Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

The mid-term elections are just one more day away. I want to encourage everyone to get out and vote. It is your civic duty and responsibility. We as a country can not progress unless we participate in our democracy and make positive changes in our federal government.

I personally feel we are getting bogged down in a pointless war. This is much less a war than an occupation. The enemy only exists because of our occupation. If we didn’t maintain a presence in Iraq, then there wouldn’t be any “war” to speak of. It’s time to get the train back on track and make positive strides in Iraq.

George Bush’s idea of taking the war to the enemy is a false one. This war was fabricated and manufactured by the Republican administration. It was started to help out the people who helped get Bush into power. The first goal was to ensure a stable supply of oil to the oil industries in the United States. An added benefit was the defense and civil engineering contracts which were doled out to Bush’s friends.

Lastly, I think this war was designed to distract from major changes the Bush administration has made to income taxes, health care (medicare) and social security, student loans and immigration. By sowing fear into the hearts of our citizens, Bush has attempted to energize this country into shifting more power to the executive and shift fortunes from the middle class to the super rich (ie: large corporations and big government).

Remember what this administration has done for you. Remember Hurricane Katrina. Remember the inadequate armor and supplies for our troops. Remember privatizing social security. Remember Osama Bin Laden (oh yeah, we didn’t forget about him). Remember Abu Gharaib. Remember Harriet Miers (supreme court nominee). Remember Scott Abramhoff, Robert Frist, Bob Ney, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick (shooting accident) Cheney, Karl Rove and Scott Foley. Remember all of the concessions Republicans have made in the Congress and Senate (there have been NONE). Remember how they manipulated the elections by phone jamming schemes, disenfranchising African-American voters and Katherine Harris forcing a recount in Florida.

Lastly, remember the paltry $500 tax relieve Bush gave us and remember the tax windfall that billionaire CEOs (all Republicans received). Wages have remained flat while inflation has increased our cost-of-living. The national surplus has been turned into a massive national deficit has exploded and is now at 8.6 trillion dollars. Let me write this out to make this clear: $8,604,232,678,606. With the current population of the United States at 300 million, this means that each citizens share of this debt (which will have to be paid back) is a staggering $28,665!

If you disagree with what I’ve said then be all means get out and vote. Even if you agree with what I’ve said, it’s imperative that you get out and vote. In the past two major elections, people have voted for moral values and family security. Sadly, the way the vote turned has been detrimental to both of these essential values. Now is the time for you to correct our country and live up to the ideals of our founding fathers. Protect our constitution and restore dignity to American values.

The other day, I just installed Firefox 2.0 to try it out on my machine. I am pretty impressed with the new browser although it isn’t a while lot different from the previous version. I had a problem with installing it the first time because when I tried to close my old Firefox, it appeared to close but it was actually still running when I installed. This caused all sorts of problems with the install such as missing images on the setup dialog and having all of my bookmarks disappear.

So I did the smart thing and uninstalled the application and then re-installed. This fixed all of the problems I was experiencing. I was disappointed that my favorite theme (Qute 3.1) was not supported in the new browser, however, I am able to enjoy the new default theme which matches the new Windows Vista interface quite nicely. My bookmark synchronizer also hasn’t been ported to the new browser. These issues are to be expected since the browser was only just released a couple of days ago.

I would definitely recommend doing some user tweaks to the browser after you first get it installed. I found some good tweaks from the developer site dzone.com. They include disabling the browser pre-fetch which attempts to pre-load pages that are linked to the page you are viewing. You can also tweak the amount of memory that Firefox uses and the behavior of the tab close buttons (which are changed in 2.0).

One of my favorite tweaks is the built-in spell checker which will check any typing you do in web forms. All text fields are checked in real time as you type. If you mis-spell a word, the word will be underlined in red. By right-clicking on the word, you can pick a suggested corrected spelling or you can add the word to the dictionary if you know it’s correct and shouldn’t be flagged as mis-spelled.

I recommend that you give this excellent program a try. Internet Explorer is introducing IE 7 which contains a lot of similar features. The benefits of Firefox is that it is more secure (since hackers don’t target it as much as IE). It has an excellent skinable architecture with it’s themes support and the add-ons and extensions allow you to customize it to do whatever you like. I rate this software 5 out of 5 stars.

When comparing PHP scripts to Active Server Pages, there is a huge difference between the way you use include files. When using ASP, you either have to use Server-Side Includes or the Server.Execute statement to include one script inside another. In PHP, you have a lot more options. You can use “include”, “require” or “require_once” to include a file.

One of the shortcomings of Server-Sidie includes is that you cannot include a file more than once. This causes problems when you want to do a conditional include. In most cases, you will only need to include a filie once. One case where you might want to include a file twice is an admin login check. With such a script, you would check to see if the user is logged in and if not, you would display the login form. Because you want to include a header and footer in the login include and also include the header and footer on any admin page that includes the login check, you will need to include the header and footer twice.

If you declare any variables, constants, classes or functions in the header or footer, you won’t be allowed to include the file more than once. This would give you a “variable already declared” error. Even if the code is contained in a conditiona “if-then” statement, the parser will still process all of the code statements and recognize the duplicate variable declaration. You could used the Server.Execute statement but when you do this, the file is not truly included within the context of the current script. Instead, the script is executed standalone, and the output from that script is inserted into the current script.

PHP eliminates a lot of these problems by providing truly conditional includes. When you put an include statement within an “If then” statement, the code will not be processed until the script is evaluated and the condition is met. This eliminates the problem with redeclaring variabels inside header and footer. Additionally, PHP provides a new statement called “require_once”. This statement ensures that an include statement is only included once. Only when the require_once statement is first encountered, does each unique include file get included.

It’s amazing how when you step away from a project, you believe that everything is working fine. Months later, you go back to work on the project to find out that what you thought was working wasn’t even close. This just happened to me while I was working on my new Team Task Project Managenet site.

I have been going through the forums application and I noticed that posting replies was not working properly. When you attempted to post a reply, the system would instead post a new topic. Definitely not a desirable behavior and something that needed to be fixed immediately. The good news is that this is now fixed and I found some other issues as well.

The HTML used to build the page was rendering differently in Firefox than it was in Internet Explorer. It seems that when using the break tag (br), the two browsers handle them differently when placed alongside paragraph and table elements. The solution was to change my paragraph tags to div tags and now everything looks consistent.

I was also plagued by the Firefox not wanting to abide by inline CSS style attributes. Instead, I placed these styles within their own style element and created ID selectors to reference the style of these elements. It’s a shame that the site has been in a state of disrepair for so long. I hope to get this site running in prime form very shortly.

Whilst coming up with new business ideas, I often ask myself “What is the most useful tools I’ve found on the web?”. Often, my thoughts turn to things like the Google search engine, the Internet Movie Database or just a reference site such as ASP Nut which contains a quick reference along with some useful articles.

Over the years I’ve found that it’s these sites that tend to attract the most amount of traffic. I’ve become interested in generating more traffic since I’ve started a new campaign with AdSense to sell advertising on my sites.

When my company was originally founded, I used to have a very simple site which would allow a visitor to see his or her IP address as it appeared to the outside world. While this may seen basic to most people who are even somewhat technically inclined, it can be a real chore to the novice computer user. So we just built a single page site where visitors could view their IP on the home page of the site. This site quickly became one of our most popular sites. The irony was that the site only took a couple of hours to build.

So now I find myself in a similar position. I am looking for some useful sites that I can create which will add some real value to the Internet. In doing so, it should prove to be a popular site which receives a lot of visitors. I will be brainstorming for ideas over the next few days. Should you have any ideas you would like to contribute, feel free to add a comment here!

One thing that drives me nuts about blogs is people who put a bunch of advertising at the top of their page. There is no useful content on the top page of the site if you are using a small monitor. At work I use dual 15″ monitors so not a lot of content displays on the screen. But the display is still 1024×768 so you would think at least some content would show up.

As an example take a look at the Smart Capitalist Blog. You will noticed the top of the page just has a list of Google text ads. If you are using a 15″ monitor like mine, then you will see no content whatsoever. I think this use of advertising is a bit of overkill. If you are going to put advertising on the top of your page, at least use a template so I can see some useful content on my screen without scrolling.

I used to read one blog every day and leave comments all of the time. I don’t want to mention the blog here lest I give it anymore publicity. They switched to a syndicated blog network which added a few ads in the middle of the screen. This was perfectly fine with me … for a while. You see, eventually, they modified the layout of the site to put the advertisements right in your face (at the top of the screen). When they did that, I removed all of my one-way links that I had setup (out of courtesy) and stopped reading the blog altogether. This is an example of the backlash people face when they get too aggressive with their advertisements.

So my boss just came to me and told me we needed to speed up the reporting feature on one area of the website. He was trying to pull up a report consisting of 40 applications. There are about 10 columns of data for each application. Each column of the report is compiled dynamically by performing a sub-select in the database.

What this means is that for each statistic displayed, you have to run a complex query on a sizable database. When combining all the records and columns together this makes for a time consuming process. So how should we go about fixing this problem? The only solution that I could see is to pre-compile these statistics into a temporary table so that the sub-selects don’t have to be run each time a report is generated.

Do you ever get the feeling that you are just optimizing the software to deal with limitations in hardware performance? I could really go on-and-on about how cheap my company is. But it really wouldn’t do me any good… management has heard the arguments time-and-time again. I guess I had better get back to work – I have to modify our software so that we have the appearance of having fast software.

I have been trying to blog more about programming here. But this article from the AP Wire is just begging for attention. The article titled Exxon Mobil 2Q Profit Jumps 36 Percent
announces that the latest profit reports by Exxon Mobile amount to $10.35 billion. This is the second largest profit reported by a publicly traded company in the history of the United States.

This is outrageous. Americans are hemmed-in at every side. While the cost of living has skyrocketed, only wealthy corporate executives and “fat cat” politicians are receiving a raise. The Federal minimum wage has not been raised in 10 years while congressional salaries have increased 9 times during that same period. Write your representative, your governor and your senator. Let them know that we have a voice and it will be heard.

It’s hard to get any work done for my current employer. Our system is very complex and convoluted and doesn’t respond very fast when navigating our website. That’s one of the drawbacks of working for a smaller company. We don’t have the manpower nor the resources to build a responsive website.

A lot of it boils down to the large amount of data we are sorting through. We have thousands of users on our systems with gigabytes of data for our websites. Despite best programming and database practices, our relatively weak servers cannot keep up with client demands. It seems that we should improve our database server or put in extra effort to optimize our database layer.

The key to keeping your customers happy is to create a fast and responsive website. With a highly dynamic website, the best way to do that is to improve your database speed and use caching on your site to speed up your pages. We have managed to make general improvements in this regard, but more needs to be done if we are to be considered the major player in our field.

I just got back from a two-week vacation to Canada for my family reunion. I didn’t spend much time on the computer (intentionally). I really had a good time just enjoying the weather and the holiday season.

We spent a lot of time swimming in the pool and just relaxing. I definitely felt like I needed a break from work (although I did manage to do some work while on vacation.) Our kids really enjoyed the trip and they are already wanting to go back. We took them to a petting zoo, to a parade and to the Canada Day fireworks show.

I still may take another week’s vacation this year. It’s one of priveleges I’ve earned with my current employer. It may be hard to get some time off during the Christmas or Thanksgiving holiday, so I may just save the vacation time for next year. Make sure that you take your vacation time. There are little (if any) benefits to being a workaholic.