Posts by chrishea

If you want to use video conferencing then there is some software available but mostly not free. (example: http://www.videowhisper.com/?p=PHP+Video+Conference

If you want to build an API, then you need to have the skills and experience to do it. This isn't a job for a novice. It is doubtful that anyone here has the specific experience that you are looking for. Even less likely that if they do that they are going to try to 'guide" you through an advanced development project like this.

I noticed on Alexa that Daniweb's Traffic Rank improved by 533 positions yesterday. Some of the other numbers were up by significant amounts as well. That seems like a pretty significant improvement in one day. Is this an indication that Google is adjusting the algorithm and things are heading back towards something closer to 'normal'?

The simple answer is "YES".

The only reward is that you have helped someone else and shared the benefit of your experience. Occasionally, you get a thank you. What can be frustrating is to put time into providing a good answer and that's the last thing that happens on that thread. You don't know if the original poster even came back to see it.

Some interesting info on this topic:
http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4261944-19-30.htm

The speculation and observations are the same as Dani's that this is now targeting sites, not just individual pages. This is a significant change in direction for Google.

Why? If you want someone to spend time explaining how to do something, then you should provide a better answer as to why you want to do it.

Cron is the Linux facility that schedules jobs based on start time. Most hosts provide it. Usually there is some kind of setup utility for it that you can access from your Control Panel. You can schedule a PHP program using Cron but if you prefer Python, you can probably do it that way as well.

Article sites have been hit pretty hard as well (some would say that was appropriate). Ezinearticles is down 35%. This is an interesting blog post by Chris Knight, their CEO. It shows that there will be some significant changes to react to Google's changes.

I recently came across Twilio.com that provides API facilities to implement voice or text capabilities through the internet. They aren't the first to provide this kind of service but the capability of the API and their pricing seem to make them worth looking at for anyone who has a need for this type of facility. The service is mainly intended for North America at this point however, they do support international outbound calls.

Twilio can get you your own phone number for $1 / month ($2 toll free) if you need it. It is pay-as-you go at 1 cent / minute for incoming voice, 2 cents / minute for outgoing voice or for SMS in either direction. They provide API facilities to put in a virtual PBX and other kinds of voice apps. They have a sample phone system app that can be used and examples of using the API in a number of languages, including PHP.

We see questions on a regular basis about implementing an SMS interface. For those who need incoming SMS (to their app) this seems like a pretty good option. You can do your own outbound SMS interface through email for free if you know the carrier for each number. This sort of interface lets the supplier (Twilio) sort out the carrier. For business use, you can also implement a pretty sophisticated voice app.

Their prices seem pretty reasonable. I don't have any personal interest (financial or otherwise) in this …

If I do a search on PHP problem, ASP problem and C++ problem, I find a Daniweb PHP post on Google page one and posts for the other two on Google Page 2. A search on the languages themselves or on topics like Windows doesn't find Daniweb in the top 100. I don't know how the keywords ranked before the Google change but it looks like a site like Daniweb that is quite broad but not that deep won't do as well as sites that are focussed on just one language/topic and have more depth. It seem that the path that you were already thinking of in terms of ramping up the content is now a necessity. It wouldn't be that difficult to have a section for downloads for each language (for example) and have people in the forums suggest their favorite programs for inclusion (possibly including some of their own). You probably want more articles and tutorials but that will take longer. Since there are so many recurring newbie questions, maybe some of the experienced people in the forums would be willing to create a formal Daniweb tutorial on some of these topics. If it's now much more about content, I guess it's a matter of dealing with it or paying the price. Google might adjust the algorithm again to Daniweb's benefit but you can't count on it. On the positive side, maybe this is an opportunity to get everything re-vitalized. Maybe there is more that can be done …

Here are a couple of links to comments about the Google changes. In theory, the changes were aimed at so-called "content farms" like eHow but they seem to have cut a wider swath than that. From early reports, it isn't just low-quality sites that are getting hit. That's the problem in Google being close to a monopoly.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4272069.htm
http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071

On the PHP forum there still seems to be a high % of first time and newbie posters asking the same tired questions that have been answered a million times before. I don't see too much that is really interesting for a more mature and experienced developer. The forums do provide a learning opportunity but you have to wade through a lot of basic stuff to find the odd gem. If you want to attract experienced / professional developers, I don't think that the current level of questions will do it. I think that experienced developers are also more self-sufficient so they probably don't use the Forums to ask questions nearly as much as newbies. There would probably be some benefit in having featured articles on more advanced topics.

Humor doesn't always come across well, especially when it is the tongue-in-cheek variety. Can't have the Aussies and Kiwis getting upset.

You can find a lot of sites with info on installing GCC on a server:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=install+gcc+on+server

GCC isn't multi-threaded so you will have to deal with that. For more than a simple program, I think that you also have an issue with creating a compiling environment that duplicates what the user has on his machine. If it is a structure that has include files and possibly extra libraries that aren't standard, is the user going to want to upload all of that stuff to your server so you can do a compile for him?

I don't think that what you are trying to do is practical. If it was an extension to the GCC compiler that they could install and run automatically (on their own machine) every time they compile, that would be OK. In my opinion, the way that you are trying to do it is just too difficult and won't be successful.

Check the manual for mysql_query. It returns a resource it doesn't return a field.

It wasn't clear from your initial post that you want to do this like FEDEX. If all of the transactions will be face-to-face and if you plan to use a phone with a touchscreen, then I guess that your original solution might work. You would need to find a web-based paint program interface that will work with a touchscreen. You also need to consider what to do if the internet connection is down. For parcel services, I would bet that their handheld device has a local program and that it doesn't depend on a wireless connection. I would be inclined to go low-tech and print the receipt in advance.

You should be able to get the module with file_get_contents and then store it. If your intent is to execute that code later, then this isn't the way to go about it. You will need to provide some additional detail if that is your intent.

This is an interesting requirement and it is probably becoming much more common. I had a look at what is available and I came across Gluster. The combination of that with Amazon Web services may give you high-capacity, private cloud storage with some sync'ing capability. I only skimmed the surface so you will need to dig a lot deeper but it appears that it may provide quite a bit of what you need. I'm not sure if the sync'ing capability is as automatic as Mozy or Dropbox so that would need to be checked out. It's ability to share and sync data across multiple end-points also needs some checking.

You may not like cloud storage but other than having your own server and using something like Gluster on it (which is also an option but at higher cost) there aren't any other obvious solutions to give you shared access from multiple end points. It makes you dependent on the internet and cloud service being available but if you can sync on a regular basis, then all of the machines could still operate offline during an outage.

This page provides some user comments on Gluster.

I think that javascript provides another way:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">window.location = "index.php?err=3";</script>

For online signatures, you normally click a button that is associated with some text that explains your legal obligation once you click the button. Since PC's don't have signature pads, how do you expect a signature of this sort to be entered. If you have ever tried freehand with a mouse you know that the result isn't something that you'd want to put any legal weight on. Just do what everyone else does. Don't know why you classify it as a "problem".

Please restate the key issue. This statement says the same thing twice:
" If the IP isn't existing, the system will add the IP but if the IP doesn't exist he also adds the IP."

You can build a program that uses IMAP to read the bounce-back emails and then delete from the list.

Here is some info, including a list of web hosting services that support video hosting.
http://www.justskins.com/web-internet/ffmpeg-video-hosting/2698

I just read through one of the Spoonlicker threads and as Ardav pointed out, it's quite amazing that as one person realized that it was a waste of time and gave up, someone else would jump in and keep it going some more. It's too bad that we can't have some annual awards. There are positive categories like Most Interesting Question or Most Thorough Answer but then there are a bunch of others like Most Gullible, Laziest Person Posing as a Programmer and so forth. You have to get cheap entertainment wherever you can!

I have never heard that they do any spam filtering on these gateways but I suppose that it is possible. If you were sending to every number in a certain range in a big blast then that might trigger a reaction. If you are sending to random numbers in smaller batches, I doubt that it will be a problem. What could create a problem is if any of the recipients aren't happy with what you are sending them and complain to the phone company.

Unless your web host is very restrictive, I don't think it will be a problem, especially if they aren't being done in one big blast. I have sent thousands of emails in a day without it being an issue. You can also build the program to pace the output so it sleeps after every one or after a certain number have been sent.

This could be a bit tricky because you are trying to get a local standalone program (that other people wrote) to talk to something on your website. I think that you might need to have a local program that calls the GCC Compiler, captures the output and then uploads it to your server and initiates a program on the server that will do the analysis and provide the results. This sounds like it could be a pretty difficult project.

The other alternative would be to run GCC on your server and actually compile the code there. It is very unlikely that GCC is made to be run in a multi-threaded environment so you end up having to queue the requests and run them serially; or, run a new copy for every request (which could put a significant strain on the server).

If you are able to figure out how to capture the GCC output and do the analysis, it would be simpler to have a local program to control it. You could have a website to provide additional resources and help information and provide a link to it within the local program. More than that will probably makes it unnecessarily complicated.

The linked page seems to describe it adequately. If you are in North America, you can do this for free (for the sender) through the gateway provided by each of the carriers. I don't believe that text messages are normally screened for Spam so the chances of it being delivered as a text message is probably better than for a normal email (close to 100%?). When you say "large text messages" did you really mean a large number or do you mean each message will be large? A text message should preferably fit into one physical SMS message of 160 char. It is a "short message service".

To create an Excel file you actually create an html file with a .xls suffix and Excel takes care of the rest. If you aren't getting a good result, then having html in the file isn't the problem. I haven't tried to debug your code but if the html was in quotes and Excel wans't seeing it as HTML then that probably would be a problem. Otherwise, if it is valid html, Excel should take care of it. You should examine the content of the file carefully.

Hi Rohit,
Advice is free. It's your job to develop the code.

You have defined the output that you want. If you aren't sure of the logic needed to get that result, then I suggest that you develop some pseudo-code to work out the logic before trying to make it PHP code. It may take a while and you may have to revise it a number of times before it seems to do what you need it to do but that is what programming is all about. The only way that you get better at it is to do it. If someone hands you the answer, then you will hit the same situation again and you will be no better at it than you were the first time. In order to give you an answer, I would have to go through the same process and what is the point of that for me or for you?

If you get to some pseudo-code that seems to be what you need, then you turn it into PHP and test it. It may not work exactly as you had hoped and then you dig at it again and figure out why. Again, that is what programming is all about. Once you have gone through the whole process and if it is still not working, then you could bring back some code or even pseudo-code, outline what you have already tried, what isn't working and ask a specific question. That is …

You probably aren't getting a slew of responses because your title and your objective don't seem to be realistic. There are many smart people / organizations who have created search engines and portals but there is still only one Google. Yahoo has been slipping relative to Google even though it had a head start. It's great to think big but if it isn't realistic, then it may just be delusional. Just because the internet is easier to get into at the low end than some other kinds of businesses doesn't mean that it is that much easier to become a big successful company. You might as well have said:

"I have a great new idea for a soft drink and this will be bigger than Coke or Pepsi"

or

"I have a great idea for a new automobile and this will kill Toyota and General Motors"

It isn't that any of these are impossible but they are improbable. Even someone with great business and communication skills (which you haven't demonstrated in your post) would have a hard time convincing the world that they had a realistic chance of achieving any one of them. Most big companies started small and built up over time. There probably aren't many cases of a new entrant being able to establish itself and then overcome very entrenched competition unless there is a change in technology or the market that gives it a serious edge.

Since you have limited time, you probably need to work to your strengths and put off jumping into new domains like PHP or Ruby until you have more time available. A couple of ways to get some credibility would be:
1. Work on an open-source project
2. Develop a plugin for an existing open-source / commercial program.

You are looking for things that will demonstrate your range of knowledge and skills that can be done in a reasonable time-frame (3 -6 mo?). If you find a project that interests you, it may be a matter of completing an initial phase / assignment and getting a recommendation from the project leader and other people in the project (and then carrying on with some additional assignments). Significant projects usually have a need for quality control testing and for documentation writers. The same needs exist in the commercial world. These may not be your ultimate goal but they might be a place to start. You have some background in QC in a different domain so why not leverage that a bit? In a smaller shop you may need to be a programmer and a bit of everything else as well but in a larger organization you will probably find that there is quite a division of labor and there are people who do quality control / testing as a full-time job. Employers are looking for more than just pure technical skills. They need people who work well in a team, …

One man's opinion:
http://www.christophermonnat.com/2009/03/zend-php-certification-necessary-or-not/

You can have a look at this:
http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php

Have a look at this:
Desktop Write

There are many languages that could be used to do this. PHP is a good choice because it is widely used, it is supported on most servers, it is free (as is the MySQL database) and there are lots of resources available.

Even though PHP is relatively easy to learn, it isn't something that you learn overnight and then produce commercial quality scripts. Besides the PHP syntax, you need programming and debugging skill / knowledge / experience, you will need to be quite familiar with HTML and you will probably need to know some CSS. If you want your scripts to have a snappy web2 user interface, then you will need to get into Javascript or a Javascript library like JQuery. You will need to set up a development environment, you will need some knowledge of the server that you'll be running this on (probably running under Linux) and you will need to use an FTP program to move things back and forth.

If this is something that you want to implement relatively soon, then the best way would be to pay someone to do it who already has the required skills and experience. If you have lots of time to complete this and you really want to learn some or all of this stuff (not just for one project) then start reading tutorials (e.g. from W3Schools), download and install a development environment and go for it.

You'll find a "looking to Hire" and "Project Partners Wanted" sections under the Business Exchange menu item.

It isn't totally flexible but it's pretty good.

I like the easy way! HTML2PDF allows you create your output as HTML and then convert that to a PDF. You can initially display the HTML and make sure that you have it right, then feed it to HTML2PDF and a PDF file comes out the other end. It works quite well as long as you are strict about having closing tags for all of your HTML.

It would be a faster path, if you could find an open source system that does at least part of what you want to do. Then your work would be limited to configuring and modifying rather than building from scratch. I had a look and there are lots of systems but very few are simulators and I didn't see one written in PHP.

What you are thinking of building is a system not a normal web site. Simulators can be quite complex so it depends how basic a system you are aiming for. If you expect to have users, then I would guess that their expectation would be something more than basic or they won't be using it for very long. There are some pretty good free simulators (such as Investopedia) already available. Yours sounds more like a game with a group that play against each other (sort of like Monopoly).

From your own initial description, you identified a number of functions that would be needed so I don't understand your comment about 1 basic function. Unless you are aiming for something pretty crude (that no one would want to use?) I think you may be seriously underestimating what it will take to produce a good system around this concept. You could probably produce something that is acceptable (but not too flashy) with just PHP. MySQL and HTML. If you want to go beyond "acceptable" then you will need to get into CSS, Javascript / JQuery …

This isn't totally clear so let me recap my understanding and add some questions:

1. You have a form that is presumably a request for a proposal that the user fills. I assume that is a html / php script that you have written.

2. The action on the form is presumably a PHP program that you wrote. If I interpret what you are saying, you would like to get that info into Zoho CRM (from that program). If you want to do this sort of integration with Zoho, it seems that you need to become quite expert in the use of their API. I'm not sure why you are coming to this forum without having already read the API documentation, figured out the steps for the integration and tried it. If you have questions about Zoho integration and use of the API, I think it would make sense to use the Zoho Forums for such questions since they would be most likely to have the appropriate experience and knowledge.

3. From a quick look at Zoho, they don't seem to have a specific module to support proposal writing. They do presumably have the ability to record Sales Leads / customers and that is probably where the info from your customer form needs to go.

4. You have a proposal document and that is presumably your sample.html file. Are you trying to do something with Zoho for this document or is it …

I think that you are adding a lot of extra complexity going that way but that is up to you. I could be wrong, but I think that you will have some real challenges trying to have a local PHP app trying to connect to a local database and to a remote server/database and still able to function properly even if it can't connect to the remote server (assuming that you figure out how to do that in the first place). In terms of installation effort and maintainability, there is a big difference between installing one or two standalone programs and an empty log file on each local machine versus installing and maintaining a server environment, PHP programs and a database on every machine. Those who don't stick to the KISS principle often live to regret it.

If you really really decide to go down that path, then I think that you will want to look at Uniform Server instead of XAMPP.

From a quick search, it seems that Airtel is the biggest cell provider in India and they have all kinds of SMS options (but they may not be free). In North America, all cell phone providers have a special email address where you include the cell number and it converts the email message to an SMS message and sends it (at no cost to the sender). If you don't have the same thing in India then I understand why these "free" SMS services all seem to be based in India. You have to decide if risking the privacy of your customers is worth it.

OK, here's my 2 cents worth (or maybe 3 cents)!

I remember some dialogue back and forth with someone a while back on this same topic. I don't think that we ever came to a really good answer. I have a done a little bit of work since then that has some of the same elements so I know how I would approach it, if I had to do it.

At the risk of repeating what has already been said, I believe that what you need is a client - server approach where you have a local client on every machine that does the basic functions. I think that you will want to keep the client as simple and as basic as you can and not try to have full functionality when the internet isn't available. Its main function will be to log the data and upload it to the server (when the internet / server is available). You could do that upload every time you get a transaction unless you can't get to the server; but there are reasons why you might not want to. You may need to batch the uploads so that process doesn't get in the way of the entry of sales info. Trying to run the two in parallel might add some extra complexity.

Where it gets a little bit tricky is the catchup processing where you need to re-sync your local log with the server after an outage. If you don't …

Your variables will all be part of the $_POST array in the receiving program. Thus, your job is to loop through the array determining if each successive variable exists and then doing whatever processing you need to do.

In general, PHP accepts $_POST[name1] or $_POST as the same thing. I believe that the official version has the quotes but they both work most of the time.

In this case, we need to create the name of the array element. You could do that by:

$element = "name".$i;
while (isset($_POST['$element'])) {
  ...
 
   // - or - 
while (isset($_POST["name".$i])) {

   // - or - 
while (isset($_POST[name$i])) {

They should all give the same result.

Once you know that the element exists (and you know what the name is) then you can do whatever you want with that variable. If you are storing the info in a database, then that code will be within your While loop.

On line 7 you are using = instead of == but the problem is more than that. You can't compare a field to an array. You need to check against a specific element of the array, something like the following:

if ($username == $array['username']) {
     ...

You can create predictable field names using a subscript in PHP quite easily (e.g. name=aaa$i) if you know how many you need. If you are creating them on the fly, then javascript is obviously the way to go.

You can use a while loop with an index value to see if a variable exists:

$i = 1;

while (isset($_POST[aaa$i])) {
   ... process the variable ...
   $i++;
}

Just to be clear, when you refer to a directory, are you referring to a directory on the server or a local (PC) directory?

This topic has been discussed many many times. Look at old posts on Daniweb and have a look at my help page topic.

Be wary of free services. Your users may pay a price if you use such a service. You can send an SMS without using such a service.

There is no quick fix but read this. You need to understand how the SPAM filters work and avoid the things that SPAM filters look for.

A server that allowed you to do this would be pretty unusual. You can't have any output before you use a header. You need to change the code.

If the value contains blanks then you lose whatever is after the blank. Try this:

echo "<option id=".$rowComp['id']." value=\"".($rowComp['name'])."\">".($rowComp['name'])."</option>";