Fine tune your Firefox

This video from show some great tips and tricks to fine tune your Firefox. It’s already not fair for the other browsers to know that Firefox is already the faster browser, and with some fine tunning, it feels like a jet.

The guy on the video reminds me some old teachers I had, but the legends are much fun. Besides that, all the tips he gave to fine tune your Firefox works very well. Check it out.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/itdojo/?p=815&tag=nl.e101

Installing CURL under Appserv

Installing CURL in a Windows enviroment for your development machine that is using Appserv, can be a major headache, but here goes a small tip of how to make it work fast.

 

First go to the PHP directory and copy the following libraries to the windows/system32 dir.

 

• ssleay32.dll
• libeay32.dll

 

Open the PHP.INI file and remove the ; from extension=php_curl.dll. If this entry is not there, just copy add it.

Reboot your machine to load and you are good to go.

Zend Tips – destroy session

I have been using sessions for a long time and always, when I don’t need them any more I simply use session_destroy to completly wipe out the session information in the server. The issue with this is that sessions, by default, uses cookies to propagate the session ID and when you use session_destroy it will not unset the cookie. In order to completly destroy a session you must use the session_destroy function and unset the cookies.

Check the http://www.php.net/function.session-destroy to get better information of how sessions work.

Zend Exam Tips – Streamming

I will not only talk about the streamming question that I got on this latest Mock Exam, but as well something that I have noticed. The first time that I did this exam I went well, so the next exam wasn’t so hard and I went very well. This time that I took the exam, it was way harder than before and very close to what I got in the real Zend Certification Exam that I took last year, so as a tip, you should consider scoring Excellent in all topics of the Mock Exam so you can always get the most of the questions in the Mock Exam.

Now about the streamming, take a look at this question. It’s an essay type of question and it’s really not so hard, but it will get you confused.

 

Consider the following PHP script:

 

<?php

function get_socket($host, $port) {

  $fr = fsockopen($host, $port);

  stream_set_blocking($fr, false);

  return $fr;

}

 

// Assume $host1, $host2, etc are defined properly

$write_map[] = array(‘fr’ => get_socket($host1, $port1),

                     ‘data’ => str_pad(“”, 500000, “A”));

$write_map[] = array(‘fr’ => get_socket($host2, $port2),

                     ‘data’ => str_pad(“”, 500000, “B”));

$write_map[] = array(‘fr’ => get_socket($host3, $port3),

                     ‘data’ => str_pad(“”, 500000, “C”));

 

do {

  $write_sockets = array();

 

  foreach($write_map as $data) {

    $write_sockets[] = $data['fr'];

  }

 

  $num_returned = stream_select($r = null, $write_sockets, $e = null, 30);

 

  if($num_returned) {

    foreach($write_sockets as $fr) {

      foreach($write_map as $index => $data) {

        if($data['fr'] === $fr) {

          $len = fwrite($fr, $data['buf']);

 

          if($len) {

            $data['buf'] = substr($data['buf'], $len);

 

            if(empty($data['buf'])) {

              fclose($data['fr']);

              /* ????????? */

            }

          }

        }

      }

    }

  }

} while(count($write_map));

?>

What should go in the ??????? above for this script to function properly?

The answer for this question is simple: 

unset($write_map[$index]);

The answer by itself shows the logic that is behind the script and if you stop and read again the question you will see that this is really the only logic you can use. After the buffer has been written on the server, to avoid it continuing in an insane loop, you should unset the array in that index. Take a look at the while condition and you will understand.