For quite some time I've searched for a way to start a command line script from within a page in PHP without using the crontab. Basically I just wanted to start a script which does some processing in the background. The solution is pretty simple, but it took me some time to find it. Continue reading »
Apr 15
Not for the first time I've searched for a way to visualize a multidimensional array in a tree view in my web browser without directly using echo or print. I wasn't able to find a concrete solution for this previously. However, this time I was put on the right track by a post of Kevin van Zonneveld. Continue reading »
Jan 14
Okay, I must admit: I'm a programmer and I know some commands. Because I want to use PEAR packages, I needed to install it. The installing command is quite easy to find, but I had a hard time determining the directory structure. Some searching on the internet and an IRC conversation (EFNet #pear, thanks davidc_!) later I was able to install PEAR in a quite reasonable directory structure. Continue reading »
Dec 10
WampServer 2.0 is a nice tool to help you develop a new site on your local computer. However, you'll probably need more packages/libraries than those included with WampServer. This post is about installing extra common features which are mostly present at hosting servers, but not (directly) on WampServer.
Jul 24
Today I faced a problem with FPDF and FPDI when trying to concatenate some PDF files. The only output I got was 'FPDF error: Unable to find xref table.' When I did a search on this error message, I wasn't able to extract the answer from it. After some searching, the problem was located.
May 15
Multiple times I've been searching (too long) for a working IPv6 regular expression. There's a lot of crap out of there which doesn't take into account certain cases. Of course you only get to know which one works best if you test them all. I've tried A LOT and finally found the right one
Mar 25
This post will show a simple example of how to interpretate a WSDL file and a very simple, yet quick example of how to extract information from this file through PHP.
Prior assumptions
In this example I assume that you've already have SOAP enabled in your PHP configuration because this is beyond the scope of this example. If you're not sure, you can check your phpinfo file. There should be something like this:
SOAP information
Jan 22
Seeing the date of my last post I realize that it's been a while ago since I last posted a message, so here's an update.
The last couple of months I've been working on my research assignment for the TU Delft which was about data integration and semantics in the context of data warehouses. In that research I've analyzed some data warehouses with respect to the current evolving WWW. It seems that especially for the Web 3.0 vision Web Services play an important role for interoperability. Next to that online collaboration is a hot topic. As I am a bioinformatician, one of the most important things in this field is security. Currently there's no secure SOAP implementation for a Web service to first establish an SSL connection before sending data. Next to that SSL results in large overhead as it encrypts whole HTTP packages. When having a data warehouse with gigabytes of data this is not practical.
Oct 27
First things first: in my previous post I suggested that the use of frames would be better to be able to reload 'pieces' of pages. This is not completely correct of course: within a frameset multiple frames display pages, so in principle the page in a frame is reloaded although this page is of smaller width and / or height so that the frameset fits the screen.
And although the idea of frames is good (reloading parts of a website), it is not worked out great. You still have to reload a whole page. After a quick thought and some trying with Smarty it is way better to just use boxes as I already wanted to do. Let's say I was blinded by the 'reloading pieces of pages' idea 
Oct 09
This week I've actually done a lot of work without noticing it. First of all I needed an environment in which I could write and directly test code without being dependent on a webhost. The easiest way to do this is by installing Apache2Triad. It's easy to install and it works directly on. The control panel offers enough functionality to make it do what you want (that is to parse PHP files and to interact with a database).
After that I've tested some files which I already had and which could be reused. As I've edited them, some mistakes had to be corrected. After doing that (I hate code which is not compiling), I've written the first two use-cases:
- Register user
- Log in user
"So that's all you'll probably think? It ain't that hard to construct a user registering system and a login prompt!"
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