NoahClassified Addon Released
I glad to announce that a new addons for openinstaller is released today. Its Noah Classifieds.. You can download it from here. For a bit of background Noah Classified as from the name is a classified ads php web app. You can view info about it from their website http://classifieds.phpoutsourcing.com/
Yet Another People Power?
I dont know about people from the NCR.. but im just sick and tired of that people power movement thing. I think that is already abused by the people who are hungry for power. If you ask me.. id rather stick with the current leadership than join any movement to oust the current president.. Its a really alarming trend.. Today i woke with the airwaves buzzing with the terms “state of emergency, martial law and people power” i did a little research and tried to search for things about people power and EDSA. I found this qoute from wikipedia..
Some political scientists have even said that the Philippines today is one of the worst examples of a democratic state; that the Philippines is still not ready for true democracy. Some Filipinos have labelled Philippine democracy as the tyranny of the masses and mob rule.
Its quite embrassing for this country to be label as the “worst example of a democratic state” but sadly such is true. We still have not learn to acknowledge any limits to rights granted to us by being in a democratic state. As from my conversations on forums before when i was try to get a pulse on the other side during the hello garci thing.. i can tell that the opposition are so intent on that what they are doing is for the common good and they are fixed on that changing the current leaders will change the lives of the poor and will allow this country to progress. Which sadly i dont believe so .. i believe that changing the current leadership will only result to more instability and more chaos.
As from my other post the Philippines is on this fragile state for year not only cause of our leaders but cause of ourselves.. We have really great flaws as a people and we always fail to acknowledge them.. changing this country would not take overnight (as others believe) it takes for each of us Filipinos to change our attitutes.. We should learn to respect the law and acknowledge the with great rights (like the freedom of speech and assembly and etc) that we are enjoying are attached with limits.
LightBox JS
I found this cool javascript.. it overlays the full image of a thumbnail on the page.. it really cool.. check out the gallery… you can download Lightbox JS from here
I find the Lightbox plus even better. LightBox Plus has this fit on screen button on the upper left corner. You can scroll to the bottom of the link to Lightbox JS.. It would be much much cooler if it could somehow do slideshows.. it would certainly be usefull on my gallery..
I will try and look the LightBox JS code.. i will see if i can get it to have next and previous buttons.. i think it is possible though.. im going to try and see if i can integrate sarissa with it.. My plan is to use sarissa to query the next image.. It might take a while though to have what i mentioned accomplished.. cause 1) lack of time on my part and 2)working with javascript is always a headache for me.. if only there is an editor for javascript just like Zend Studio for PHP it would be a lot easier.. if you guys know of any drop me a message.. : )
Drag Racing Filipino Style
On my way to a bank this noon.. at the Flyover near the waterfront hotel.. i encountered this two guys(one was not wearing a shirt) drag racing modified motorcycles… It may be just here in the Philippines that we see things such as this.. I should also probably mention this.. the traffic authorities where just about a 100 meters away from them tending to a motorcycle crash.. I repeat A MOTORCYCLE CRASH… These people never learn…
As i continued driving.. over and over i was trying to understand what level of stupidy are they in to do such a thing.. even until now im still unable to figure out why they do such a thing.. For months now, i have been observing how most of us behave on the roads.. i have observed that most of us just disregard traffic rules.. Some concrete examples of that are the guys drag racing in the middle of the day with light traffic.. and also the jeepneys drivers that seem to think they own the road.. if only i had some say on these things .. i take a baseball bat and crack their heads open…
Every night on the news.. i see people trying to place the blame on someone on where the philippines is now… but i think we have a better chance at turning this country around if we try and instill discipline and respect for the law on our children and for each of us to try and live as models..
Zoundry Blog Writer
Its 11:13 PM.. i was surfing around check for stuff on blogging. I found the nice software on posting on your blog offline.. its Zoundry Blog Write.. This is just a test post.. I will be posting my thoughts on it soon and screen shots as well.. But so far so good.. The software seems really cool. I can only hope this makes posting on my blog a lot easier doing it on the web is kinda slow and i hate the white screen on reloads when you click the link.
You can download the software from here
A Touch Of AJAX On Oscommerce
For about 2 days not i have been working on putting a touch of AJAX onto oscommerce admin.. I got the idea when one of my client requested of a mod on oscommerce that require AJAX and also i have been receiving quite a number of complaints and inquiries why the oscommerce admin is slow and it takes so much time just to get one thing done. AJAX seem to be the answer to that… after a couple of hours of looking into the admin area code of oscommerce.. i came up of the idea of creating a simple page with one div then loading a layout page via XMLhttpRequest then load the menu on one of the elements within that..
For about 2 days not i have been working on putting a touch of AJAX onto oscommerce admin.. I got the idea when one of my client requested of a mod on oscommerce that require AJAX and also i have been receiving quite a number of complaints and inquiries why the oscommerce admin is slow and it takes so much time just to get one thing done. AJAX seem to be the answer to that… after a couple of hours of looking into the admin area code of oscommerce.. i came up of the idea of creating a simple page with one div then loading a layout page via XMLhttpRequest then load the menu on one of the elements within that..
After thinking it over.. i finally seattled on a layout page with three areas one div for the header.. one for the expanding menu and one for the contents area which will contain the configurations and etc… depeding on which ever is clicked on the side menu…
On the php side.. osc i removed the if this is active echo the links on the modules on includes on oscommerce… as a result i had a side menu with all of it expanded.. work ok for me.. but i will have to find a way to make it expand later…
I decided then that im going to try and work on the configuration first on OSC… so i took apart the configuration.php on admin .. i also decided to put all chunks of it on a directory.. its a great way to get the code organized.. i would hate to work on osc with all the chunks later in one dir.. it would certainly be hell for me… Just one problem with having the chunks of configuration.php on one dir.. is that the language file does not seem to load.. i tried to patch the language part on application_top.php but my patching did not work.. so for the mean time i settled on requiring the language page manually into the chunks…
I removed the header section on configuration.php and also the footer.. then i copy and pasted the are where the setting are put into a table and then copy and pasted the info box on the side to another file… on each file i included the application_top.php and application_bottom.php and since most of the OSC areas start with that..
Oscommerce Mods
For the past 4 hours i have been working on a mod of the admin section of oscommerce, the mod specs seemed simple so i jumped right to it.. It basically involved the having a dropdown of all orders that are processing and when the drop down is changed the info about the order is loading below the drop down without reloading the page..
For the past 4 hours i have been working on a mod of the admin section of oscommerce, the mod specs seemed simple so i jumped right to it.. It basically involved the having a dropdown of all orders that are processing and when the drop down is changed the info about the order is loading below the drop down without reloading the page..
For such a task, there is only one technology that i know of that would allow me to do such a thing.. AJAX
Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax (Pronounced A-JAX), is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to shift a great deal of interaction to the Web surfer’s computer, exchanging data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability. The Ajax technique uses a combination of:
- XHTML(or HTML) and CSS for marking up and styling information.
- The DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations like JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented
- The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in some situations, an IFrame object is used instead of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the web server.
- XML is commonly used as the format for transfering data, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML.
For the past 4 hours i have been working on a mod of the admin section of oscommerce, the mod specs seemed simple so i jumped right to it.. It basically involved the having a dropdown of all orders that are processing and when the drop down is changed the info about the order is loading below the drop down without reloading the page..
Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. In fact, derivative/composite technologies based substantially upon Ajax, such as AFLAX, are already appearing.”
Special Thanks to wikipedia for such a nice definition of AJAX.
Months before this AJAX related task, i was reading up on it so im not exactly a new to it.. but this is my first time that im really obliged to have the thing working.. mostly before i just type the examples on the webpages and test.. to see what it does.. So on to research on any prebuilt stuff that could have the cross browser AJAX.. as from what i read from my research month ago there are differences between IE and the other browser when it comes to it..
So my first stop.. is http://www.sf.net/.. right then when the page loaded the search AJAX on the site after a couple of pages i got to Sarissa. Sarrisa is an open source javascript class that handles the cross browser stuff.. i was a bit disappointed with the documentation though there are not a lot of examples i can refer to… so i thought google can help with with searching for people who have been messing around with it.. and have posted their work on their blogs.. Thank god for blogging i said.. To my disappointed after 2 hours of trying to figure it out.. i decided that maybe Sarissa was not the way to go to accomplish my task today cause of the time frame involved..
After a couple of minutes of searching google for AJAX stuff i finally got to something that works.. I copied and pasted code here for the convenience of everyone.. i found it on http://www.omnytex.com/articles/xhrstruts/. I know it does not involved PHP but the javascript works great. The section on properties and description is really helpfull.
You read the article here: http://www.omnytex.com/articles/xhrstruts/
The snippet i used is:var req;
var which;
function retrieveURL(url) {
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Non-IE browsers
req = new XMLHttpRequest();
req.onreadystatechange = processStateChange;
try {
req.open("GET", url, true);
} catch (e) {
alert(e);
}
req.send(null);
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE
req = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
if (req) {
req.onreadystatechange = processStateChange;
req.open("GET", url, true);
req.send();
}
}
}
function processStateChange() {
if (req.readyState == 4) { // Complete
if (req.status == 200) { // OK response
document.getElementById("urlContent").innerHTML = req.responseText;
} else {
alert("Problem: " + req.statusText);
}
}
}
I had to change the id of the div layer on processChangeState to the name of my layer. I would try and redo the function such that i can somehow change the id using a function or make a class out of this.. That should surely make it such that i can reuse it for other apps.. Also i will be looking into Sarissa and try to make it work.. i will be posting examples soon..
As for the PHP side of thing.. i had to remove some stuff on the product info page on oscommerce i had to remove some tags and that about it the queries and the php stuff is already there i just had to clean it up with the php code for processing updates and etc..
AJAX seems to be a really nice thing when you have it going.. Now i have this crazy idea of modifying OScommerce so the the center part of the page is the only thing that loads when you click a category.. i dont know if that is possible but it surely is really interesting to find out if it can be done.
Just Some Thoughts About WordPress
All i can say wordpress is a great web app.. the new AJAX additions weems to work quite nicely. I find it very easy to use.. Im thinking of having my entire site basically WordPress + a number of plugins..
Another nice thing about wordpress is that the documentation is really good and easy to understand… very easy in fact.. This should make step one of my site development really straight forward.. which is really helpfull .. considering other than market my services which is web development and design i also have to code for my client.. Im a One man army.. which mean basically time for me is a valuable commodity.. A lot of thanks goes to the WordPress developers for such a nice piece of artwork.
PHP Win32 class nightware
Been working on this project which requires that i query the username and where the user is logged on (i.e RDP or console) on windows 2003 server.. I have spent most of my weekend on this… (sorry folks not many OI installer releases this weekend). It was not a surprise when i found out that the extension for PHP that allow you to make windows API calls is a very flacky.. MS and opensource stuff doesnt always match i guess..
WordPress in OI does not work
Today i got an idea i have been thinking about for months.. which was to start a blog where i can post anything that comes to mind and more importanly i can post news on and comment on stuff concerning PHP and my obsession these days ( Building openinstaller addons). It feels really nice when people appreciate your work and knowing that your creations have made things easier.. I can only wish more people can jump in a create there addons.
I was browsing through the http://www.opensourcecms.com checking out the blog software and after a couple of hours of messing around with the demos.. i found wordpress to be the nicest and the easiest to use.. next i checked out the openinstaller addons and i was glad that wordpress is listed there.. This is going to be easy… Im the kind of guy that if i can take an easier way to do thing i will take that way.. so i went on and tried to install wordpress and to my horror it did not work.. it showed me this page with just some text on it.. ( im just too lazy to take note of it.. sorry folks ). Id expected OI to install it and it will take me to a fully functioning web app..
I will be checking it out tomorrow.. i will see if i can fix it..