Yahoo GeoLocation API
The Yahoo Maps API is the best API I've found for using on in internal site. Google won't let me access theirs from a non-public site.
imagegrabwindow() and imagegrabscreen()
I stumbled over these two new functions in the PHP CVS today. They are only available in Windows as they use COM, but interesting non the least.
Nicer Pagination with ADOdb
Or should that be Nicr? To follow in an annoying theme.
Olavo Alexandrino wrote a nice well rounded class for record set pagination in ADOdb. If you've ever used ADOdb's version, you will know it is not very good, to say the least.
Although Olavo did a fantastic job on the logic, the presentation left a little to be desired from my perspective.
I am providing my modifed version for download below, it provides a few logic updates and better presentation.
Idiot Proof Lightbox
I've just made some modifications to my Gallery code which is part of i9000's small site CMS software.
It adds some client side logic to make sure the images Lightbox 2 creates fit the users screen perfectly. Previous to this some customers were complaining that the images they uploaded were too big for their visitor's screen.
This allows us to present the largest possible image to the user without scrolling around the page.
Poor mans currency conversion
I recently completed a project that required currency conversion. I was limited what I could get out through the corporate firewall, so I came up with this.
It connects to Yahoo! with curl and reads a CSV string into memory.
Read a file into an array
Here's something that puddled me for a while...
$filename = 'file.txt';
$file_handle = fopen($filename, 'r');
$data = '';
while(!feof($file_handle)){
$data .= fgets($file_handle, 1024);
}
Converting XLS to CSV. Simple, eh? Well, sorta.
I hate problems that can be solved really easily. (With a totally different set of tools). I needed to open Excel (XLS) files in PHP. Simple enough you think, IF you are using Windows.
IF I was using Windows, I would have a bunch of options open to me, I could use PHP's COM & .NET functions. Or PHP's ODBC functions. Or a selection of classess from PHP Classes.
file_exists(), is_file() & is_dir() with spaces?
Why won't file_exists(), is_file(), is_dir() return true if the file or directory has a space in it?
I spent a few hours trying all kinds of ways to make this work. I finally settled on using $file->setName("safe"); from PEAR's HTTP_Upload class which makes the uploaded file "safe".
What's safe?
Yellow text?
I stumbled over a strange bug on two systems the other day where the imagettftext() function was always writing the text in yellow. No matter how I set the colour, imagecolorallocate($image, 0, 0, 0);, I would always get yellow. Why yellow?
Both systems are Ubuntu, I don't know if it is a mix up on the libraries from the package, or indeed PHP.
I had to recompile PHP ignoring the --with-ttf option which most docs suggest, and just use the --with-freetype-dir instead. Problem solved.
“Mail option not available!”
I spotted a strange PHP "feature" in the error_log() feature.
PHP checks for sendmail functionality once during ./configure for the mail() and error_log() functions.
Now, you can quite happily pass the sendmail path with the 'additional_parameters' flag to the mail() function, if you added mail support later but error_log() won't take that flag, so it fails with "Mail option not available!"
Rule: Install postfix/qmail/whatever BEFORE installing PHP if you want to use mail as an error_log() option.
