Techie stuff

Oracle - Decode

2006-08-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

In Oracle/PLSQL, the decode function has the functionality of an IF-THEN-ELSE statement.

The syntax for the decode function is:

decode( expression , search , result [, search , result]... [, default] )

expression is the value to compare.

search is the value that is compared against expression.

result is the value returned, if expression is equal to search.

default is optional. If no matches are found, the decode will return default. If default is omitted, then the decode statement will return null (if no matches are found).

For Example:

You could use the decode function in an SQL statement as follows:

SELECT supplier_name,
decode(supplier_id, 10000, 'IBM',
10001, 'Microsoft',
10002, 'Hewlett Packard',
'Gateway') result
FROM suppliers;

The above decode statement is equivalent to the following IF-THEN-ELSE statement:

IF supplier_id = 10000 THEN
result := 'IBM';

ELSIF supplier_id = 10001 THEN
result := 'Microsoft';

ELSIF supplier_id = 10002 THEN
result := 'Hewlett Packard';

ELSE
result := 'Gateway';

END IF;

The decode function will compare each supplier_id value, one by one.

URL Icon

2006-03-13T12:30:00.000-08:00

Method 1 : To be included in every page
LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.mydomain.com/myicon.ico"

Method 2:

Rename the icon file *exactly* to: favicon.ico -- all
lowercase. No deviation from this is allowed.

Place the favicon.ico file in the 'root' directory on your
web server (where your main index page is).

MySQL Check for the version

2006-02-14T09:21:00.000-08:00

MySQL : Check for the version

Command : SELECT VERSION()

The === operator

2005-12-16T06:46:00.000-08:00

= = = is an Identical operator

a = = = $b returns TRUE

if $a is equal to $b, and they are of the same type.

mysql_insert_id() && LAST_INSERT_ID()

2005-12-02T07:12:00.000-08:00

mysql_insert_id() && LAST_INSERT_ID()

Used when you add a record in to one of the table using PHP, and then you want to use that ‘auto generated record id’ for further modifications to other table.

Used when you insert a record into a table that contains an AUTO_INCREMENT column, you can obtain the value stored into that column by calling the mysql_insert_id() function.

When a new AUTO_INCREMENT value has been generated, you can also obtain it by executing a SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() statement with mysql_query() and retrieving the value from the result set returned by the statement.
For LAST_INSERT_ID(), the most recently generated ID is maintained in the server on a per-connection basis. It is not changed by another client. It is not even changed if you update another AUTO_INCREMENT column with a non-magic value (that is, a value that is not NULL and not 0).
Note that mysql_insert_id() returns the value stored into an AUTO_INCREMENT column, whether that value is automatically generated by storing NULL or 0 or was specified as an explicit value. LAST_INSERT_ID() returns only automatically generated AUTO_INCREMENT values. If you store an explicit value other than NULL or 0, it does not affect the value returned byLAST_INSERT_ID().
mysql_insert_id
(PHP 3, PHP 4, PHP 5)
mysql_insert_id -- Get the ID generated from the previous INSERT operation
The ID generated for an AUTO_INCREMENT column by the previous INSERT query on success, 0 if the previous query does not generate an AUTO_INCREMENT value, or FALSE if no MySQL connection was established.
Note: Because mysql_insert_id() acts on the last performed query, be sure to call mysql_insert_id() immediately after the query that generates the value.
Note: The value of the MySQL SQL function LAST_INSERT_ID() always contains the most recently generated AUTO_INCREMENT value, and is not reset between queries.

Techworld.com - Microsoft offers 'open' Office formats

2005-11-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

Microsoft has announced it will offer its Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats as open standards.

The software giant will submit its Office Open XML format to the International Standards Organization (ISO) to be adopted as an international standard in time for the launch of the next version of its Office software suite, it said today.

The decision comes as a group of technology rivals led by IBM and Sun are pushing the OASIS format for office applications called OpenDocument as a global standard format.

It also comes in the wake of a highly publicised decision by the state of Massachusettsto require compliance with OpenDocument for government documents - which effectively forces the phasing out of Microsoft Office and its proprietary format.

Microsoft has been facing increasing pressure from governments and agencies as they have insisted on standards-compliance for their software. Microsoft executives confirmed that the move would help the company win contracts from public authorities that want software based on open standards.

"We have a few barriers [with government contracts]," said Alan Yates, general manager for Microsoft Office. "It will give governments more long-term confidence."

The issue isn't as clear-cut as that however. ISO standards are not the same as open standards. "With an open standard any application can use it," said Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager of OpenOffice.org. "With an ISO standard, it's not quite the same thing. It just means you have a reference for it." If approved, the Office Open XML will see Microsoft grant free licences for its use.

Microsoft has put together a group of companies including Apple, BP, Intel, Toshiba, Barclays Bank, the British Library.and Statoil to make the submission to Geneva-based European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA).

The evaluation process is expected to take around a year. Once completed, ECMA will forward a request to the ISO. Microsoft explained that the timing had been chosen to ensure that the XML formats became open standards in time for the launch of Office 12 toward the end of next year.

Server 2003

2005-11-22T06:55:00.001-08:00

Gates Outlines Microsoft's High-Performance Computing Plans Nov. 15, 2005

Microsoft's entry into the scientific computing market could yield less expensive, easier-to-use supercomputing systems and pave the way for advances in business computing, chairman Bill Gates said during a keynote speech at a supercomputing conference in Seattle Tuesday.
Microsoft next year plans to release a version of Windows for small supercomputers, and is funding 10 universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia to help develop a set of high-performance computing products that includes operating systems, middleware, and development tools. As computer technology becomes integral to advances in biology, physics, medicine, and earth science, there's demand for simpler tools that can speed up scientists' "time to insight," Gates said during the speech at the SC05 conference.
High-performance computing techniques are also finding their way into industrial applications, including consumer product design and automobile crash testing. Microsoft's upcoming high-performance computing software, its first designed for the market, could help tie together the desktop and powerful clusters of computer servers in new ways, said Gates.
"Computation has become a tool for all the sciences," Gates said. "We need an approach that scales from the smallest supercomputer up to the largest."
Microsoft Tuesday released a second beta version of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, a version of its operating system designed to run on clusters of perhaps a few dozen machines. The product is due in the first half of next year, and will compete with the open-source Linux operating system that dominates cluster installations today. Using clustering technology, users can chain together dozens or hundreds of inexpensive PC servers with special cabling to run software that distributes work among the processors. The approach has let universities, supercomputing research centers, and corporate IT departments access supercomputing power at much lower costs than specialized supercomputing architectures have allowed. Microsoft is also designing new capabilities for its graphical development tools that could help scientists program clusters.
As part of its development effort, Microsoft has funded 10 "institutes for high-performance computing," including the universities of Washington, Virginia, Tennessee, Utah, and Cornell University. Professors there will provide Microsoft with product development assistance as part of the new program. One challenge Microsoft and its partners will face is the need to develop new software algorithms that can run more efficiently across multiple processors. As chip designers become unable to significantly raise microprocessors' clock speeds to boost performance, the computer industry is turning to integrating multiple processing cores on a chip and extracting more parallel processing capability from software code to fuel performance gains. That means techniques used in high-performance computing today could in five or 10 years become commonplace on the desktop.
In an interview after his speech, Gates said Microsoft's research and development of high-performance computing technologies could help usher in speech and computer vision as user interfaces for PCs, improve the performance of software that can prioritize information for users, and run security algorithms more robustly. "We’ll be able to use all the extra power," says Gates. "In a certain sense, you could say it's been a Holy Grail of computer science" to distribute code that runs well in one machine across many.
During Gates' speech, Microsoft high-performance computing director Kyril Faenov demonstrated a prototype "personal cluster" of four Windows computers running at 25 billion computations per second, on which departments or workgroups could run preliminary calculations before submitting them to a larger system for more detailed modeling of data. The prototype could be priced at less than $10,000, he said. During the demonstration, Faenov ran a version of The MathWorks' Matlab software on the personal cluster to analyze proteomics data, and then transferred the job to a 64-node cluster run by Intel Corp. at a different location in Washington.
Gates said that as part of its high-performance computing effort, Microsoft researchers are entering into new types of collaborations with scientists and medical researchers.

Wiindows Server 2003

2005-11-22T06:55:00.000-08:00

Microsoft: No Delay For Windows Server 2003 R2

Windows Server 2003 R2 did not debut at IT Forum but the upgrade will be released to manufacturing by the end of the year, Microsoft executives said.
At Microsoft's IT Forum in Barcelona, Spain, the software giant announced the planned release of the complementary Virtual Server 2005 R2 to manufacturing in December--and a major price cut--but did not announce the next big milestones for the R2 version of the Windows Server 2003--the release to manufacturing and ship dates.
Microsoft said the debut of Windows Desktop Search for Enterprise Deployment at IT Forum has no bearing on the schedule for Windows Server 2003 R2.
From his office in Redmond, Wash., Windows Server executive Bob Kelly said R2 will not be delayed. He did not say why Microsoft said little about R2's ship date except to say Microsoft discussed core scenarios of R2 at IT Forum as it prepares for going gold in the near future, he said.
"There's no holdup. We're still on target for what we promised," said Kelly. "We will RTM before the end of the calendar year."
Regarding the possibility of a delay into 2006, Kelly said it would not happen. "Not at all," he said. "We we feel very good about where we are."
IT Forum is Microsoft's last major conference of the calendar year. Release Candidate 2 of Windows Server 2003 R2 was made available roughly a month ago.
Sources close to Microsoft said they expect R2 will be released to manufacturing by the end of next month but may not be widely available in the channel until early 2006.
Partners said they are looking forward to R2's new features--including Active Directory Federation Services, better branch office support and vastly enhanced Unix integration features--but they are not too worried about the release of R2.
Microsoft also announced an 80 percent price cut on Virtual Server 2005 R2, which will be priced at $99 for the Standard Edition and $199 for the Enterprise Edition from $499 and $899, respectively, in version 1.0.
One partner said he was told to expect a mid-December release. Another partner said the company will just make the end-of-year promise. "I'm told right at the end of the year, six to seven weeks, " he said.

Keylogger Threats

2005-11-22T06:54:00.000-08:00

Keylogger Threats Rise 65%
Secretly installed programs that track keystrokes represent a growing security threat to consumers using PCs.

Threats from keyloggers, the stealthily installed programs that record computer keystrokes to help steal personal information, grew 65 percent this year, a study said Tuesday, marking a growing trend in hackers using malware for financial gain.

About 6,191 keyloggers were recorded this year, up from 3,753 in 2004, said iDefense, a security intelligence provider that is part of VeriSign. iDefense recorded 3,753 keyloggers in 2004, a huge leap over the 300 released in 2000.

“Keylogging is a very effective method for hackers,” said Joe Payne, vice president, VeriSign iDefense Security Intelligence Services. “Fraudsters can launch hundreds of these attacks around the world in seconds, gathering sensitive data to conduct large-scale monetary transfers for their illegal activities.”

Keyloggers are largely distributed by organized cyber theft groups and are typically packaged with phishing emails or spyware, said iDefense.

A keylogger runs in the background, recording all the keystrokes of a user and hides it in the machine to be retrieved later. Once a keylogging program is activated, through a command from the hacker, it provides the hacker with personal data such as addresses, account numbers, or passwords—basically any strings of text a person enters.

“The object of a keylogger is to get the coveted password,” said George Waller, executive vice president of StrikeForce Technologies, a security company specializing in identity assurance products. “Keyloggers can capture keystrokes without you knowing it while advanced programs can even grab cookies and scrape the screen to get personal information.”

Keylogging can be perpetrated through emails known as phishing attacks. In these emails, users are lured into clicking on what seems like a harmless link. Once they do, a program is secretly downloaded into their computers.

The programs can also be spread if they are embedded on iPod files or picture files on major web sites. Hackers use techniques including chat program Internet Relay Chat and programs like trojans that give hackers backdoor access to systems to gather and filter logged keystrokes.

“There are so many victims because so few know the risk or the early warning signs; you simply can’t stop what you can't see,” said iDefense’s Mr. Payne.

Powering Identity Theft
A reason keyloggers are gaining attention among hackers is their potential use in identity theft.

“A sizable amount of these identity theft cases are the result of keyloggers that most people don’t realize they have on their machines,” said Mr. Waller.

The rise in keylogging is part of the trend of creating worms, viruses, and malware for profit. The Zotob worm attack in August was part of this trend, said security experts. Zotob attacked major corporations by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows operating system and signaled the rise of the “business worm,” or a new type of malicious software that targets enterprises rather than home users (see Zotob Heralds ‘Business Worm’).

“This is part of the process where attacks are moving from notoriety to criminalization,” said Ken Dunham, senior engineer, iDefense. “Hackers want to create malware they can leverage and use for identity theft and which can financially benefit them.”

Keyloggers have, however, flown under the radar as consumers and businesses have had their resources diluted because of the rise in the number of security threats this year (see Security Threats Rise 22%).

“Keyloggers are part of the latest wave of security problems that people don’t even know how to detect,” said Mr. Waller. “There needs to be greater education about the issue and how keyloggers perpetrate.”

Train free Microsoft

2005-11-04T06:31:00.000-08:00

Train free @Microsoft
There are two options available to interested IT professionals:
Beginners Training: A half day training that touches upon the fundamentals of each offering will be conducted at regular intervals across seven cities in the country. Interested participants can contact their nearest CPLS (Certified Partners in Learning Solution) training partners or register at www.microsoft.com/india/learning/cplsoffering.aspx
E-learning modules: For those looking for deeper training, Microsoft has introduced nine e-learning courses for SQL 2005 and seven courses for Visual Studio. Interested participants can apply for and undertake these courses for free by registering at www.microsoftelearning.com/visualstudio2005/ and www.microsoft.com/learning/sql

Create automatic A-Z page marker for the list of names using PHP

2005-10-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

Create automatic A-Z page marker for the list of names using PHP

$lastName = ucfirst($row1->LastName);
$firstchar = $lastName{0};
//ucfirst ($firstchar);
if($previous!=$firstchar)
{
     $previous=$firstchar;
     echo "<h4><a name=\"$previous\">$previous</a></h4>";
     echo "<br>";
}

Update all empty string data in MySQL Database to null

2005-10-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

Update all empty string data in MySQL Database to null

update
<table_Name>
set <table_Name>.<field_name>=null
Where
ASCII(<table_Name>.<field_name>) = 0

Now, high speed internet access via balloon

2005-10-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

Now, high speed internet access via balloon
Source: IANS. Image Source: IS
London, Oct 20: Scientists have for the first time tested a super fast data downlink provided by a stratospheric balloon floating 24,000 metres above the earth and such a craft could eventually help provide communications in disaster zones.

The 12,000-cubic metre helium balloon sent data to the ground at 1.25 gigabits per second - thousands of time the capacity of a home broadband Internet connection, reports the online edition of the New Scientist journal.

The airship test by a team of researchers led by Britain's University of York was conducted in Sweden. Scientists hope that such airships may eventually help in providing communications in disaster zones or low-cost access in the developing world.

David Grace, one of the scientists in the research team, said stratospheric communications balloons provided wireless alternatives to fixed Internet infrastructure.

"You could rapidly put communications infrastructure where it doesn't exist. In developing countries it could be a cheaper way to roll out, and you could do it incrementally, he said.

A BBC report said balloons hovering in the stratosphere could become an attractive alternative within three to five years as consumers demanding ever higher bandwidth.

Moreover, broadband via telephone lines had speed limitations while satellite was expensive and could support only a limited number of users, the report said.

It said the balloon could be an alternative to wired access in suburban areas where costs of roll out were high. It could also be offered on high-speed trains and in remote areas, the report said quoting an expert.

The cost of the balloon as compared to a satellite was also likely to be attractive, the report said.

"The launch cost of the infrastructure is likely to be one-tenth that of satellite and one airship can support a user density one thousand times that of a satellite," it said.

With each airship being able to support an area of 60 km, there would only need to be "a handful" to offer complete coverage in Britain. The trials of the technology will continue in Japan next year.

Populating the combo box in PHP

2005-10-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

Populating the combo box

Problem may occur when the values for the option tag are populated with values from database and those data have spaces. For Example If you populating names and there are names like “john, mary, alex ron” then

<option value=”**********“> may take values john, mary and alex instead alex ron.

To take care of this it is to be populated as (if using HTML within php script)

echo "<option value= "."'$row->abbrev'".">".$row->abbrev."</option>";

incorrect method would be

echo "<option value= "."$row->abbrev".">".$row->abbrev."</option>";

PC Pro: News: OpenOffice 2.0 released

2005-10-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

The new version of the OpenOffice productivity suite is now officially released. The open-source suite now sports a more professional looking user interface and a brand new database module. It also features the ace-in-the-hole - the Open Document file format based on the open-standard OASIS format for office applications.

OpenOffice 2.0 now features a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a drawing package (Draw), presentation graphics (Impress) and the new database module (Base) as well as Math and Gallery.

Where OpenOffice.org hopes to score with version 2.0 is that it is the first open-source office suite to offer full support for the OpenDocument format. Open Document is an XML file format specification for the full range of office productivity applications including text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. Already many government and public organisations are looking at OpenDocument compatibility as a way of adding competition to the Microsoft hegemony.

Additionally the OpenDocument format overcomes worries that by using a proprietary format for public sector and government documents, the public at largewill need to pay for a proprietary program to read them. Furthermore, an open format is the best way of ensuring that there will be software available in the future able to read these documents, when proprietary formats may well be obselete.

Written in Java and based on the HSQLDB database engine, the Base database module capable of creating self-contained, portable and cross-platform database applications. The result is claimed to be complete cross-platform compatibility and functionality between GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and Sun Solaris users that could prove very attractive to organisations with heterogeneous platforms such as academic institutions.

The Calc spreadsheet compatibility has been improved by the extension of the maximum number of rows to 65,536 rows. The extensions will not only please the spreadsheet junkies who like to use vast amounts of data, it also is the same size as Excel that means moving large files between the two is simpler. In addition, there have been a number of improvements to the Pivot table type 'DataPilot' enabling advanced analysis of data from spreadsheets and databases.

Overall, OpenOffice.org looks a very credible competitor to Microsoft Office 2003. However, the window of opportunity might be small as Redmond is planning its own major overhaul with Office 12 due next year.

Open Office version 2.0 is available from OpenOffice.org.

Your Laser Printer is a Spy

2005-10-19T06:46:00.000-07:00

Your Laser Printer is a Spy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a consumer privacy and digital rights organization, has analyzed codes embedded in printouts in color laser printers. The code cracked by the EFF was an invisible bar code that contained the serial number of the printer for tracking users as well as the date and time a page was printed. In Xerox printers the code appears in a pattern of yellow dots visible only with a magnifying glass and a blue light. The codes are supposed to be for government agencies looking out for counterfeit currency printers.
The EFF said it has identified similar coding on pages printed from virtually every major printer manufacturer though it has so far managed to crack the codes for only one Xerox model. Seth David Schoen, staff technologist, EFF, said that the dots are yellow, less than one millimeter in diameter, and are typically repeated over each page of a document. The pattern is visible under blue light with the help of a magnifying glass or a microscope. A complete list of the printers that have the yellow dots is given here. www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php. Though some printers do not produce the yellow dots, some of them leave other watermarks and may have other ways of identifying them.

Did u know

2005-10-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

Did u know?

You cannot create a folder named con, com1, com2, lpt1 on any of the Windows OS.

2005-10-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

Yahoo chief rates Google as No. 4 portal Yahoo Inc chairman Terry Semelm belittled rival Google Inc's recent efforts to expand beyond its leading Internet search engine, describing the diversification as a haphazard attempt to catch up with his company.

[via rediff Business]

A Better Option -- compression technique

2005-08-21T18:36:00.000-07:00

This man just came up with A Better Option

CHENNAI, AUGUST 21: Heard of the engineering graduate from Anna University in Chennai who came up with a revolutionary image compression technology that made big daddies MPEG, JPEG, GIF and TIFF look crude? He could soon be clambering onto your desktop.

In 2003, Arvind Thiagarajan invented ABO (Adoptive Binary Optimisation) to reduce the sizes of images and documents more effectively than anything that existed then.

Thiagarajan was working with the Singapore-based K K Women and Children Hospital when the head of cardiology at Asia’s biggest paediatric institute asked if he could help them transmit huge scanned images.

Little did the just-graduated engineer, with no specialised knowledge in imaging sciences, realise that he was about to create an IT revolution.

Thiagarajan was asked if it was possible to convert all the video images of echo-cardiograms, stored on VHS tapes, into digital formats.

To do it the traditional way would have cost the hospital a staggering $2.33 million and more than eight years. Plus, digitizing a 10-minute echo scan would require 16 GB storage space.

‘‘That was my starting point with compression algorithm and the beginning of MatrixView (a company which he subsequently floated),’’ Thiagarajan told The Indian Express, during a brief stopover in Chennai earlier this month.

He devised a method whereby each pixel was seen as a value stored in a matrix and, by arranging and rearranging them, he was able to achieve a compression of 30 times without a single pixel loss in the process.

‘‘In all other formats, there is a certain level of loss while compressing the image or data,’’ said Thiagarajan. The JPEG had managed a compression of a mere four to five times. ABO performed better on key parameters including, most importantly, image quality.

Impressed by Arvind’s achievement, an American doctor came up with a new expansion for ABO—‘A Better Option.’

Arvind wasted little time in getting an independent validation of his invention by auditing company, Ernst & Young, in Sydney.

Two years later, Arvind patented the algorithm behind the ABO. The IPO of his Singapore-based company MatrixView, promoted with investments from an NRI in Singapore and a Korean angel investor, was oversubscribed on the Australian Stock Exchange within the first hour.

‘‘Within five minutes of listing the company, the share price went up to one (Australian) dollar (about Rs 32). It tripled within a week. Today the share has stabilised at Rs 50 and currently our company’s market capitalisation is Rs 500 crore,’’ Thiagarajan said.

His sights are now on the US market. ‘‘Next year we are planning a major launch there.’’ For this, MatrixView is in the process of identifying partners for business development and corporate investments.

Soon, there will be a launch in the Indian market as well. ‘‘The scope is immense. In the medical field, the ABO will enable transfer of full, multi-size CT scan of 16 or more images, even on a dial-up internet line,’’ he said.

MatrixView’s financial solutions are already being implemented in the Hong Kong-based HSBC Ltd and an insurance company in Singapore.

‘‘Finally we want ABO to be available as a desktop utility catering to both image and data for all PCs,’’ said Thiagarajan. But, before that, the ‘Inventor and Chief Scientist’ of MatrixView will ‘‘perfect’’ his algorithm further and delve deeper into the exciting world of medical, financial and mobile solutions.

Our special India Empowered stories and columns are available at www.indiaempowered.com

Small is beautiful, ask
Arvind Thiagarajan

• Thiagarajan, working with a Singapore hospital, was asked if he could convert ECG video images into digital formats
• To do it the traditional way would have cost the hospital a $2.33 mn and more than eight years
• In 2003, he invented ABO to reduce sizes of images, documents; nothing that good existed until then
• Two yrs later, Arvind patented the algorithm behind the ABO. The IPO of his Singapore-based company MatrixView was oversubscribed on the Australian Stock Exchange within the first hour

Measure the size of monitors

2005-07-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

LCD's and CRT's sizes are measured differently, do you know the difference?

Not sure of the difference between "flat panel" and "flat screen"?

click on the above link.

UNIX Flavors

2005-07-30T11:02:00.000-07:00

Unix is not a single operating system. It has many flavors (aka. variants, types, or implementations). Although based on a core set of Unix commands, different flavors have their own unique commands and features, and designed to work with different types of hardware. No one knows exactly how many Unix flavors are there, but it is safe to say that if including all those that are obscure and obsolete, the number of Unix flavors is at least in the hundreds. You can often tell that an operating system is in the Unix family if it has a name that is a combination of the letters U, I, and X.

The following is some of the well-known Unix flavors, with links to their official home pages.

AIX by IBM
BSD/OS (BSDi) by Wind River
CLIX by Intergraph Corp.
Debian GNU/Linux by Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
Tru64 Unix (formerly Digital Unix) by Compaq Computer Corp.
DYNIX/ptx by IBM (formerly by Sequent Computer Systems)
Esix Unix Esix Systems
FreeBSD by FreeBSD Group
GNU Herd by GNU Organization
HAL SPARC64/OS by HAL Computer Systems, Inc.
HP-UX by Hewlett-Packard Company
Irix by Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Linux by several groups several
LynxOS by Lynx Real-Time Systems, Inc.
MacOS X Server by Apple Computer, Inc.
NetBSD by NetBSD Group
NonStop-UX by Compaq Computer Corporation
OpenBSD by OpenBSD Group
OpenLinux by Caldera Systems, Inc.
Openstep by Apple Computer, Inc.
Red Hat Linux by Red Hat Software, Inc.
Reliant Unix by Siemens AG
SCO Unix by The Santa Cruz Operation Inc.
Solaris by Sun Microsystems
SuSE by S.u.S.E., Inc.
UNICOS by Silicon Graphics, Inc.
UTS by UTS Global, LLC

Sub-menus do not load on one of the pages of your website

2005-07-15T12:33:00.000-07:00

One possible problem, that I faced was that the value assigned for the name attribute of the anchor tag, was similar to the one of the varible used in the menu script. This caused some kind of Java script error that did not display the submenus only on that particular page.

For example

If u have used something like

<a name="thisyear">

and suppose your javascript code also has a variable defined 'thisyear' then there is a high probability that there would be a javascript error raised.

CONNECTING MYSQL DATABASE THROUGH ASP

2005-07-14T10:56:00.001-07:00

We can use DSN-less method to connect to MYSQL Database by using connection string through ASP script. But to use the connection string, MYSQL ODBC drivers need to be installed at the host machine. The required drivers have been installed on grad.uta.edu so, we can access the mySql database without any problem. Once that is done, the following section describes how we can use conventional connection string method to access MYSQL database via Active X Data Objects (ADO).

Using a connection string (DSN-Less) (http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/50/4 )

An alternative to using a system DSN to connect to a MySQL database is the connection string. Connection strings allow us to connect to a database using an ADO connection object and its open method in the same way that we use a system DSN, however, instead of making the connection object retrieve our connection details from a DSN, we explicitly supply them, like this:

adoConn.Open "Driver={mySQL}; Server=localhost; Port=3306; Option=0; Socket=; Stmt=; Database=address; Uid=admin; Pwd=password;"

The connection string to connect to a MySQL database is specified in exactly the same way as that for an SQL Server or Access database. Each parameter is a name/value pair separated by a semi-colon. The details of each of these parameters are shown below:

For more details, please open the link ((http://www.devarticles.com/art/1/50/4 )
Following is the link for downloading the MySQL ODBC driver.
http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc.html

Following are the instructions for downloading:

1. Start by firing up your web browser and heading over to http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc.html .Take a look under the "Versions" tab on the right hand side of the page and click on MyODBC. At the time of writing, the current version on MyODBC was 2.50.39.

2. Under the "MyODBC for Windows" section, click on the link that matches your operating system. In this article I'm focusing on Windows NT/2000, so click the NT/2000/XP link. This will take you to the mirrors page. Click on the link for the mirror that's closest to you and save the download to a folder on your hard drive (The download is a 1.45MB .zip file, so visit WinZip.com to download WinZip if you haven’t got it already).

3. Once complete, extract the zip file to a temporary directory and run the included setup.exe file. This will install the MyODBC driver. When the installation is completed, simply click on the close button to bypass the data sources con

Q & A about web languages

2005-07-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.alt-php-faq.org/ ------------------------ PHP Q and A

http://www.abiglime.com/webmaster/articles/asp/011298p7.htm ---- ASP Q & Ans

How to create a printable version of a web page?

2005-07-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

A printable page can be created using javascript/scripting languages like PHP or CSS. The following link explains the creation of a printable page using CSS.
http://webdesign.about.com/cs/css/a/aa042103a.htm

How to disable the enter key in a form?

2005-07-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

The following link gives the javascript code that can be used to disable the enter key in a form. http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex16/disableenter.htm

Note about comments in HTML

2005-07-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

Many people who attempt to put comments into their HTML code -- text intended for the reference of the developer but not to be displayed by the browser -- get the syntax wrong, which can cause some browsers to mistakenly display part of the comment, or even worse, consider big chunks of the rest of the document to be a comment and ignore them. This widespread confusion about comment syntax is understandable given that HTML comment syntax is a rather inscrutable outgrowth of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), a language devised for the formatting of government documents which formed the basis of HTML. Maybe some of the same people who devised the 1040 tax forms also created the syntax rules for SGML, and hence HTML.

Cont...

The PHP page does not get displayed on IE if there is any HTML comment . But when view source for the page is done all the code present there

2005-07-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

Solution : There may be a open comment tag on one of the include files of your page that may not have been closed…… that causes a blank page to be uploaded in IE but works in netscape and morzilla

Displaying HTML code on your without browser having to interpret to it

2005-07-14T10:28:00.000-07:00

Enclose the code inside <pre> and </pre> and the less than sign (<) and greater than sign (>) of any tags inside pre should be given as
< for < and
< for >

For example if you want to display anchor tag <A> you would give as
< A <

Auto Refresh your page

2005-07-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

Add the following meta tag in the head section of the HTML page

<meta content="180" equiv="refresh">
Value of content attribute is in seconds

Comparing two strings

2005-07-14T10:04:00.000-07:00

To compare Strings for equality, don't use ==. The == operator checks to see if two objects are exactly the same object

Onclick event

2005-07-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

onClick sets a script to run when the user clicks on
the link.For example, this link creates an alert box which
says Heading Home! when the link is clicked:



<A HREF="mypage.oc.html" onClick="alert('Heading Home!')"
>My Page</A>

One of the more useful uses of onClick is creating a popup window
which the links targets. This example uses our popup window script
<A

HREF="mypage.popup.html"

onClick="return openWindow(this,'mypage')"

>My Page</A>

If onClick returns
a value of false then the click is cancelled and the browser doesn't
go anywhere. For example, you could check if a user really wanted
to go to a URL like this:


<A >
    HREF="deleted.oc.html"
    onCLick="return confirm('Are you SURE you want
                to delete this record?')"
    >Delete It!</A>

source : http://www.idocs.com/tags/

On click event

2005-07-13T06:29:00.000-07:00

onClick sets a script to run when the user clicks on the link. For example, this link creates an alert box which says Heading Home! when the link is clicked:

a href="mypage.oc.html" onclick="alert('Heading Home!')">My Page

One of the more useful uses of onClick is creating a popup window which the links targets. This example uses our popup window script

a href="mypage.popup.html" onclick="return openWindow(this,'mypage')">My Page

If onClick returns a value of false then the click is cancelled and the browser doesn't go anywhere. For example, you could check if a user really wanted to go to a URL like this:

a href="deleted.oc.html" onclick="return confirm('Are you SURE you want to delete this record?')">Delete It!

CAPTCHA

2005-07-12T13:06:00.000-07:00

CAPTCHA – completely automated public turing test to tell computers and humans apart

--- the security that prevents auto submission of the pages
--- its the curly hazy text that is seen on many sites for verification purposes

Display the results returned from an EXPLAIN query in PostgreSQL

2005-07-11T08:42:00.001-07:00

Information from the EXPLAIN query is retrieved by using the pg_last_notice function.

The last notice is the last notice for the connection, not the result set, so the data overwritten with each query.
/*
// $connect = pg_connect();
$query = "explain select * from {table}";
$resultID = pg_exec($connect,$query);
$result_text = pg_last_notice($connect);
print_r(nl2br($result_text));
?>

*/

Variable interpolation

2005-07-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

$name=”Tom petty”;
echo “my name is $name”;
?>

output:

my name is Tom petty ------------------------ variable interpolation

$name=”Tom petty”;
echo ‘my name is $name’;
?>

output:

my name is $name ------------------------ variable interpolation

How do I get a user's IP address ?

2005-07-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

The users ip address is stored in the environment variable $REMOTE_ADDR, if you want to resolve the domain name for that ip (if any) use:

$domain = GetHostByName($REMOTE_ADDR);

Command to Check whether server is down or not

2005-07-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

Telnet : for checking if the server is down or not.

Ping will not work since it may be blocked from the router.

Database : Cartesian product

2005-07-11T07:48:00.000-07:00

Definiton : Retrieves all the tuples from the combination of table

Equivalent of Cartesian product in SQL - Cross Join

Ways to optimize Database queries

2005-07-07T07:22:00.000-07:00

1. Indexing
2. using Explain

There are many other ways, Please add them in your comments.

How to get character é displayed on ur webpage

2005-07-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

Well use É on your PHP or HTML page . Did you spent hours trying to find out how to get that character. - VJ

Modify ur code to put footer always in the bottom irrespective of size of ur page

2005-07-07T07:17:00.000-07:00

If ur footer is moving up and down according to contents of your page....... Its about time to change ur code. The link here descibes more about doing it http://www.pmob.co.uk/temp/3colfixedtest_explained.htm

Is your webpage cluttered with too many tables ?

2005-07-07T07:15:00.000-07:00

Try using CSV and DIV tags to put headers and fotters on your page. http://www.pmob.co.uk/temp/3colfixedtest_explained.htm

Are you duplicating code in every page of ur website?

2005-07-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

If your answer is yes then its about time to fine tune your code behind the pages.... Follow this interesting link I found http://www.ryanbrill.com/archives/including-content-with-php/