Some of the most powerful functions implemented in PHP are those involving regular expressions. They make common procedures like file parsing, string extraction etc really quick and easy. But actually learning to use them successfully is not that easy. Here are a couple of my favorite links that do an excellent job of going over regular expressions

http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/52/0.php
PHP Freaks

The new msn maps looks awesome, screenshots available here http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050523-125208

* Satellite images with 45-degree-angle views of buildings and neighborhoods

* Satellite images with street map overlays

* Ability to add local data layers, such as showing local businesses or restaurants

From the screenshots the image quality is definitely awesome. Hopefully they have updated their maps, since google maps still cannot locate my house. Impressive stuff !!

Its good to be back to a zippier blogger :)

As for other news, the semester is over and I have been busy adding features to my blog at f2o.org . I just recently added a rss feed for the sucker and am distributing it using feedburner, so lets see how that turns out.

Oh yes, the Sony Playstation looks awesome

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000620043567/

Just two more weeks !!!!

Go rockets !!!!!!

A nice little article to implement captcha using php on your website - > Image based verification tutorial

Next semester i am taking a class that definitely sounds so cool ... mobile programming -> my latest interest.

Class descripton:

Have you ever wished you know more about programming your smart phone, your web camera, your VCR, or your Tablet PC. Have you ever noticed that computing has slipped away from the desktop and even from the laptop and has gone ubiquitous? Do you know that 'gadget computing' is the fastest growing area in our tech sector and where most of the new computing jobs are created? If your answer is yes to all the above, you like 'cool programming,' and you have an affection for 'bluetooth,' then you are perfect candidate for the "Multimedia Programming" class offered in fall 2005.

Syllabus


Component Object Modeling (COM)

Microsoft DirectShow SDK

Video and audio programming and applications

Programming and applications of serial devices

Embedded Visual C++ and Pocket PC

PDA programming and applications

Smart phone SDK

Cell phone programming and applications

Tablet PC SDK

Programming and applications of Tablet PC

Sure does sound exciting !!

My old excite account has been receiving a lot of spam lately, despite having spam filtering level set to high .... I also dont think anything really happens when i report spam since i tend to receive the same mail in my inbox without fail !!!!! I have turned the filters on to max and implemented my own custom filters ... lets see if that has any effect on it.

Is it just me, or is the total post count on the dashboard broken ???? It has been showing the same number for quite some time now

A little more coding, I was able to modify the S5 : A simple standards-based slide show system and added yahoo image search results using the Yahoo Image Api. So your image queries come out in the form of a nice little slide show.

You can demo it here http://kashif.dotgeek.org/YahooImage.php

I finally got a yahoo 360 invite from Nathan Weinberg ....Thanks a lot ....now to do some exploring of the features and if you would like an invite just leave me a comment :)

Wow, nice new service from Google called the Google Ride Finder ..... an excellent service that lets a person find taxi services to various places around the city.

This is such a cool wallpaper, Im so gonna do this with my laptop

Click the picture for a better view.

PHP 5 has some handy new functions but two that really stand out are date_sunrise and date_sunset ..... I can see some potential uses such as a weather channel, or a counter for a competition or for religious prayers but asides from that, are there are any other important uses that had to be implemented as a function ?

what I also dont like about it is the type of input data it needs to return an answer

mixed date_sunrise ( int timestamp [, int format [, float latitude [, float longitude [, float zenith [, float gmt_offset]]]]] )

other than that little "rant" I think PHP 5 is definitely a major step from 4.0

.

Well my first experiment with PHP5 was using the new SimpleXML extension , and I was definitely blown away as to how simple it makes parsing xml files and accessing the data.

I decided to implement something with the new yahoo api, and I decided to go with a simple spell checker. Now I coming across a little problem with this, yahoo only provides spelling suggestions if it can actually find something with that query, so that you can query with the correction. If it cant , no spelling suggestions are offered. I am hosting it here http://kashif.dotgeek.org/YahooSpellCheck.php and the source can be seen here http://kashif.dotgeek.org/YahooSpellCheck.php.txt

Can anyone offer some tips or further suggestions ?

Finally I got my dotgeek account, which boasts of free PHP 5 web hosting. Now to start some fun projects !!!! Got any suggestions ?

oh and something totally random, someone came to this page after querying for this on google: " *Kashif Beattie* " .. How weird is that ??

I saw this google text ad in my gmail account while having a conversation with a buddy .... now why would someone want to buy a bad movie ??

I remember reading somewhere that adding six slashes at the end of www.google.com changes the way the page look. So, I decided to check on some other sites that I frequently visit and so far have come up with one page. If you put one more slash at the end of yahoo.com ( http://www.yahoo.com// ) the date and time on "in the news" section changes to 6:00pm Wed December 31.

Here is a screenshot(click for a better view):

.



Got any others ?

PC Magazine has a review of that funky looking Nokia 7280 that i was talking about the other day .... http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1772513,00.asp

I saw the mac mini today, and my jaw just dropped at the size of the little thing .... just amazing.....thats all i have to say