Format a time interval with the requested granularity
This class, a refactored version of Drupal’s format_interval function, makes it relatively easy to format an interval value. The format will automatically format as compactly as possible. For example: if the difference between the two dates is only a few hours and both dates occur on the same day, the year, month, and day parts of the date will be omitted.
class DateIntervalFormat
{
/**
* Format an interval value with the requested granularity.
*
* @param integer $timestamp The length of the interval in seconds.
* @param integer $granularity How many different units to display in the string.
* @return string A string representation of the interval.
*/
public function getInterval($timestamp, $granularity = 2)
{
$seconds = time() - $timestamp;
$units = array(
'1 year|:count years' => 31536000,
'1 week|:count weeks' => 604800,
'1 day|:count days' => 86400,
'1 hour|:count hours' => 3600,
'1 min|:count min' => 60,
'1 sec|:count sec' => 1);
$output = '';
foreach ($units as $key => $value) {
$key = explode('|', $key);
if ($seconds >= $value) {
$count = floor($seconds / $value);
$output .= ($output ? ' ' : '');
if ($count == 1) {
$output .= $key[0];
} else {
$output .= str_replace(':count', $count, $key[1]);
}
$seconds %= $value;
$granularity--;
}
if ($granularity == 0) {
break;
}
}
return $output ? $output : '0 sec';
}
}
Usage:
$dateFormat = new DateIntervalFormat();
$timestamp = strtotime('2009-06-21 20:46:11');
print sprintf('Submitted %s ago', $dateFormat->getInterval($timestamp));
Outputs:
Submitted 3 days 4 hours ago
Face Detection Using PHP
Maurice Svay explains how to detect faces in photos with PHP:
Nowadays, face detection is built in many consumer products (camera obviously, but also Google and iPhoto), and seems to be a pretty common job. So I expected to find many solutions for doing it with PHP. Surprisingly, the only one I could find is OpenCV, an opensource lib that was originally developed by Intel. OpenCV seems to perform well but you need to be able to install it on your server. In my case, I wanted to have a pure PHP solution, so it can work with most hosts.
Apache HTTP DoS tool released
Yesterday an interesting HTTP DoS tool has been released. The tool performs a Denial of Service attack on Apache (and some other, see below) servers by exhausting available connections. While there are a lot of DoS tools available today, this one is particularly interesting because it holds the connection open while sending incomplete HTTP requests to the server.
Java, C, Python and nested loops
Java has no goto statement, to break or continue multiple-nested loop or switch constructs, Java programmers place labels on loop and switch constructs, and then break out of or continue to the block named by the label. The following example shows how to use java break statement to terminate the labeled loop:
public class BreakLabel
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
int[][] array = new int[][]{{1,2,3,4},{10,20,30,40}};
boolean found = false;
System.out.println("Searching 30 in two dimensional int array");
Outer:
for (int intOuter = 0; intOuter < array.length ; intOuter++) {
Inner:
for (int intInner = 0; intInner < array[intOuter].length; intInner++) {
if (array[intOuter][intInner] == 30) {
found = true;
break Outer;
}
}
}
if (found == true) {
System.out.println("30 found in the array");
} else {
System.out.println("30 not found in the array");
}
}
}
Use of labeled blocks in Java leads to considerable simplification in programming effort and a major reduction in maintenance.
On the other hand, the C continue statement can only continue the immediately enclosing block; to continue or exit outer blocks, programmers have traditionally either used auxiliary Boolean variables whose only purpose is to determine if the outer block is to be continued or exited; alternatively, programmers have misused the goto statement to exit out of nested blocks.
What’s interesting is that Python rejected the labeled break and continue proposal a while ago. And here’s why:
Guido van Rossum wrote:
I’m rejecting it on the basis that code so complicated to require this feature is very rare. While I’m sure there are some (rare) real cases where clarity of the code would suffer from a refactoring that makes it possible to use return, this is offset by two issues:
1. The complexity added to the language, permanently.
2. My expectation that the feature will be abused more than it will be used right, leading to a net decrease in code clarity (measured across all Python code written henceforth). Lazy programmers are everywhere, and before you know it you have an incredible mess on your hands of unintelligible code.
But what’s more interesting is that the idea of adding a goto statement was never ever mentioned.
Common sense perhaps?
Google Page Speed: Web Performance Best Practices
When you profile a web page with Page Speed, it evaluates the page’s conformance to a number of different rules. These rules are general front-end best practices you can apply at any stage of web development. Google provides documentation of each of the rules, so whether or not you run the Page Speed tool, you can refer to these pages at any time.
The best practices are grouped into five categories that cover different aspects of page load optimization:
- Optimizing caching: Keeping your application’s data and logic off the network altogether
- Minimizing round-trip times: Reducing the number of serial request-response cycles
- Minimizing request size: Reducing upload size
- Minimizing payload size: Reducing the size of responses, downloads, and cached pages
- Optimizing browser rendering: Improving the browser’s layout of a page
The Cost of Hosting on Amazon
Mather Corgan, president of HotPads, gave a great talk on how HotPads uses AWS to run their real estate search engine. HotPads abandoned their managed hosting in December and took the leap over to EC2 and its siblings. The presentation has a lot of detail on costs and other things to watch out for, so if you’re currently planning your “cloud” architecture, you’ll find some of this really helpful.
TypeFriendly: A Documentation And User Manual Builder
TypeFriendly is a documentation generation script written in PHP5. It was designed to be easy in use and it allows to achieve the first results immediately, a couple of minutes after you start the work. The script contains everything you need to write clear, multilingual documentation for your project, so that you do not have to code everything on your own.
The most important features of TypeFriendly:
- Modular documentation structure – it is generated from text files and the structure and navigation are generated from the file names.
- Simple syntax – the text is written in intuitive and clean Markdown syntax.
- Multilingual support and tools – TypeFriendly allows you to create your manuals in many language versions. It also contains a tool that shows whether the derived languages are up-to-date.
- Configurable output formats – currently, TypeFriendly is able to generate the documentation in XHTML (many pages) and XHTML (single page). There is also a third format – metadata – still under development. It will allow to import the docs to a database in order to make an on-line version with, for example, user comments.
- Various add-ons such as syntax highlighting, references, class description fields.
- Navigation generators.
- It is portable – works under Linux, FreeBSD and Windows. All you need is the PHP interpreter available.
TypeFriendly is distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License 3, which means that you can use, modify and share it for free.
Demo
http://static.invenzzia.org/docs/tf/0_1/book/en/index.html
http://www.invenzzia.org/en/projects/typefriendly/screenshots
Source Code
http://svn.invenzzia.org/browser/TypeFriendly/trunk/
The Little Manual of API Design
This manual gathers together the key insights into API design that were discovered through many years of software development on the Qt application development framework at Trolltech (now part of Nokia). When designing and implementing a library, you should also keep other factors in mind, such as efficiency and ease of implementation, in addition to pure API considerations. And although the focus is on public APIs, there is no harm in applying the principles described here when writing application code or internal library code.
Is this the best open source CMS ever created?
Meet TYPOlight, a powerful Web content management system that specializes in accessibility (back end and front end) and uses XHTML and CSS to generate W3C/WAI compliant pages.
Accessibility
A growing number of countries around the world have introduced legislation which either directly addresses the need for websites to be accessible to people with disabilities, or which addresses the more general requirement for people with disabilities not to be discriminated against. TYPOlight does not treat accessibility as just an additional feature and is thoroughly accessible.
Web 2.0
PHP 5 and Ajax are modern “Web 2.0″ technologies that you can find in a lot of contemporary applications. TYPOlight has a solid codebase built on the new object-oriented programming features of PHP 5 and can therefore be considered a future-proof software. To ensure back end accessibility, every Ajax feature includes a graceful fallback in case JavaScript is disabled.
Page features
- Different page types
- Multiple websites in one tree
- Manual or timed publication
- Hidden pages
- Password protect pages
Editing features
- Clipboard feature
- Edit multiple records
- Built-in rich text editor (TinyMCE)
- Different content elements and modules
- Multilingual spellchecker
- Insert tags (similar to server side includes)
- Manual or timed publication
File manager
- Multiple file uploads
- Image thumbnails and file preview
- Edit uploaded files with the source editor
- File operation permissions
- Copy, move, rename files or folders
- Delete folders recursively
Form generator
- Automatic input validation
- Store uploaded files on the server
- Send form data via e-mail
- Send uploaded files as e-mail attachment
Search engine
- Automatic page indexing
- Search indexing on protected pages
- Phrase search, wildcard search, AND/OR search
- Search result caching and pagination
Full feature list
- Intuitive user interface
- Accessible XHTML strict output
- Meets W3C/WAI requirements
- Web 2.0 support (mootools-based)
- Live update service
- Accessible administration area
- Multiple back end languages and themes
- Generates search engine friendly URLs
- Multi-language support
- Powerful permission system
- Versioning and undo management
- Advanced search and sorting options
- Front end output 100% template based
- Automatic e-mail encryption (spam protection)
- Supports SMTP in addition to PHP’s mail function
- Supports multiple websites in one tree
- Supports GZip compression
- Print articles as PDF
System features
- Open Source (LGPL)
- Web-based administration
- Platform independent
- Over 150 third party extensions
- Multilingual documentation
Links
E-Books Directory: More than 300 free programming books
Here is a categorized list of online programming books available for free download. The books cover all major programming languages: Ada, Assembly, Basic, C, C#, C++, CGI, JavaScript, Perl, Delphi, Pascal, Haskell, Java, Lisp, PHP, Prolog, Python, Ruby, as well as some other languages, game programming, and software engineering. The books are in various formats for online reading or downloading.
