If you live in Malaysia, and you would like to try out the new Fedora 9, which will be realizing today, please sent me an email, I will be happy to burn a copy for you, by the way I will be only downloading the i386 - install DVD, so that is the only version I an burn it for you. This is especially useful for those who don’t have a good broadband service in Malaysia. By the way, Malaysia broadband services is very bad.

1. Sent me an email at “blog at radicalfix dot com” to get my mailing address.
2. Then, send me a stamped, self addressed envelope with a blank DVD in it.
3. I’ll burn the DVD for you, and pop it back in the post.

If you want to download it with your own, why not use torrent to download, and don’t forget to seed!

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To put it simply, Krumo is a replacement for print_r() and var_dump(). By definition Krumo is a debugging tool (initially for PHP4/PHP5, now for PHP5 only), which displays structured information about any PHP variable.

A lot of developers use print_r() and var_dump() in the means of debugging tools. Although they were intended to present human readble information about a variable, we can all agree that in general they are not. Krumo is an alternative: it does the same job, but it presents the information beautified using CSS and DHTML.

Except the collapsible DHTML tree built around the structure of the dumped PHP variable, and the improved by the CSS looks, Krumo offers additional useful features.

For example haven’t been disappointed that you can not see the name of the variable passed for dumping ? Calling it many times, you will not be able to know which dump value was provided by a certain variable at a certain time in a certain place of your code. Well, Krumo can not do that either, but it offers a work- around: it prints the code line that the Krumo call was placed: in this way you can keep track of the origin of each dump you see on the screen.

Another nice addition to the set of Krumo features is the ability to turn it off. When your code gets swamped with a lot of dumping calls, instead of cleaning them up, you can just turn them off. You go to admit that this beats the alternative of going through your code and removing every dumping route you have … right ?

A lot of times you need to dump the contents of the superglobals ($_GET, $_POST, $_SERVER, $_SESSION, etc), or see the list of included files, or the declared classes and interfaces, or the defined constants, etc. Krumo offers an easy, fast and graceful way to do this with just one simple call: see the examples area for demonstration, or just load this page to see the results.

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One of the project which I am looking forward is Func (Fedora Unified Network Controller). Below are some information about what Func does, which I extracted it from their official wiki:

So, if I want Words, What Is Func?

Func allows for running commands on remote systems in a secure way, like SSH, but offers several improvements.

• Func allows you to manage an arbitrary group of machines all at once.
• Func automatically distributes certificates to all “slave” machines. There’s almost nothing to configure.
• Func comes with a command line for sending remote commands and gathering data.
• There are lots of modules already provided for common tasks.
• Anyone can write their own modules using the simple Python module API.
• Everything that can be done with the command line can be done with the Python client API. The hack potential is unlimited.
• You’ll never have to use “expect” or other ugly hacks to automate your workflow.
• It’s really simple under the covers. Func works over XMLRPC and SSL.
• Since func uses certmaster, any program can use func certificates, latch on to them, and take advantage of secure master-to-slave communication.
• There are no databases or crazy stuff to install and configure. Again, certificate distribution is automatic too.

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<?php
 
// get kuala lumpur wheather forecast 
$content = file_get_contents('http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=MYXX0008');
 
// parse the xml document to array
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($content);
 
// print the xml element into string
print_r($xml);
 
?>

There is a better way to process the RSS feeds, Read my previous post about Zend_Feed.

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Now I will show you a simple code to access my very own feeds from my blog, since I am using Feedburner, my RSS feeds address will be at http://feeds.feedburner.com/radicalfix:

<?php
 
require_once 'Zend/Feed.php';
 
// a list of feeds you want to import 
$feeds = array ('http://feeds.feedburner.com/radicalfix');
 
foreach($feeds as $feed){
	// import feeds
	$channel = Zend_Feed::import($feed);
 
	$channelTitle =  $channel->title(); // the channel title 
	echo $channelTitle."\n\n"; // print the channel title
 
	/* for this example I will loop through the 
	 * requires RSS channel elements (title, link, decription)
	 * many optional elements are available please refer to 
	 * the latest RRS 2.0 Specification (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html) */ 
	foreach($channel->items as $item){
		$itemTitle = $item->title(); // the title of the feed
		$itemDesc = $item->description(); // the description of the feed
		$itemLink = $item->link(); // the link of the feed
 
		echo "\t".$itemTitle."\n\t".$itemDesc."\n\t".$itemLink."\n\n";
	}
}
 
?>

I will show you how to modify the RSS for the next few posts.

References:
RSS 2.0 specification: RSS 2.0

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My answer is simple, It depends on how your MySQL database server is installed. If you are using Fedora Linux distribution, and you installed MySQL server during Fedora installation or RPM packages from MySQL, then probably your MySQL databases are store under /var/lib/mysql directory.

If a tar file binary distribution is installed by unpacking it at the installation location you choose (typically /usr/local/mysql), then the databases should be at data directory under your chosen directory.

If a source distribution is installed after you configure and compile it. By default, the installation step installs files under /usr/local, then databases should be store under subdirectory var.

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It’s a file used in blogging applications to create an RSS feed. It is that simple!

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The MySQL database examples in this blog use PHP PDO database access layer, which is only available since PHP 5. With PDO, you use the same PHP functions no matter what database engine you’re talking to, this it very similar to JDBC if you use Java before. Although the syntax of the SQL may differ from database to database, the PHP code remains similar. This will be helpful if the developer or the management decided to change database after development, it makes the web application integration with other database easier.

Please take note, PDO offers data access abstraction, not total database abstraction, it will certainly improve, maybe PDO2. Other PHP libraries, such as PEAR DB, ADODb, and MDB2 attempt to solve the total database abstraction problem, they hide different databases implementation details such as update statement, date handling and column types behind a layer of code. If you want both data access abstraction and database abstraction together, why not try Zend Framework hidden gems called Zend_Db, but remember if you need to use PDO connecting to MySQL database with Zend_Db, you still have to install pdo_mysql PHP extension.

For now, I will not talk about Zend_Db, I will focus on PDO. I will leave Zend Framework for the next posts. Below is a simple connection to MySQL database table called animal, and execute the select statement to list all the animals from the table:

<?php
 
// mysql hostname
$hostname = 'localhost';
 
// mysql username
$username = 'username';
 
// mysql password
$password = 'password';
 
try {
 
	$dbh= new PDO("mysql:host=$hostname;dbname=animal", $username, $password);
 
	// echo a message saying we have connected
	echo 'Connected to database';
 
	// the SQL SELECT statement
	$sql = "SELECT * FROM animals";
 
	foreach ($dbh->query($sql) as $row) {
		print $row['animal_type'] .' - '. $row['animal_name'] . '';
	}
 
	// close the database connection
	$dbh = null;
 
} catch( PDOException $e) {
	echo $e->getMessage();
}
 
?>

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