of that email address.)

But, since this is a collection of resources on regular expressions, then you can do the research and come to your own conclusion how this code works

Ok! Let's stop talking about what regular expressions are and list some resources to get more information on what reg expressions are, how we can use them in our code, why we should use them in our code, where we should use them in our code, and what languages use regular expressions religiously!

====================
Reg Expressions Resources
====================

-------
General
-------
http://www.regular-expressions.info/

-------------
Code Specific
-------------
-----
Ruby
-----
http://www.zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html

----
PHP
----
http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pcre.php

Feel free to add to the list!

CSS Frameworks

-JC- — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:46:03 -0700

Have any of you ever used Blueprint CSS or any other CSS framework?

If so, did they really save you on time and help in the long run? I imagine using a CSS framework would only be good if you are developing a large project, or you develop multiple websites a month.

PHP5 OOP ??

-JC- — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:21:35 -0700

I hear from some PHP programers that PHP5 is more Object Oriented ??

What has changed in PHP5 to make it more Object Oriented as opposed to PHP4 ?? Does this mean that if I dabbed in PHP4 a year or two ago, then I would have to re-learn techniques used in PHP5 ??

I am just curious if it was a huge change, or if PHP4 was always Object Oriented, and PHP programmers just did not design their code this way in general -- so, in PHP5 they placed more strict guidelines that are built in to help force OOP ??

Thanks

Test Driven Development

-JC- — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:17:48 -0700

Test-driven development -- to do or not to do? That is the question!

Two years ago I would have said, 'To hell with TDD!', but today I am leaning more toward the TDD facet of application development.

Why? Well, I have been learning this concept in a new book I am working through, and if it was not for TDD, then there would have been many bugs I would not have realized were there until I launched the program.

Even then I would have to hunt those bugs down. But, because I used TDD good practices I found these errors and bugs early on, and was able to determine where the error or bug was caused faster.

So, I am now a TDD programmer and proud of it

How about you?

Getting Real w/ Development

-JC- — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:36:58 -0700

I ran across this book a few days ago, and I am really enjoying the read! The book is called 'Getting Real' by 37signals

It is basically the design and development ideas and philosophies of 37signals, a company whom has had many successful web application launches and even a large open source launch (Ruby on Rails)

Before this book I thought features were where the development was at, and now I understand it is at the features ... but not at the 'more features equal best application out there' -- instead 'less features and simplicity makes the best applications'

This book has changed my outlook so far of how a product development and launch should take place! It has literly changed my life...

I am on chapter 6 or 7 now, and I am loving it!

They have three versions of the book. A solid 'i can hold it in my hands' book. A pdf formatted book. And, lastly an HTML version of the book.

The first two cost money, but the last one does not cost anything!

Needless to say I am reading the free HTML version, and if you wanna check it out here is the link: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php

Reply back here and let me know what you think of the book and if you agree or disagree with some of the ideas in the book