I saw a commercial this evening for high speed WIFI wherever you go, eliminating the need for using pay hotspots. I missed the website address, but I think it was for Verizon, but I couldn’t find anything on their website. The same for T-Mobile. In fact, I can’t find anything out there.

It was about $60 a month I think. It’s a little more than we’re paying for Comcast high speed internet, but hey… you can supposedly go ANYWHERE.

I read an article out there (can’t find the link now) about a town in Michigan that actually has town-wide WIFI access that you can patch into (probably for a fee I’m sure). So I know it’s possible. Now it’s just finding out what carrier offers high speed WIFI access anywhere.

Filed under: General
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Well, it’s my first real day and opportunity to start diving into the world of ASP.NET and adding that to my toolbelt. I’ve been a PHP guy for about four years now and have become relatively comfortable with it and consider myself at about intermediate level. But I’ve always been haunted by the fact that I don’t do ASP. I plan on changing that.

I’m using the book SAMS Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days (Second Edition) and for the most part it is really easy to follow. It does have its moments of personal interjection and needless comments…

…The browser is a dumb application, in a sense. It can only interpret HTML, and that’s it…

Kind of a rude statement, I think. That’s like saying, “you’re dumb because you only can read english”. It might be more appropriate to say something like “The browser is limited in its capabilities and can really only interpret HTML”. You can call IE a dumb browser if you want… I don’t mind. But when Firefox is concerned, you better watch out pal. You’re treading on thin ice.

But all that aside, I actually like ASP.NET so far. I like the forms integration and how the server interacts better with the client and the syntax seems pretty logical for the most part… so far.

I will be curious to see how PHP is compiled in the CRL and used.

Filed under: ASP.NET
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So, I’ve got both Apache 2 and IIS 5.1 installed on my laptop and need both web server environments for testing purposes and was trying to find a quick-n-dirty way to start and stop both services without having to drill through shortcuts and clicking on this or that. I just wanted to run a quick .bat file that’d handle it all for me quick and easy.

With a little digging and researching on starting and stopping services, I put together two .bat files, one to start IIS and stop Apache, and the other to do the opposite, stop IIS and start Apache.

Anyway, here’s what you need to do to perform this quick-n-dirty operation. Open up a text editor and prepare to copy-n-paste-n-save.

The file to start IIS and stop Apache2:

NET STOP "Apache2"
NET START "World Wide Web Publishing"

Paste that in your editor and name it something like startIIS.bat and save it someplace accessible like your desktop or your start menu.

The file to stop IIS and start Apache2:

NET STOP "World Wide Web Publishing"
NET START "Apache2"

do the same as the first file, but name it something like stopIIS.bat.

Now here’s the catch on this though, the words in “quotations” are the actual name of the service as found in your list of services running in Windows 2000/XP. The name will vary from OS to OS. It may be “Personal Web Server”, “World Wide Web Publishing”, “Apache”, “IIS” or some othe name similar to that. Whatever the case may be, make sure you’re referencing the exact service name (you’ll find that under the “Name” field).

Hope that helps you out like it did me. It proves useful for working with two server environments on one machine—now it’s easy for me to do testing and development within the ASP.NET framework as well as switching over to a more “*nix-like” environment with Apache running PHP/MySQL.

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This seems to be a prevalant problem out there—a startup error with php_mysql.dll when it comes to PHP 5, MySQL, and the windows environment:

PHP Startup: unable to load dynamic library ‘c:\php\ext\php_mysql.dll’

I did have it working fine for awhile, but then I installed a PHP compiler for .NET and that kinda hosed up my operation a bit. I’m not exactly sure what went wrong. So I removed it and tried to “reinstall” PHP 5 and configure it along with apache 2 and kept getting the error message.

But the friggin DLL is RIGHT THERE!!

After scouring the web with 80 billion people saying “aaah, I can’t figure out what to do” I found one guy who posted his solution and it seemed to work for me. But here’s the kicker… what fixed the problem was running PHP5 in CGI MODE. That is, I had to modify apache’s configuration file to include this patch for PHP:

ScriptAlias /php/ "c:/php/"
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
Action application/x-httpd-php "/php/php-cgi.exe"

The mysql error disappeared upon restart of apache services. I can’t say this for certain, but it’d appear that there is some sort of disconnect between PHP 5 and Apache regarding the handling of .dll extensions in the windows environment when trying to use php5apache2.dll as a module of Apache.

Guess I’ll be running PHP as a cgi.

Filed under: Development, PHP
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With my quest to learn how to develop in the ASP.NET environment, I found a PHP compiler for the .NET environment called Phalanger. It supposedly will allow you use PHP within the .NET framework and use the two interchangeably to some extent. I don’t know the details offhand as I’m still new to ASP.NET and haven’t really read through the compiler site, but looks promising.

See http://www.php-compiler.net/

Filed under: PHP
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I’ve been in a personal quandry for some time now, wrestling with issues of self, God, church, and finding value and meaning in my life. It seems lately it’s been difficult and near impossible to see what worth or value I have, that others might see that value and not only take notice, but acknowledge or become an advocate of what I have to contribute to the world. Finding visible evidence of that sort of moral support and encouragement (without openly soliciting for it) hasn’t exactly been obvious—probably more subtle, perhaps like a mental well-wishing. Good for you Michael. Hope that works out for you.

(more…)

Filed under: Awareness, General, Spirituality
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So someone called the house last night at about 4 in the morning—I didn’t pick up because very few people I know actually call me at home—and at 4 AM?

So I checked the area code and prefix at thedirectory.org for the area code 337 and the prefix 397 and it returned Leesville, Louisiana. Uh…. I don’t know anyone in Leesville, LA, let alone anywhere in Louisiana.

I checked Google Maps to find out how far in-land it is from the coast and it turned out to be a little over 100 miles or so (as the crow flies) from the coast and maybe 20 miles west of Alexandria, LA. I’m sure they weren’t hit nearly as hard there as the folks in New Orleans, but it has my curiosity piqued a little bit as to why I got a call that early/late. The caller ID said “Iverson, Jr Rand” (cut off at the D)… and I just can’t think of any Iverson’s that I might know.

Anyway, a little weirdness for this morning’s blog entry.

Filed under: General
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I hate to just post a blog entry about a problem with no solution—I think part of the reason for blogging about something is to share some knowledge or insights that others might be looking for. With this entry I have nothing but questions.

It seems that First Chair (vers 1.0) [running in the Windows environment using Apache and maybe IIS] falls apart when migrated over to PHP5 from PHP4. What’s breaking the flow? Sessions. Isaac and I have been scouring the web for information about this predicament and have found a small handful of suggestions, of which I’ve only found one to fit the bill.

The Problem

User heads to the login page and session is initiated, giving them a session_id through PHP. Somewhere between the action of posting the form values, processing that information, and redirecting them to the target page, that session information is dumped and a new session_id is assigned to the browser.

The Only Work-Arounds I Know Of

It seems you’ve really only got two options when it comes to using some semblance of a session_id to uniquely identify a user:

1. Use cookies instead and generate a string based on their IP address and a timestamp of their initial visit and forsake all usage of PHP sessions, or
2. The more annoying alternative, ensure that you’re passing the PHPSESSID variable through your redirects. It’s ugly. It’s inconvenient. But it seems to “work” for the time being.

Frankly, the idea of having to go into all your redirect statements (both JavaScript and header(”Location: “)) isn’t pretty and you persistantly get that ugly URL string in your browser location box. Developers at PHP.NET are saying that it’s not a bug, and that it’s actually an HTTP error. But the question remains, what changed from PHP 4.4 to PHP 5.0 that is causing HTTP to break down in regards to session handling?

I would really like to hear from other PHP developers on this issue—I’d post ‘em at bugs.php.net, but it seems that anything posted there about the “session bug” gets slammed and closed immediately because of their defiant position that it’s an HTTP issue.

I’ve put together a little PHP script that will help you test your PHP environment to see if session passing with redirects will be a problem. There are three links I’ve set up in the file, one to test a redirect without passing the session_id, one to test redirecting while passing the session_id, and the last to just test a link to ensure your session remains in-tact.

You can download the script here. Make sure you remove the .txt extension before attempting to use it.

Filed under: PHP
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We’ve finally got a new supervisor to replace the old one who left several weeks ago. That’s how slow the system is. He starts Monday—so we’re all bracing ourselves for his management style, which remains unknown to us. He’s an experienced Creative Director, so we know he’s got the capabilities—but we’re unsure as to how he’s going to respond to the environment of the ‘MO.

Meanwhile things are really picking up for me to the point of managing a couple projects simultaneously, including acquiring voice talents for audio voiceovers we’re doing, developing flash modules for those voiceovers, redesigning the intranet home page (who ever thought you could stretch the development of one page over a three-month period), amd of course my favorite pet project… fixing the rabbit hole. Busy busy.

I’d REEEEALLY like to go back to bed though this morning. I could go for another two hours of sleep.

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The Intranet project at work is going to be interesting. What turned out to be just a discussion about how we were going to reel in rogue websites to conform to new branding standards, turned out to be the beginning of a MUCH larger undertaking. Let’s just say that this project could be enough to last for at least a year or so.

The Intranet contains a few hundred pages, some well organized and placed, many arbitrarily placed with no logical explanation. So I’ve gotta try to find a good .NET based content management system (or create one while learning C#.NET) and develop some sort of process or plan for migrating the intranet from hundreds of static html files to a robust dynamic system that will have smart user management. Heck, if it could plug into the users system with Lotus Notes, that’d be very cool.

But I tell you, that application I blogged about earlier (the Mind Mapper thing) sure came in handy. It’s quite powerful and did all that I needed it to (and more). Kudos to that development team.

Filed under: Development
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