OSTalks » php

Dream Big – An Open Source Tale

clintcan — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:24:04 +0000

Don’t ever let yourself be put down because other people say it can’t be done.

This is a simple story of how leveraging open source technologies can bring you to heights and depths you thought you could never reach.

Around 2002, November, I was asked by one of our ministry head to think of a way to make a new website geared for students. When I think of now, it was really like a social network on a much much smaller scale.

The situation here on the student network’s proposed site was this: they had already searched for a software development firm in Manila and asked for a quotation and timeframe of the work. They said it would take 3 months, and about a six digit amount to get it done. Since that was way too much, they decided to look into the outreach here in Cebu and ask around if there were any people somehow knowledgeable enough to take the challenge.

A few months before, where I was working, I had started studying and implementing some LAMP architecture on the corporate website. Mind you, my skills then were not so mature yet. PHP was still version 4.x and there were even some 3.x versions around. You can even call me a greenhorn (newbie) during this time – on the company I was in, all I had was Dreamweaver 4 to work upon the website, and some tutorials from the web on how to set up and program in php.

To make the long story short, I and two other people from the community (serving in ministry work), were tasked to do what one would have thought to be impossible to do during that time – make the student network site, complete with interactive forums and one login registrations to be part of the site, and with ALL content in less than one month. Yes, that’s right, the site was going to be launched a little bit after Christmas.

Since I was working then, we had to take turns in programming and developing the site. I was the head then of the 3 person team in Cebu. The two were not working yet, so I tasked them to make the different sections of the site. We were working at my home (no problems, I was single then ). Some people from our main branch in Manila were sending designs for us to cut and slice and place in the site.

After of almost a month of non-stop work on the site. It was done, and uploaded to a shared server through dialup (it would take 3-4 hours to update the whole site).

What’s the lesson of this experience? If I were to use proprietary software and languages it would be a whole lot more expensive (I knew there was asp, and coldfusion, but hosting for that was expensive). We had to use the one available on most cheap servers at that time, and that was a LAMP based server. We leveraged free forum software and modified it and integrated it into the site’s one login and registration. If we had started from scratch we wouldn’t have had finished the site on time. Open Source is all about collaboration, and this experience has taught me a lot about coordinating remotely too.

Looking back, I was to lead the original web team here for about 2 more years, before moving on (by then they had grown to more than 5) – after which, I was still assigned to the original website which we made, and helped worked on two more sites and administered the ministry’s server (which was now a dedicated server). The site which we first started won the Catholic Mass Media Awards for Best Website for 3 straight years before becoming a Hall of Fame Awardee. I was incidentally there using a borrowed suit during the first time we won (it was held in Ateneo and televised nationwide, hosted by some guy and Donita Rose), and that by itself was an experience I’ll never forget. You can get the list of winners during the first time the site won at the cmma foundation website here.

Dream Big. It can be done.

Facebook: Hiphop for PHP Released As Open Source

clintcan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:06:07 +0000

After spending some weeks in rumor land, Facebook has now released a cross-compiling language converter for PHP as open source (php license), titled Hiphop for PHP.

What the application does is to programatically convert PHP source code into C++ and compile it with g++.

According to senior engineer Haiping Zhao, Hiphop has now been deployed to 90% of the Facebook traffic, six months after deployment.

For more information, please see the video below:

Import DBF Files To MySQL Using PHP

clintcan — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:35:35 +0000

I recently had a task to do for a friend of mine to migrate Visual FoxPro data into a mysql database.

As a programmer that doesn’t like to re-invent the wheel, I tried searching through google, but was only partially successful in getting code to insert dbf data into mysql (it was public domain code, but only had code to insert data into a table that was created earlier).

This is the code modified to work with any dbf file – it creates the table, then inserts the dbf data into the created table. The code was further modified to strip whitespaces from the text values (FoxPro/DBase pads text with spaces up to the length of the field). You may want to change this further, since this is a quick and dirty code for the sole purpose of importing dbf tables. This works with my rpms at the repository.

/* * Part 2 code modified by Clint Christopher Canada from different public domain sources * Part 1 code created by Clint Christopher Canada. BSD licensed. */


// This is Part I of the code

$tbl = "table to create";

$db_uname = 'mysql username';

$db_passwd = 'mysql password';

$db = 'database';

$conn = mysql_pconnect('localhost',$db_uname, $db_passwd); 
// Path to dbase file

$db_path = ".DBF";
// Open dbase file

$dbh = dbase_open($db_path, 0)

  or die("Error! Could not open dbase database file '$db_path'.");
// Get column information

$column_info = dbase_get_header_info($dbh);
// Display information

//print_r($column_info);
$line = array();
foreach($column_info as $col)

{

	switch($col['type'])

	{

		case 'character':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` VARCHAR( $col[length] )";

			break;

		case 'number':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` FLOAT";

			break;

		case 'boolean':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` BOOL";

			break;

		case 'date':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` DATE";

			break;

		case 'memo':

			$line[]= "`$col[name]` TEXT";

			break;

	}

}

$str = implode(",",$line);

$sql = "CREATE TABLE `$tbl` ( $str );";
mysql_select_db($db,$conn);
mysql_query($sql,$conn);

set_time_limit(0); // I added unlimited time limit here, because the records I imported were in the hundreds of thousands.
// This is part 2 of the code
import_dbf($db, $tbl, $db_path);
function import_dbf($db, $table, $dbf_file)

{

    global $conn;

    if (!$dbf = dbase_open ($dbf_file, 0)){ die("Could not open $dbf_file for import."); }

    $num_rec = dbase_numrecords($dbf);

    $num_fields = dbase_numfields($dbf);

    $fields = array();
    for ($i=1; $i<=$num_rec; $i++){

        $row = @dbase_get_record_with_names($dbf,$i);

        $q = "insert into $db.$table values (";

        foreach ($row as $key => $val){

            if ($key == 'deleted'){ continue; }

            $q .= "'" . addslashes(trim($val)) . "',"; // Code modified to trim out whitespaces

        }

        if (isset($extra_col_val)){ $q .= "'$extra_col_val',"; }

        $q = substr($q, 0, -1);

        $q .= ')';

        //if the query failed - go ahead and print a bunch of debug info

        if (!$result = mysql_query($q, $conn)){

            print (mysql_error() . " SQL: $q
\n");

            print (substr_count($q, ',') + 1) . " Fields total.
";

            $problem_q = explode(',', $q);

            $q1 = "desc $db.$table";

            $result1 = mysql_query($q1, $conn);

            $columns = array();

            $i = 1;

            while ($row1 = mysql_fetch_assoc($result1)){

                $columns[$i] = $row1['Field'];

                $i++;

            }

            $i = 1;

            foreach ($problem_q as $pq){

                print "$i column: {$columns[$i]} data: $pq
\n";

                $i++;

            }

            die();

        }

    }

}

?>

Starting a Facebook Application

clintcan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:36:15 +0000

One of the most popular social networking sites today is facebook. As of this time, the social networking site boasts of over 300 million users, which is pretty hard to ignore, considering marketing value.

What makes facebook interesting are its applications; which are mostly user created, and add life to the social networking site.

Here’s how to submit a facebook application to the net:

1. Join as a facebook developer, and on the http://www.facebook.com/developers/ url, click on the Set up new application button

2. On the Create App page, type in the name of your application

3. Take note of the API Key and Secret; you’ll need these later. Fill up the necessary items in the Basic Page.

4. Enter the canvas url (where your application will reside in apps.facebook.com), and the content url where your application is hosted.

5. Press Save, and you’re off to start a brave new world of creating a Facebook Application!

The simplest start for a facebook application looks like this:

require_once 'php/facebook.php'; require_once 'config.php';

$facebook = new Facebook($api_key, $secret);
$user_id = $facebook->require_login();

echo “Hello, $user_id!”;

facebook.php is the facebook php client which you can download in the developers site. You can learn more about the api in the http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/ site.

Have fun!

Mypodcast.com Feeds and Longtailvideo Media Player

clintcan — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:51:38 +0000

The religious community that I’m in delves into media. In fact we have a website that showcases video and audio materials for free.

We use the ever popular video/media flash player made by Longtail Video to stream our mp3 and video files to be distributed and seen by people in the web.

As we host our mp3 files in mypodcast.com, the rss feed that is delivered my the site isn’t exactly compatible with the player – so I had to parse the rss feed and re encode it into an rss feed that the longtail player recognizes.

In order to not reinvent the wheel in reading rss feeds, I used the ever popular open source (BSD-licensed) php feed reader, simplepie.

Below this page is the quick and dirty code that I used. I hope this will help you get started in the world of podcasting!

require_once('simplepie.inc');

$feed = new SimplePie(‘http://host/rss.xml’);
set_cache_location($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . ‘/cache/’);

$feed->handle_content_type();

rss feed name
get_items() as $item)
{
$title = $item->get_title();
$date = $item->get_date();
if ($enclosure = $item->get_enclosure())
{
$media = $enclosure->get_link();
$length = $enclosure->get_duration(true);
}
$subtitle = $item->subtitle;
$description = $item->get_description();
//print_r($enclosure);
$desc = explode(“”,”",$image);
echo ”

$title
$author

“;
}
?>

Heywatch and php

clintcan — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:20:23 +0000

Heywatch is a cool video encoding web service that is being used by different clients like Sony, Fotolia, Kickapps, MTv, among others for their video conversion needs.

One nice thing about this service is that it has a REST based API that is simple to implement in php. However, the documentation that comes with heywatch shows only how to access the API using PEAR – this becomes a disadvantage if your shared hosted webhost doesn’t have PEAR installed. I also personally think that using PEAR just to call this api is basically overkill.

Why not use curl instead? I basically changed the PEAR functions in the API documentation to that of php curl functions (which are basically native and available in practically all shared php webhosting)

$video_url = "http://osaddict.com/files/elephantsdream-480-h264-st-aac.mov"; $format_id = "1086"; // 1086 for flash h264, 31 for flash flv $ftp = "ftp://username:password@ftphost.com"; $ping_after_encode = "http://host/heywatch/success.php?myvideoid=5&myuserid=1"; $ping_if_error = "http://host/heywatch/error.php"; $ch = curl_init(); $your_username = ""; $your_password = ""; $video_url,"format_id"=>$format_id,"automatic_encode"=>"true","ftp_directive"=>$ftp,"title"=>"My Video Title","keep_video_size"=>"true"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $your_username.':'.$your_password); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$arr);

$data = curl_exec($ch);

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
print curl_error($ch);
exit;
} else {
curl_close($ch);
}

header(“Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8″);
header(“Pragma: no-cache”);
echo $data;
?>

What this code does is to download a video, convert it to h264 flash format, then upload it to a select ftp host in just one step (success.php and error.php are ping functions where the developer is notified if conversion was successful or not).

One thing to take note is that heywatch doesn’t like special characters in the ftp url, if you place such characters in the $ftp variable, heywatch upload fails.

Have fun!

Where In the World… is Open Source Software?

clintcan — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:37:38 +0000

Working for a company that allows you to experiment with different technologies can be a very satisfying (and sometimes stressful, considering the deadlines) experience. Working in such an environment also lets you encounter people that even in your wildest imaginations would never have thought of meeting in your lifetime.

A few years ago, while we were starting out (I was in the company even before it came to be one), my boss in our talks mentioned a familiar name, Jim Everson. For those who don’t know him, he’s the guy who led in the development of several educational games including the classic Broderbund game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego”.

Where does this all lead to, you may ask? In a nutshell, last year, Jim was diagnosed with advanced melanoma. Which led to his ex-wife (my boss’ sister) helping him out in whatever way she can – well, she helped design a website for him.

My boss asked a favor from me, to help quickly get some open source auction software and customize it for the website’s use, which I gladly did (as I was acquainted with him, and talked with him through emails in the past).

If it was not for open source software, we would have started programming from scratch, and would have taken much longer to finish (and at that time, I was up to my neck with deadlines at work). And, since the source code was there to see and customize, it was quick enough to implement it to their needs.

To end, if you do see Jim on your travels (he’s now an independent mac consultant), ask him about his mouth watering lamb chops recipe – he makes one mean lamb chops!

PHP SSH2 Source RPMS for CentOS/RedHat

clintcan — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 07:09:28 +0000

You might have heard of ssh2 pecl bindings for php. Unfortunately, the “stable” version fails to compile for php 5.2.x.

I am providing source rpms for CentOS/RedHat which fixes this problem. Please take note I’m using a free file hosting service to host this source rpm. If you know of anything better than this, please tell me.

CentOS/RedHat php-pecl-ssh source rpms

There’s a useful link below that should help you get started with php ssh2:

Make ssh connections with php

Update: You can now get this php extension at my repository