So, by now – you know what’s this post is all about, what will be the writing style and some of you probably consider it as NSFW! Well I dont care about that – all I care is that my eyes are burning and I am turning into a retard, I am fucking annoyed and I have been under irritating mental pressure because of those fucking text based CAPTCHAS where I have to spend couple of extremely annoying minutes to look at those gibberish texts , understand that and then input what I am seeing on the screen! Oh yeah baby, It feels like I am sitting for a VIRGINITY TEST inside one of those bloody fucking Egyptian prisons. I AM A HUMAN AND I CERTAINLY DONT WANT TO BE TORTURED TO PROVE THAT! If you are still in favor of those CRAPPY FUCKING text based CAPTCHAS, you can leave the rest of the post because I dont give a damn about your love for those eye-tearing, getting-on-the-nerve style alien things.
Well, if you really have to FUCKING test me as a HUMAN, DONT DO THAT by slicing my ribs apart to check if there is any heart. There are certainly many other ways to check if your visitors are human or bot. Record their mouse movement (and put it into a pattern), or check if mouse was really over the submit button or blah blah blah. AND IF YOU WANT A FULLPROOF military grade PREVENTION against BOTS, go fuck with your document under a 200000ft dungeon.
Alright, the reason I am writing this article is that CAPTCHAs don’t have to be so fucking annoying. You can make intuitive captcha images instead of asking your visitors to translate what the hell your great great grandfather had seen in his UFO dreams, printed in those images.
WHY not make it something like these ones, keeping the actual captcha validation flow intact. Dont change it’s working style. Keep the same style of of public private key, salts, user inputs and everything. JUST FOR GODS SAKE change those images. Ask something different. Why not you think about something like these three below – if you ask yoru users to fill in the blanks (in the input box – instead of the mind fucking gibberish and garbled craps)
ANS: liberty OR LIBERY or LiBeRtY (whatever caps)
ANS: tree
ANS: rectangle or rectangles (consider fail safe or singular/plural for more user friendliness)
Seriously, why on EARTH do I have to prove that I am a HOMO-SAPIENS by filling up these freaking awful garbled text based CAPTCHAs. Lets make it easy, unless you are planning to serve your $100000000000 secret sausage recipe thinking that an annoying old school CAPTCHA will prevent it from being stolen. Please for gods sake, help making these moments your visitors will spend on your site a little more pleasing.
If no one starts this project, I will seriously start it as a web service with a name “NFC”. You know what that means? NO – FUCKING – CAPTCHA!
Beside the frequently asked question “Which Framework is best?” this one is the top in category – “Which one is the best IDE”. People asks this question in morning, afternoon and evening. Every-time, everywhere. I am a big time fan of Netbeans and I left it a few days after it’s release of 6.7. It was so good, heavenly, yummy but I had to leave this old pal because of it’s extreme hunger to the available resources. There was only one thing that time which could compete with the resource hungry netbeans – that is FireFox. But hey, FF is not your IDE after all. Anyway, back to my point – I left Netbeans and started using PhpStorm. I have a company license and I am glad that I made this move. I am not going to preach PhpStorm in rest of this article, but what I will do is sharing my experience with PhpStorm 🙂
1. PhpStorm is fast: Not like a Bugatti Veyron beside your old 4 wheelers, but it’s fast. I was told that 64 bit version is even faster but that was not true in my macbook pro running snow leopard. rather I found that 64 bit version is slightly sluggish and more resource extensive. Whatever, when you make a jump from Netbeans to PhpStorm, you will really feel the speed of everything and if you keep an eye over your system memory, you will surely say “wow!”.
2. The best Javascript and X/HTML Intellisense: I am a javascript developer for almost 8 years by now. I have tried eclipse, some standalone components which could also run as eclipse plugin and Aptana. Aptana was good – I was using aptana mostly because of it’s auto-completion capability of javascript. But I really HATE eclipse. Why? – I will write a separate blog post on that. Now Netbeans has some capability of intellisense for Javascript but when it comes to jQuery (remember, I left NB at it’s 6.7th release) it was frustrating. PhpStorm really is beautiful for this. Just amazing! The format, the auto suggestion, the code completion everything works just perfect. This is one of the main reason why I am sticking with PhpStorm
3. Version Controlling: Ya ya I know, NB got that too. I am not a Netbeans hater, rather I love it. I love how amazingly it changed my world of coding by charging me nothing – zip, zilch nada! So it is merely a selling point for making a move from NB to PhpStorm – but the thing is, support for different VCS in PhpStorm is as good as like the other parts of it. It has fantastic support for Git and Svn, beautiful tools for merging and fixing the conflicts, refactoring and what not. I was feeling at home and to be honest, migrating from NB to PhpStorm didnt feel like I came to the land of aliens just for this. Without integrated support for VCS it would be impossible for me to stay with PhpStorm.
4. Less hungry: Though Steve Jobs said to stay hungry and foolish but please note that he said it only for humans, not to IDEs :P, lol! Ok, so PhpStorm is less hungry to CPU and Memory than NB. I just wish Firefox will be a performer like this one day 🙂 (different story again, sorry I am distracted with too many things at once)
5. Less Costly and a Friendly company: Phpstorm is a developer friendly company. I am using the licensed copy of Zend Studio since 2005 (I got that for free because of being a ZCE and because of winnign some competitions over time) but heck! Zend Studio is costly. That’s fine, Zend Studio is the PHP company and knows inside out of making a PHP IDE. But trust me, PhpStorm is not an alien thing at all – you will not feel “vim” with this excellent tool. PhpStorm can help you code PHP, HTML, CSS and JS with maximum comfort. Yet, it costs much less than other similar IDEs with similar feature set. And what did I mean by “Developer Friendly”? PhpStorm team listens to you. Most of the time you mail them for a discount, they give you some sort of discount without expecting anything from you (I love you, PhpStorm team for this). Even Elite in the class Zend Studio gives some discount some time. But try the same with Elite of the Elites like Coda. They wont take their time to say “Go, fuck yourself!” – I hate Coda, seriously! So rude!
Anyway – that’s a long story. I am very happy with PhpStorm and has recently upgraded my IDE from 2.x to 3.x with their one year full update support (even with major versions :D, Zend you should really think about that with Zend Studio) and living happily ever after. Love you PhpStorm, I really do!.
Get your 30 days trial version of PhpStorm from http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm and feel a whole different level of satisfaction 🙂 And surely, dont forget to check NetBeans too, that’s a beautiful piece of tool.
When I started learning programming for internet in 2001, I started with perl. It was a fantastic language and everything was fine. There was absolutely no problem with it. But then, when I tried to host my tiny application in free hosts available that time, I understood that finding a free host for perl was not as easy as finding one for PHP. Though some hosts were offering free perl hosting that time, but there were problems with available modules etc. And I was a noob with very limited resources around me (even I couldn’t access internet all the time, it was costly like hell for me in those days). I started learning PHP. It’s syntax was similar to perl and there was even the friendly “$” sign present, it didn’t take me too much of time to change my application into php. I choose one from the many free PHP hosting providers and my application went live immediately.
Is perl a bad language? Was it a bad language? NO!
But at the end of the day, PHP turns into the best thing for me because there were plenty of resources available, there was a “HELL OF A MANUAL” with user comments and what not.
These days, beginners and fresher asks a common question all the time – “Which framework is best?” . My answer remains simple for them, “none”. If you are planning to learn a new PHP framework or want to choose a PHP framework for your web application, there are some small points you need to consider first.
1. What is my applications going to do?
2. Which framework has a stable community
3. Which framework has good resources available
4. Which framework is under solid development phase and not in a “discontinued” mode?
Once you have the answer, you need to know that there are basically three types of frameworks in nature. Though most of them offers you an MVC or HMVC work flow, yet, they differ in nature.
Some Frameworks are too Liberal
Some Frameworks are too strict
Some of them are over strict and configuration junky
I started with CodeIgniter. It was extremely liberal, allowed me to write very bad code. In those early days, when I was not pretty much aware of the “MVC” convention, I wrote business logic in the controller, even sometime called model from inside a view. I was like “why not? it works” – but I never understood the philosophy of the true MVC application model and continued to write bad code, until I realized the beauty of coding and the value of that in a team work.
I started learning CakePHP, but well, that time its strict coding style and it’s “convention over configuration” started looking awkward to me. Because I had jumped into CakePHP from a comparatively liberal world of programming, CodeIgniter. I learned CakePHP for a couple of months, even used it in a few applications I was working on that time and I gave it up. It was painful for me.
But then, I realized that to write code that you can really take pride on, you must follow the convention. You can’t simply write business logic inside a controller just because you can do it. You should give up your stubbornness. I started again with Zend Framework. We, a small team in leevio spent a couple of weeks learning Zend Framework together. Though it was a bit painful that time with Rob Allen’s tutorial and very very bad official manual where anyone gets lost in a pile of unnecessary talks, ultimately it started paying off. We learned the ZF and helped other people in our team to learn it in a collaborative effort. Zend Framework is a real gem. It’s strict, but it allows you to write bad code too. However, the strictness is not something that can hurt like a framework which I frequently call a configuration junky, like symfony.
I had a hell of an experience with symfony, oh boy! I wanted to give it a try in 2007/08 and then after spending two days with their configuration system, sandbox, blah blah, this and that, i had been finally able to say hello to this world. I was exhausted, my eyes were almost tearing and it didn’t take much time to change my “hello world” into “bye bye symfony” 😛
Long story short, if you are a beginner with MVC and want to learn a framework from the heart, start with Zend Framework or CakePHP. Soon you will realize that you may not have to move or use any other framework unless the situation requires it. Saying that, there are other very good frameworks out there like Yii, CodeIgniter and Kohana (started as a fork of CodeIgniter and later it became what it is now)
And again I am answering the title question “Which frameworks is best” – there is no such “best” thing to be honest. The one that suits your need is the best framework for you.
Graph API from Facebook is a very interesting project based on open graph protocol. Facebook is gradually setting Graph API as the standard and deprecating the use of their old REST based APIs. To start working with Graph API doesnt need an extensive knowledge on how Facebook API works but its always good to have a sound knowledge on that. Graph API uses oAuth based authentication mechanism and using the auth token, they can identify who is making the API calls. I have been working on Facebook events using Graph API for last couple of days and I will be sharing my experience in this series of two or three posts where I am going to cover the following topics
1. Authenticating a user
2. How to create a Facebook Event with picture
3. How to post on Events Wall
4. How to manage users
5. How PHP SDK can be a life saver in some cases 🙂
Authenticating a user
Its very important that you know how to authenticate an user against Facebook and ask for appropriate permissions to be granted. To work with public events in Facebook, you need to ask for “create_event” permission from your visitors. Otherwise, in case of private events, you need to be granted permission for “user_events” and “friend_events”. For now, lets consider that we will be creating public events and we will ask for only “create_event” permission.
Lets create a new application in Facebook which will point to our working url. The following screenshot will show you which informations are necessary to create such an app. Once you are done, save the API_KEY/APP_ID and SECRET_KEY safe in somewhere for later use.
Facebook App Properties
Now you are done with creating a Facebook app, its time to code 🙂 The following codeblock will prompt any visitor to log in with Facebook and grant the application some permissions. We are using our JS-SDK. We are also saving the auth token. You will soon find out why that would be necessary.
FB.getLoginStatus(function(response) {
if (response.session) {
var session = FB.getSession();
fbtoken = session.access_token;
fbuserid = session.uid;
}
else{
loginFB();
}
});
function loginFB() {
FB.login(function(response) {
if (response.session) {
var session = FB.getSession();
fbtoken = session.access_token;
fbuserid = session.uid;
}
}, {perms:’create_event’});
}
function logoutFB() {
FB.logout(function(response) {
// user is now logged out
});
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
[/sourcecode]
Now when you visit your application url, for example http://ev.tekzon.net in our case, you will be prompted an authentication windows like this
Authentication Dialog
So now users are successfully authenticated to our new Facebook application, lets move to the next part
Creating a Facebook event using JS-SDK
To create a Facebook event, we need to pass the following parameters to “/me/events” graph url.
name: Name of the event
start_time: Start time of the event in UNIX timestamp format, or in “mm/dd/yyyy H:i” format 🙂
end_time: End time of the event in UNIX timestamp format, or in “mm/dd/yyyy H:i” format 🙂
location: Location of the event, as a string
description: Description of the event
picture: Profile picture for the event, we can not use that with JS SDK.
privacy: either “OPEN” or “PRIVATE”, we will use “OPEN” in this example
So, here is a Javascript function which can create this event. In the following codeblock you will find a wrapper javasript function “createEvent()” to create this event and an example function to use that createEvent() function
[sourcecode language=”javascript”]
function createEvent(name, startTime, endTime, location, description) {
var eventData = {
"access_token": fbtoken,
"start_time" : startTime,
"end_time":endTime,
"location" : location,
"name" : name,
"description":description,
"privacy":"OPEN"
}
FB.api("/me/events",’post’,eventData,function(response){
if(response.id){
alert("We have successfully created a Facebook event with ID: "+response.id);
}
})
}
function createMyEvent(){
var name = "My Amazing Event";
var startTime = "10/29/2011 12:00 PM";
var endTime = "10/29/2011 06:00 PM";
var location = "Dhaka";
var description = "It will be freaking awesome";
createEvent(name, startTime,endTime, location, description);
}
[/sourcecode]
Now once you invoke this “createMyEvent()” function, it will show you the event id of your newly created event, if successful. Lets see how that would look like.
Ok, so now we know how to create a Facebook Event using JS-SDK and Graph API. But there is a major problem in creating a Faceboko event using JS-SDK and that is, you cannot attach any Profile Picture with this event. And you have to use a server side SDK (we will be using PHP-SDK in the following example) to do that. Lets see how can we create a Facebook event with a profile picture.
Creating a Facebook event with Profile Picture
We need to post the event parameters (use Ajax) to our server side script. Lets assume that the image file we are planning to use as the Profile Picture for our Facebook event resides in “/path/to/my/image.jpg”.
Here is a very important information for you and that is such an image’s minimum width MUST BE 100px – There is no documentation on that, and apparently I had to waste almost 4 hours to find what is the problem with my code. I just wish Facebook API documentation were better mentioning such things which may lead developers to waste huge time.
Ok, in the following codeblock, we will be using a new javascript function “createMyEventWithPHP()” which will post the event data to our server side php script event.php – Before that, download the PHP-SDK of Facebook from http://github.com/facebook/php-sdk, unzip and place in the same path where you are keeping this “events.php”
[sourcecode language=”javascript”]
function createEventWithPHP(name, startTime, endTime, location, description) {
var eventData = {
"access_token": fbtoken,
"start_time" : startTime,
"end_time":endTime,
"location" : location,
"name" : name,
"description":description,
"privacy":"OPEN"
}
$.post("/events.php",eventData,function(response){
if(response){
alert("We have successfully created a Facebook event with ID: "+response);
}
})
}
[/sourcecode]
When we will invoke createEventWithPHP() javascript function, it will post all the event data to our PHP script. Then PHP script will create that event with Facebook PHP-SDK and print the newly created event id. Say for example, this newly created event id is 129312137169841, so we can go to http://facebook.com/events/129312137169841 and see how it looks with the profile picture
Facebook event with profile picture
So thats for today, folks. I will be coming back with more of Facebook Events and Graph API in my next part. Stay Tuned.
Shameless Promotion 🙂 : By the way, if you are looking for a beautiful Admin Panel Theme for your PHP based projects/web-applications, you may want to check out Chameleon Circuit, which is developed by our Themio Team 🙂 Chameleon Circuit - Full Featured Admin Theme from Themio
I am a longtime user of Springloops, since 2008/2007 for all my PHP applications. I love their plans and features so much that I had upgraded to a paid plan and using that for last 1.5 years. Now, they have introduced the plan2 which looks strange and funnier to me. Let me tell you why.
I am using the Flowerpot plan of their old version 1, which has the following features
Storage: 2GB
Number of Projects: 10
Servers per project: 3
Number of users: unlimited
Price: $9/mo
Now, the new Flowerpot plan in version 2 offers the following
Storage: 3GB
Number of Projects: 10
Servers per project: 1
Number of users: 4
Price: $15/mo
Springloops V2 has Tickets and Milestones feature in V2, included with all plans. But for that, you will have to pay an extra $6 than what you were paying currently. And the funny thing is that not only the number of active servers decreases from 3 to 1, but also number of users will be reduced from unlimited for AWFUL 4? You gotta be kidding me, eh?
One of the springloops employee ( Szymon Szczepankowski ) had emailed me why do I hate v2 of springloops and didnt opt-in to upgrade to v2 from my v1 plans, immediately after I twitted about my frustration. And this blog post is written just in reply of that.
Stay in V1, enjoy a beautiful springloops. Never upgrade 🙂
Weather was gloomy today and I went to the bypass road because there are vas opening, and it’s a perfect place to capture an approaching storm. The cloud is so cool over there that It is almost a heaven for photographers 🙂
Everyday is not the same. Sometime you are stronger, sometime you are sick and all alone. Lets help people who is looking for tiny assistance from you and that will make them smile again.
