Based on their official website memcached is defined as:

Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

Memcached is simple yet powerful. Its simple design promotes quick deployment, ease of development, and solves many problems facing large data caches. Its API is available for most popular languages.

— memcached.org

MemCached Server

This is how I installed(a simple installation) my memcached server that can be accessed by a webserver on our local area network. The server is running Ubuntu as its operating system. Caution: The version on ubuntu’s repository could not be the latest version. Refer to memcached’s website for the latest version. If you want to install the latest version from the source you can refer to memcached’s wiki page

Open synaptic package manager and install memcached and php5-memcached. After the installation restart the webserver using the command:

Start memcached by using the command:

By default memcached is running on port 11211 and is accessible by the machine with IP 127.0.0.1 which is the machine’s local IP address with 64MB memory allocation

To try if memcached is working use this simple PHP code

< ?php
$m = new Memcached();
$m->addServer('localhost', 11211);

$m->set('int', 99);
$m->set('string', 'a simple string');
$m->set('array', array(11, 12));
$m->set('object', new stdclass, time() + 300);

var_dump($m->get('int'));
var_dump($m->get('string'));
var_dump($m->get('array'));
var_dump($m->get('object'));
?>

Open the script on the browser. Try opening the cli and telnet to memcached using the command:

The image below shows how the cli would look like after the command

Check memcached’s status by using the command

We can get a cached value using the command:

It should return “a simple string” as assigned on the script.

To explore more, commands can be seen on this page http://lzone.de/articles/memcached.htm

To allow another machine (local web server) to store data on the memcached server we need to edit the configuration file using the command:

In my case I changed the allotted memory to 256MB and allowed IP of 191.168.1.254 which is our windows webserver as seen on the image below:

After the configuration I restarted memcached using the command:

The Webserver (XAMPP)

To quickly test the memcached server I used xampp portable version which can be downloaded on their official website www.apachefriends.org.

As stated earlier the webserver is already allowed to use the memcached server. As an information memcached is a daemon which runs like the mysql server, so we need PHP to connect to the memcached server.

1. To start, download memcached on code.jellycan.com/memcached which is win32 binary.
2. After downloading extract the file (recommended: C:\memcached). You should have the file memcached.exe
3. We can install memcached as a service on the command line using the command:
   C:\memcached\memcached.exe -d install
4. Start memcached using the command:
   C:\memcached\memcached.exe -d start
5. After running memcached we need to tie it with PHP using the php_memcached.dll. You should have this file on your PHP’s ext folder, if not download the file at these links http://downloads.php.net/pierre/, http://www.pureformsolutions.com/pureform.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/php_memcache.dll or on our server: php_memcached.dll.rar
6. enable the use of php_memcached.dll by editing your php.ini and uncomment the line extension=php_memcache.dll if it does not exist add this line. After editing the file restart the webserver.

You can access the data on the memcached server by using the code below:

< ?php
        $memcache = new Memcache();
        if(!$memcache->connect('191.168.1.7', 11211))
                die("Couldn't connect to memcached!");

        $key="string";

        $result = $memcache->get($key);

        if($result)
        {
                echo "$key is $result";
        }
        else
        {
            echo 'There is no data saved named '. $key;
        }
?>

You should have an output of “a simple string”. I hope this helped you set up the server. Happy coding!

Sources:

http://pureform.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/installing-memcache-on-windows-for-php/

http://memcached.org

http://blogs.oracle.com/oswald/entry/cache_cache_cache_part_1

One of the things I find hard in developing a web application is using a library for sending email such as PHPMailer. I find it hard when used to send emails. Another thing I find hard is when sending emails in a localhost webserver. It would also cost me more and would take much time in setting up my own mail server. PHP’s mail function is also very useless in such testing ground.

If you are using a gmail account and want to use PHP’s mail function in your local webserver, here is a better way to relay an email to gmail. I am using backtrack 5 Gnome and the steps will also work for debian based distros. Follow the steps below,

Install ssmtp,

After installing ssmtp, open the configuration file.

Append the configuration at the bottom

After the changes, you can now use PHP’s mail function

< ?php
$message = "This is a test";
$message = wordwrap($message, 70);
mail('icpep.org@gmail.com', 'My Subject', $message);
?>

I installed Apache, MySQL and PHP on windows 7.  I tried to install drupal version 7.9 and went through an error as shown in the image below:

The error “Your web server does not appear to support any common PDO database extensions.” can be fixed by following these steps:

1. Open your php.ini file
2. Around line 966 uncomment the line “extension=php_pdo_mysql.dll”
3. Make sure you have php_pdo_mysql.dll on your ext folder or download it here php_pdo_mysql
4. Restart Apache and you can continue with the installation of drupal

With millions of websites in search engines we can never be sure that the sites we are visiting are not harmful.  Some search engines like Google helps us detect websites that can cause harm to out computer.  Some search engines do not have this feature which makes us vulnerable to to exploit attacks especially for those that are webmasters.  We must always make sure that we have computer protection such as anti spyware or even the basic antivirus software which can be downloaded for free on the internet such as avast and avira.

Just like the website virus I found on some of our sites a new one existed and was not even noticed by the webmaster of the site I recently modified.  There was a script injected along the php files, as seen on the images.  I never knew how the virus got into the site, what I saw when I opened the site’s files via FTP is that there are encrypted codes along the normal pages.  I had the pages scanned and found out that the encrypted codes is a virus.  I removed the lines on the php files and in a short while it was back again.  There I found out that there are 3 files that generates the virus, 1 is the index.php which has the iframe tag as seen on the image, 2nd was the file ncoyrl.htm which has the encrypted javascript codes and lastly a gif image named zcv.gif which also plays a role.

After I deleted the files the website no longer throws a threat warning coming from an antivirus.  We must always make sure that in an online business, security is an issue.  Let a programmer or anybody that is techie enough to check free scripts downloaded online.

PHP has a function date where you can specify different ways on how to display the date.  How do you generate current date and display only month and date like ‘September 2010′.  Here is a simple php howto,

<div>function curDate() {</div>
<div id="_mcePaste">return date("Y-m-d",mktime(date("h")+8, date("i"), date("s"), date("m")  , date("d"), date("Y")));</div>
<div id="_mcePaste">}</div>
<div>$now = substr(curDate(),0,7);</div>
<div>echo date("F Y", strtotime($now));</div>
<div>?&gt;</div>

The code above will simply output September 2010, a simple code that will surely help you especially when coding PHP from scratch.

In the past months I was able to handle a LAMP server, this is my second time to handle a UNIX based web server but this time its a lot different because I will will be the one to install and configure the web server.  Our System administrator was the one who installed the latest version of slackware which is 13.1 on the machine, so all I need to do is have the web server up and running.

Our system administrator did include the x packages when he installed slackware and this caused me a problem in running PHP because it gave me several errors in GD support.  The error I get was,

I was able to solve the problem with the following steps taken and was based from a linux forum I really loved.
Download the packages by entering the following commands,

After downloading the files I installed them using pkgtool and select install packages from current directory and by there it will display the packages downloaded. Here is a sample of how to install it using pkgtool,

After installing the packages restart your apache and PHP GD support should be working. To check type this command,

Do you want to extract the main domain of a URL?  Here is a function that works well and can be modified easily.  I found this function while searching for a good Regular Expression to fulfill such result.

{code type=php}<?php

function get_base_domain($url)  {
$debug = 0;
$base_domain = ”;

$G_TLD = array(
‘biz’,'com’,'edu’,'gov’,'info’,'int’,'mil’,'name’,'net’,'org’,'aero’,'asia’,'cat’,'coop’,'jobs’,'mobi’,'museum’,
‘pro’,'tel’,'travel’,'arpa’,'root’,'berlin’,'bzh’,'cym’,'gal’,'geo’,'kid’,'kids’,'lat’,'mail’,'nyc’,'post’,'sco’,'web’,'xxx’,
‘nato’,'example’,'invalid’,'localhost’,'test’,'bitnet’,'csnet’,'ip’,'local’,'onion’,'uucp’,
‘co’ );

// country tlds (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain)
$C_TLD = array(
‘ac’,'ad’,'ae’,'af’,'ag’,'ai’,'al’,'am’,'an’,'ao’,'aq’,'ar’,'as’,'at’,'au’,'aw’,'ax’,'az’,
‘ba’,'bb’,'bd’,'be’,'bf’,'bg’,'bh’,'bi’,'bj’,'bm’,'bn’,'bo’,'br’,'bs’,'bt’,'bw’,'by’,'bz’,
‘ca’,'cc’,'cd’,'cf’,'cg’,'ch’,'ci’,'ck’,'cl’,'cm’,'cn’,'co’,'cr’,'cu’,'cv’,'cx’,'cy’,'cz’,
‘de’,'dj’,'dk’,'dm’,'do’,'dz’,'ec’,'ee’,'eg’,'er’,'es’,'et’,'eu’,'fi’,'fj’,'fk’,'fm’,'fo’,
‘fr’,'ga’,'gd’,'ge’,'gf’,'gg’,'gh’,'gi’,'gl’,'gm’,'gn’,'gp’,'gq’,'gr’,'gs’,'gt’,'gu’,'gw’,
‘gy’,'hk’,'hm’,'hn’,'hr’,'ht’,'hu’,'id’,'ie’,'il’,'im’,'in’,'io’,'iq’,'ir’,'is’,'it’,'je’,
‘jm’,'jo’,'jp’,'ke’,'kg’,'kh’,'ki’,'km’,'kn’,'kr’,'kw’,'ky’,'kz’,'la’,'lb’,'lc’,'li’,'lk’,
‘lr’,'ls’,'lt’,'lu’,'lv’,'ly’,'ma’,'mc’,'md’,'mg’,'mh’,'mk’,'ml’,'mm’,'mn’,'mo’,'mp’,'mq’,
‘mr’,'ms’,'mt’,'mu’,'mv’,'mw’,'mx’,'my’,'mz’,'na’,'nc’,'ne’,'nf’,'ng’,'ni’,'nl’,'no’,'np’,
‘nr’,'nu’,'nz’,'om’,'pa’,'pe’,'pf’,'pg’,'ph’,'pk’,'pl’,'pn’,'pr’,'ps’,'pt’,'pw’,'py’,'qa’,
‘re’,'ro’,'ru’,'rw’,'sa’,'sb’,'sc’,'sd’,'se’,'sg’,'sh’,'si’,'sk’,'sl’,'sm’,'sn’,'sr’,'st’,
‘sv’,'sy’,'sz’,'tc’,'td’,'tf’,'tg’,'th’,'tj’,'tk’,'tl’,'tm’,'tn’,'to’,'tr’,'tt’,'tv’,'tw’,
‘tz’,'ua’,'ug’,'uk’,'us’,'uy’,'uz’,'va’,'vc’,'ve’,'vg’,'vi’,'vn’,'vu’,'wf’,'ws’,'ye’,'yu’,
‘za’,'zm’,'zw’,'eh’,'kp’,'me’,'rs’,'um’,'bv’,'gb’,'pm’,'sj’,'so’,'yt’,'su’,'tp’,'bu’,'cs’,'dd’,'zr’
);

// get domain
if ( !$full_domain = get_url_domain($url) ) {
return $base_domain;
}

// now the fun
// break up domain, reverse
$DOMAIN = explode(‘.’, $full_domain);
if ( $debug ) print_r($DOMAIN);
$DOMAIN = array_reverse($DOMAIN);
if ( $debug ) print_r($DOMAIN);

// first check for ip address
if ( count($DOMAIN) == 4 && is_numeric($DOMAIN[0]) && is_numeric($DOMAIN[3]) ) {
return $full_domain;
}

// if only 2 domain parts, that must be our domain
if ( count($DOMAIN) <= 2 ) return $full_domain;

if ( in_array($DOMAIN[0], $C_TLD) && in_array($DOMAIN[1], $G_TLD) && $DOMAIN[2] != ‘www’ ) {
$full_domain = $DOMAIN[2] . ‘.’ . $DOMAIN[1] . ‘.’ . $DOMAIN[0];
}
else {
$full_domain = $DOMAIN[1] . ‘.’ . $DOMAIN[0];;
}

// did we succeed?
return $full_domain;
}

function get_url_domain($url)  {
$domain = ”;
$_URL = parse_url($url);

// sanity check
if ( empty($_URL) || empty($_URL['host']) )  {
$domain = ”;
}
else {
$domain = $_URL['host'];
}
return $domain;
}
?>{/code}
To test the code we can use the function,
{code type=php}$url  = ‘http://www.icpep.org’;
echo get_base_domain($url) ; // icpep.org{/code}
Click here to download.

This code really helped me a lot.  There are a lot of Regular expressions out there but this simple approach can break all those head breaking expressions.  Btw, this function is free of use and is under GNU licensing.   Hope this functions is of big help to you also, happy coding!

By Default phpmyadmin can import data on your mysql database up to 2MB of data and beyond that will be an error.  This has been a big problem  by most webmasters and sometimes this can be a barrier to stop improving the sites.  Before I kept on searching what to use to import a large data on my MySQL database and all I can see is BigDump.  It is a software used for large and very large MySQL Dumps which is also an option to import large data on your database.

If you find BigDump a pain in the head then another way to solve the problem is to edit your php.ini file.  All you need to do is open your php.ini file and edit the line

Setting 2M to a larger size will fix the problem.  One problem with this is that it will affect the web server’s runtime limit and could throw an error if you dump a very large data.

If you are a web developer and having problems on Installing PHP Curl on Apache with PHP installed on Windows Operating System, below is my version of tonyspecer’s “cURL with PHP and Apache on Windows“.  The steps are simple and direct to the point.

I have windows apache version 2.2.14 and PHP Version 5.2.10 installed on my Laptop using the installers provided on the respective sites.

1.  Install APACHE and PHP (I installed my APACHE on C:\apache and PHP on C:\php directories )
2.  Edit the php.ini file found in the PHP directory.

• Near line  546 set the extension directory extension_dir = “C:\php\ext”.  In my case I have my extensions files inside the ext folder. You can use any folder name as long as you set it in the php.ini file.
• Near line 472 set register_globals = On
• Near line 630 set session.save_path=”C:\WINDOWS\Temp” or you can set any directory

3.  On the PHP folder (in my case C:\php\) copy the php5ts.dll file to the bin folder of your Apache (C:\apache\bin\)
4.  On the PHP folder (C:\php\) copy libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll to ” C:\WINDOWS\system32″  folder
5.  Download CURL for Windows found at http://curl.haxx.se/download.html and put it on the PHP folder (C:\php\curl)
6.  Download OpenSSL for Windows found at http://www.shininglightpro.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html, for me I downloaded 7MB OpenSSL v0.9.8k Installer

• To some Windows Visual c++ Redistributable is recommended before OpenSSL is installed.  The windows Visual c++ Redistributable can be downloaded at Microsoft website in the link:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=9b2da534-3e03-4391-8a4d-074b9f2bc1bf&displayLang=en

7.  Check to see if you have the following file: c:\windows\system32\msvcr70.dll. If not, search for it in Google and download it to system32.  If you can’t find it in that directory click this link to download the file from www.dllfiles.com.  Extract the zipped file and put it in the “c:\windows\system32\”  folder.
8.  Uncomment the curl line in your php.ini file to enable curl:  extension=php_curl.dll but in my case I just added the line because it is not found in my php.ini file

9.  Edit the Apache httpd.conf file to enable php:

• For newer version of Apache add at the bottom
  • LoadModule php5_module “C:/php/php5apache2_2.dll”
• Then below add Line: AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

10.  Restart Apache and your curl should be working now.

Sending E-Mail with PHP can be simple, or it can be very complex depending on what you want to do.  PHPmailer is a free PHP software used for sending emails or should I say used for “spamming”.  Though the software has been provided for free, many developers has gone beyond its real purpose.  With a block of IP Address , a web server with PHP installed in it is a perfect set-up for spamming. I have been using this free PHP software  also and it has saved me a lot of work and headaches.

What is in PHPmailer that makes it a good tool for sending emails? Does it only support a private host or is it capable of using gmail or any other public webmail services?

PHPMailer is an OOP PHP script designed for sending emails.  Some of the “G” features of phpmailer are:

• Redundant SMTP servers.
• Supports  8bit, base64, binary, and quoted-printable encoding.
• Supports text and HTML type of email.
• Can send emails with multiple TOs, CCs, BCCs and REPLY-TOs.
• Capable of Word wrap.
• Tested on multiple SMTP servers: Gmail, Sendmail, qmail, Postfix, Imail, Exchange, Mercury, Courier.
• Works on any win32 or “nix” platforms.
• Capable of handling and embedded image.
• Capable of handling multiple attachments.
• SMTP authentication.

This are only few of the capabilities of a PHPMailer.  Above all the email handlers I used PHPmailer is number one on my list because of the ease of use.  It requires less skills with amazing performance, it is a fully featured email transfer class for PHP.  Its indeed a thumbs up for the developers!