But it had me thinking about a few questions…

Who really owns your  fans, followers, or potential customers?

What if the network is down/offline or is shutdown permanently, could you still contact them?

What if the network kicks you off,  blocks you or decides they are taking over your page/account is there much you could do to stop them?

Believe it or not the social networks are in control of your fans, followers, and potential customers.

Don’t believe me?  Try to export your fans or followers so you can contact them directly…didn’t find the export button did you? Do you even know how to contact them directly or who they really are?

The truth is the ease of social media allows us to tweet or post effortlessly which has lead to us forgetting about how we used to communicate in the past.

Email was once and still is the King.  It is the only way you can truly own and communicate directly with your fans, followers, and potential customers.

The solution is therefore simple, no matter what social network you are using, always try (with their permission) to get your fans, followers, and potential customers contact details.

Information like:

• Correct full name (recommended),
• Email address (minimum),
• Telephone (preferably mobile so you have an option to send a text instead)
• Location, gender and age (perhaps range) are useful information to keep as well.

You do have your fan’s/follower’s/potential customer’s email address right or does facebook/twitter have that too?

Related Reading:

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (And Other Social Networks)

Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (And Other Social Networks)

$ cd /Library/StartupItems

$ sudo mkdir xampp

$ cd xampp/

$ sudo nano xampp

Enter the contents below:

#!/bin/sh

/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/xampp start

If you installed XAMPP elsewhere you will need to modify the path above.

You can also start specific xampp apps for example, starting apache only by using /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/xampp startapache instead.

$ sudo nano  StartupParameters.plist

Enter the contents below:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<!DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM “file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyList.dtd”>

<plist version=”0.9″>

<dict>

<key>Description</key>

<string>XAMPP</string>

<key>OrderPreference</key>

<string>Late</string>

<key>Provides</key>

<array>

<string>Starts Apache and MySQL</string>

</array>

<key>Uses</key>

<array>

<string>SystemLog</string>

</array>

</dict>

</plist>

$ cd ..

$ sudo chown -R root xampp

$ sudo chgrp -R wheel xampp

$ sudo chmod 755 xampp/xampp

That’s it!

All you now have to do is to restart your MAC and xampp will start automatically on boot.

Original Solution was by Sreeprakash N which can be found here (http://sree.cc/mac-os-x/how-start-xampp-at-startup-on-mac-os-x) , however it’s not easy to follow as a few commands have been jumbled together, hence this post to make it easier for others to follow.

Related Reading:

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Animal Guide)

21 Memory Improvement Tips - Lose The Post It Notes and Get Your Memory Back

Tip of the Toes (A Ballerina Story) (Fun Rhyming Children's Books)

What could this buyout/merger mean, as it stands now it raises more questions than answers for ICT industry.  What do we stand to gain or loose.

Will iPhone become available to the masses, is this the beginning of the end of Blackberry Country?

Will iPad 1 and iPad 2 become the new laptop?

Will Edge be upgraded to the 3G, and will Digicel expand the 3G network or move it to LTE (Mobile 4G)?

What do you think is going to happen after this merger is completed?

Related Reading:

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Start Your Own Business, Fifth Edition: The Only Start-Up Book You'll Ever Need

The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

Feels brute force, but it gets the job done.

Article:

Deploy the bare minimum required Zend Framework scripts in your application library

Link:

http://ingol.nl/blog/2010/12/02/deploy-the-bare-minimum-required-zend-framework-scripts-in-your-application-library/

Related Reading:

Measuring Performance : Using the new metrics to deploy strategy and improve performance

Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework

Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Apps

It is perhaps one of the biggest patent lawsuits to date, and it is one of many patent lawsuits filed since the start of the year. Paul Allen company Interval Licensing has hundreds of patents and has chosen four (4) out of its arsenal to use in the suit. One of the patents mentioned in the suit is the analyzing of a user’s behaviour/action (e.g. search) to suggest a list of related content. Doesn’t this sound like a lot of websites you use?

This post is not about Paul Allen taking on the web, but rather to stir your thoughts on the subject and bring to light an issue you never thought of before.

So what does it really mean for Jamaica/Caribbean ICT?

Simply put, it means that once you produce software you could be at risk, things that seem simple, obvious, or ubiquitous could land you into huge trouble.

To get a better idea of the potential impact, lets look at the a few patents, and answer if your software implemented any of these?

• Displayed a popup a window.
• Displayed a progress bar to show how much is left in a process.
• Resized an image on the fly to present it to a user.
• Expanded LOL in a message into laughing out loud and displayed it to a user.
• Sent an email with a compressed attachment (zip files).

Did you answer yes to one or more? Then you could be at risk of being sued!

To put it into more of an everyday practical context, if you run an eCommerce site you are probably in violation of around twenty (20) patents. Check out FFI’s Webshop example – http://webshop.ffii.org/

I may have oversimplified the description of the patents above, however it is to make it easier to understand and to highlight how things we developers take for granted could be putting our business at risk.

Does this mean I should not develop software? Short answer no, you need to be aware of the risks involved and mitigate against them as best as possible.

Better yet stand up and say NO to Software Patents!

Khary Sharpe

Related / Reference Links:

Example of Software Patents

http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/samples/index.en.html

Controversial Patents

http://oreilly.com/pub/q/patent_list

Paul Allen Patent Suit
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/08/30/puzzling-out-paul-allens-patent-suit-against-silicon-valleys-giants/

Oracle Sues Google over Android and Java

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20013546-265.html

Kodak files patent suit against Apple and RIM

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/14/kodak-files-patent-lawsuits-against-apple-and-rim/

USPTO Awards LOL Patent to IBM
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/12/30/166220/USPTO-Awards-LOL-Patent-To-IBM

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,640,233.PN.&OS=PN/7,640,233&RS=PN/7,640,233

Photo by Han Soete

Related Reading:

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition

How Google Tests Software

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

One solution is to roll your own package that only includes the necessary components, another is to zip, upload and unzip.

For the time being I decided to choose the latter.

With just a quick review of the zip extension on php.net/zip, I found in the documentation a possible solution.

I added my two cents and ended up with this

<?php

$file = basename($_GET['file']);

$extractTo = realpath(dirname(__FILE__)) . '/' . time() . '/' ;

echo "Extracting $file to $extractTo";

$zip = new ZipArchive;

if ($zip->open($file) === TRUE) {
    $zip->extractTo($extractTo);
    $zip->close();
    echo ' - done';
} else {
    echo ' - failed';
}
?>

You then do a simple http://www.example.com/unpack.php?file=myapp.zip and your files are extracted in no time.

As you can see nothing fancy.

It creates a new folder within the same location you placed the script . The folder is named after the current timestamp to avoid overwrites.

As per usual, do the necessaries to protect this script.

How do you cut your upload time?

Related Reading:

CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-301 Study Guide

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Animal Guide)

Head First PHP & MySQL

The function below was created to do just that.

function isOnLAN($url)
{

$urlParts = parse_url($url);

$domainName = $urlParts[‘host’];

$ip = gethostbyname($domainName);

if (ip_in_network($ip,"172.16.0.0", 12))
return true;

if (ip_in_network($ip,"192.168.0.0", 16))
return true;

if (ip_in_network($ip,"10.0.0.0", 8))
return true; //true

return false;

}

// Taken from php.net - http://jm2.php.net/manual/en/function.ip2long.php#92544
function ip_in_network($ip, $net_addr, $net_mask){
if($net_mask <= 0){ return false; }
$ip_binary_string = sprintf("%032b",ip2long($ip));
$net_binary_string = sprintf("%032b",ip2long($net_addr));
return (substr_compare($ip_binary_string,$net_binary_string,0,$net_mask) === 0);
}

Usage:

if (isOnLAN("http://192.168.1.1"))
  echo "Address on LAN";
else
  echo "Address on INTERNET";

Related Reading:

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Animal Guide)

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws

Firewall (Kurt Wallander Mysteries, No. 8)

• timezonetowindows
• windowstotimezone
• territorytotimezone
• timezonetoterritory
• citytotimezone
• timezonetocity

$form = new Zend_Form();

$timeZoneList = $locale->getTranslationList("timezonetoterritory");

$timeZone = $form->createElement('select', 'time_zone', array(

'filters'    => array('StringTrim'),
'label'      => 'Time Zone:',
))->addMultiOptions($timeZoneList);

$this->addElement($timeZone);

Related Reading:

Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad

The Time Machine (Dover Thrift Editions)

Tell Your Time: How to Manage Your Schedule So You Can Live Free

First lets look at the directory structure for creating a themeable application.

Typical Layout:
root

— private

— public

—— css

—— js

—— images

You’ll notice that all our publicly available files for stylesheets, javascript and images are placed in the public folder. We are going to alter this by placing them into a sub-folder under public called ‘default’.

Our structure now looks like this.

root

— private

— public

—— default

——— css

——— js

——— images

What this allows us to do is encapsulate all our files/assets into a single folder that we can now easily reference. All our themes and their assets should now follow the same naming convention as our ‘default’ folder.

Adding a theme to our structure now looks like this
root

— private

— public

—— default

——— css

——— js

——— images

—— modern

——— css

——— js

——— images

In our application bootstrap we add the following line of code (around where you initialize the session)

$session = Zend_Registry::get('Zend_Session'); //change this to match how you store your sessions

if (!isset($session->theme))

$session->theme = 'default';

To easily use this in our application lets create a view helper.

class My_View_Helper_Theme
{
/**
* Returns site base url based on the current theme
*
*
* @return string
*/
public function theme($content = '', $prependBase = true)
{

if ($prependBase)
{
$baseUrl =  Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()->getRequest()->getBaseUrl();
}
else
{
$baseUrl = '';
}

$session = Zend_Registry::get('Zend_Session'); //change this to match how you store your sessions

$url = $baseUrl . $session->theme . $content;
}
}

In our view we can now use our view helper to fetch the correct file from the current theme.

<img src="<?php echo $this->theme('/images/blankslate.jpg') ?>" />

We can make our view helper a little more helpful by adding a fallback to the default if the file doesn’t exist in the theme.

class My_View_Helper_Theme
{
/**
* Returns site base url based on the current theme
*
*
* @return string
*/
public function theme($content = '', $prependBase = true)
{

if ($prependBase)
{
$baseUrl =  Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()->getRequest()->getBaseUrl();
}
else
{
$baseUrl = '';
}

$session = Zend_Registry::get('Zend_Session'); //change this to match how you store your sessions

$url =  '/public/' . $session->theme . $content;

$location = DOCUMENT_ROOT . $url;

if (file_exists($location))
{
return $baseUrl . $url;
}
else
{

// If theme doesn't exist then use the default theme

$url = '/public/default' . $content;

return $baseUrl . $url;
}
}

Related Reading:

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Animal Guide)

Head First PHP & MySQL

Psychology: Themes and Variations, Briefer Version