November 1st, 2007
Pumpkins, Halloween masks, candles and flowers. These are some that things that are very common during Halloween or as we Filipino termed it “Undas”. This is a yearly celebration commemorating our beloved ones whom had passed away. During November 1, people usually come to cemetery bringing some flowers and candles and offer some prayers to their dearly beloved ones.
Just this day, Me and my wife (unfortunately my daughter is too young to go with us) went to the cemetery to light some candles on the grave of my brother, her relatives too. While I was on that place, I was reminiscing my childhood days when I was still collecting some candle drops and roll it into balls and sell it to local merchants, who then as I have known that they recycle this to make candles again. Its funny to think that when I was young I was also collecting these candle drops, making me go round the whole place just to collect more candle drops. I was also thinking that maybe in the future my children would be the one collecting these candle drops too. Well this can be a tradition handed down to my kids. Then another set of memories came, that during these that me and my friends share ghost stories. Stories that makes your shiver in fright and also stories that are hard to explain but they happen. I can still remember that after sharing these stories I wasnt able to come home alone that I ask some old folks to bring me back to our house. Well those were the days…
On the brighter side, part also of this celebration are the foods being sold on the sidewalk going to the cemetery. Foods that are already synanimous to the celebration. There are these “okoy”, “bibingka”, “BBQ”, “Sago’t gulaman” and “chicharon”. Hmmm… mouth watering indeed. These foods are yearly part of the celebration that without having a bite of them the occasion is incomplete. Well of course me and my wife bought 2 bibinka ang 2 okoy with sauce (suka, garlic and pepper).
While we were heading back home, my mind was wondering off things that I’m pretty sure you don’t want to think. Thoughts like when I am dead, will it be my turn to be visited yearly? When will that be? Will I also be buried in the same ground my brother was buried? Or I”ll just have my body cremated? Well this is a reality check for all of us, nothing is certain in this world but death. “Oh God I’m still young, don’t take me yet, I still have plans to make and goals to achieve”. But certainly sooner or later we all be dead, its just matter of how will that be and when will that happen. I may sound so creepy but hey! its Halloween, woooo…. Did I scare you?
Tags: childhood memory, Halloween, Undas
Posted in Life goes on | No Comments »
October 23rd, 2007
Last Sunday me and my wife inquired about the SUN Cellular Php350 plan. Well basically the idea came from my friend Dhing whom is a SUN subscriber. According to the representative we talked to, Plan 350 features the following
- Unlimited Call & Text SUN – SUN
- Free 250 Text to other networks
- Free Phonekit of your choice between
Sony Ericsson K310i,
Nokia 2626
Philips S660
Samsung SGH-X510
The plan is really enticing and tempting because of the offers this plan is giving. But I’m more concern on the performance of the network. I tried bringing up this problem to the representative to see how they react and tried to twist this problem with their marketing wit. Well they succeeded, because they were able to convince me to give the 350 plan a shot. The deciding factor basically is that they told me that postpaid subscriber have more priority on their network and “Always Busy Network” nightmare will seldomly occur as they explain. I was trying to get just a single plan but the representative advise me to get 2 plans each for me and my wife. She told me that I would be easier to call and text postpaid to postpaid because of the priority SUN is giving to them. So again I was captivated by their marketing advise and finally got the 2 350 plan which is 700 pesos a month, whew! But before we decided to get these two me & my wife talked first on how much we really consumed on our prepaid subscription with G****, according to her we are consuming more or less 1000 pesos a month. So comparing all factors weve finally decided that the 2 plans are still reasonable considering our lifestyle. So in the end we got the 2 350 plan with the Samsung SGH-X510 free phone.
So hows the plan now?
On this date we are on the 3rd day of the subscription, well in fairness the representative was right, connection to SUN-SUN was an ease. I didn’t have to wait for some time till my call is connected unlike the prepaid subscription. Text messaging? no problem! I tried making a test on how long it will take the text to arrive, so approximately 5 seconds, not bad as I have told my wife. So last night I’ve decided to broadcast my new SUN number to all my friends, I’m going to use this as my primary number and will later say goodbye to my G**** prepaid number.
So whats the benefit?
In our lifestyle me working in Manila and my wife in Pampanga. Call and text thru cellphone are our only communication from Tuesday to Saturday. Approximately we consume more or less 1000 pesos worth of load with our prepaid subscription. In fairness with G**** the service is the best, but with an alternative as offered by SUN and the savings we can get every month, who will refuse to avail.
Posted in Life goes on | No Comments »
October 23rd, 2007
Last time I announced it here the 1st PHP Developer’s Conference which will be held this December 1, 2007. As promised I will be posting updates every now and then of the event’s details so I would like to post this which was originally from the phpugph forum.
“Guys, I would like to announce that the online registration for our event – PHP Everywhere! this coming December 1 – is now available! For the meantime, you can access it at http://www.jotform.com/form/72883452322 while AJ’s still preparing our home page to embed the registration form on our website.Reserve your tickets early to avail our early bird promo and get a 50% off discount on the ticket price & ticket special promo!
- Student Tickets for Php 100 (Orig. Price: Php 200)
- Professional Tickets for Php 500 (Orig. Price: Php 1,000)
- Student Special Promo – Buy 2 Take 1 for Php 200 (Orig. Price: Php 400 )
- Professional Special Promo – Buy 2 Take 1 for Php 1,000 (Orig. Price: Php 2,000)
Promo ends on November 16, 2007. So, what are you waiting for? Hurry and secure your ticket now!”
As stated from the website, tickets were lowered as a promo for the early bird registration. The prices are reasonable having that we have student tickets which are just 100 pesos as if you are just buying a meal from a carinderia or local fast food chain. For the professional tickets, 500 pesos worth of a once in a lifetime experience is still cheap. So why wait, register early so that you can still enjoy these lowered price tickets . You’ll never know tomorrow, tickets would be sold higher than this due to the number of attendees interested.
So hurry register now!!! here is the link http://www.jotform.com/form/72883452322
Again I’ll keep you all posted for other announcements.
Posted in Anonymous | No Comments »
October 19th, 2007
PHP User Group Philippines, Inc. (PHPUGPH) will be holding its first PHP Developer’s Conference on December 1, 2007 from 9am – 6pm. The said event will be attended by professional LAMP developers, freelancers and companies which are very notable in the field of IT. The event’s main goal is to spread the news of using OSS(Open Source Software) technologies to a wider audience like schools, universities and companies. Last April was a similar even that the group conducted which I was not able to attend, but definitely I will be here! Details of the event’s venue will be posted soon.
Why attend?
If you are a student taking IT related courses, this is good exposure for you. You will get the chance to see the real IT world in the Philippines and the real guys behind the scene of the sites you are surfing, either for fun, entertainment or education purposes. Well I also believe that learning is not always achieved inside the 4 corners of the classroom.
If you are a PHP programmer or even non PHP programmer whether professional, mid-level or novice one, this event is definitely for you. This is a ones in a lifetime experience to attend the 1st ever event, this is history in the making in the Philippine IT History. It always a good feeling to be the first isn’t it? Your grand children will read this in their history books and you will be proud to say to them, I was there! You will learn so much from the topic that are lined up. You can find the complete list in AJ blog site.
If you are a company or an entrepreneur, this event will directly benefit you, since most of the speakers are also entrepreneurs, and IT company CEOs which I’m definitely sure will give some tips how to run an IT related business. If I’m not mistaken the Tipidpc guys will be there to share how the site came to be. Ideas will be be scattering all over the venue and you’ll never know, the solution you are looking in your company will be revealed here.
Sponsorship?
Basically I’m not the person in-charge of the sponsorship thing, but I can be your mediator and tell the phpug top guys about your intentions.
Well what are you waiting for, start marking those calendars as if this is a Christmas countdown. I’m pretty excited about this event and I hope to see you all there!
Posted in Anonymous, Life goes on | 2 Comments »
October 19th, 2007
Problem: You want to convert an array to string so that it is easier to print the result instead of looping inside the array and have this printed
Old Solution:
$aArr = array("Have you ever seen",
"the beauty of the world.",
"The wonderful creation of the Lord." );
foreach($aArr as $sString) {
print $sString;
}
Other Solution:
$aArr = array("Have you ever seen",
"the beauty of the world.",
"The wonderful creation of the Lord." );
$sString = implode(" ", $aArr);
print $sString;
In Action: I want to execute a linux command via PHP and get its result and extract the desire content. The example below will try to extract the ip address from the ifconfig command
exec("ifconfig", $aOutput);
$sTempString = implode(" ", $aOutput);
preg_match("/inet\saddr:(.*?)\s/i", $sTempString, $aMatch);
print $aMatch[1]; //
Tags: array, implode, php tutorial, string
Posted in Arrays, Strings | No Comments »
October 19th, 2007
Question: How can I determine the linux version installed in a Linux OS
Answer: To determine your Mysql version, we will be using the mysql command with the -V (capitalize) option.
[darwin@myserver]$ mysql -V
mysql Ver 14.7 Distrib 4.1.20, for pc-linux-gnu (i686) using EditLine wrapper
Your mysql version here is 4.1.2.0.
Tags: linux, mysql
Posted in Linux Tidbits | No Comments »
October 19th, 2007
Question: How can you determine the version of your Apache Web Server on your Linux machine?
Answer: First determine the installation directory of your apache server. You can find this by issuing this command, but basically you can do better that this one in finding the installation directory of your apache.
[darwin@myserver]$ whereis apache
apache: /usr/local/apache
Once you know where the directory is we will try to execute the httpd command with the -v option
[darwin@myserver]$ /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -v
Server version: Apache/1.3.36 (Unix)
Server built: Jul 18 2006 14:34:00
And there you go your Apache version is 1.3.36.
Thanks again Mark.
Tags: apache, linux, web server
Posted in Linux Tidbits | No Comments »
October 19th, 2007
Wondering how to get the Linux OS version installed on a server or PC? Here are some commands our system administrator taught me and wanted to share it with you.
Using dmesg command
[conai@myserver]$ dmesg | head -1
Linux version 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp (bhcompile@hs20-bc1-3.build.redhat.com)
(gcc version 4.1.0 20060304 (Red Hat 4.1.0-3)) #1 SMP Tue Mar 14 16:05:46 EST 2006
Using uname command
[conai@myserver]$ uname -a
Linux dugong.mbsautomotive.com 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp #1 SMP Tue Mar 14 16:05:46 EST
2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
Opening the /etc/issue file
[conai@myserver]$ cat /etc/issue
Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux)
Kernel \r on an \m
Opening the /proc/version file
[conai@myserver]$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp (bhcompile@hs20-bc1-3.build.redhat.com)
(gcc version 4.1.0 20060304 (Red Hat 4.1.0-3)) #1 SMP Tue Mar 14 16:05:46 EST 2006
According to Rai and Mark, there are still other ways to do this but I think these are enough to get the information I need. Pick whatever suites your needs. Thank Rai and Mark for sharing this information with me.
Tags: dmesg, linux, uname
Posted in Linux Tidbits | No Comments »
October 18th, 2007
Problem: We wanted to determine if a number is even or odd
Notes: We know that even number end with 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 and odd numbers ends with 1, 3, 5, 7, 9. So how will we know if a number given is an even or odd number in a program..
Solution:
<?
$magic_number = 123568;
if($magic_number % 2 == 0) {
print "The number is even.";
} else {
print "The number is odd.";
}
?>
Explanation: In the program above we use the modulus division. Modulus division unlike the ordinary division (/) returns the remainder instead of the quotient. So we tried modulo dividing the given number by 2 to determine if it is divisible by 2.
Posted in Operators | No Comments »
October 18th, 2007
I got a new header design for my site today. This logo was made by my friend Dhing. The logo’s concept was about my journal to the programming world but focusing on PHP thats why I have the <?php ?> tag on the upper right corner of the logo. By the way Dhing is also a php programmer like me and a designer by night. He is currently employed in iRemit as a PHP programmer. So if you want some professional designing and programming on your site, just let me know and I’ll contact him for you. With this, I can help but to think ironically, that he being a programmer and good designer don’t even have a site of his own, (dhing sorry about this). Well I think this is a reality in our world, that the ones that are expert on a field are also the one that have the least asset on their expertise. Like a shoe maker don’t have any descent shoes, doctors sometimes cannot threat theirselves, barbers cannot cut their hair and Dhing being a programmer and designer don’t have a site… hahaha… sorry Dhing…
Before I ask my friend’s help I have been surfing the net for a couple of days, trying to find the perfect wordpress theme for my site. I was looking for simple and professional looking theme that made me go thru different wordpress theme sites like, themes.wordpress.net, www.wpthemesfree.com, www.wpthemespot.com and other sites that I can no longer remember. Although to be fair the themes from these site are awesome. Their themes vary from a simple looking appearance to a very graphical ones,. They cater from the ordinary type, professional type, artistic, pornographic type, environment featured types, animals and many others. But with these tons of themes to choose from, I cannot find the right one for me. So I decided to stick with the default theme offered by the default wordpress installation. But for the past days I find my site so boring thats why I ask the help of my friend Dhing, to be honest I’m bad at designing.. oppss. Well HE will not give you everything isn’t it? No one is perfect or else we don’t need to be here and I am not writing this blog in the first place.
Well, I am contented with the output of the design and I’m quite happy about it. Again tnx Dhing.
Tags: wordpress design, wordpress themes
Posted in Life goes on | No Comments »