INSERT INTO new_table
SELECT CONCAT(‘/home/user/public_html/somefolder/’, SUBSTRING_INDEX(s.url, ‘/’, -1)) AS local_path
FROM source_table AS s
WHERE …

It does the job with out having to write a single line of PHP code!

Download This Episode

Attempt 2!

The first attempt I did not save the mp3 in stereo mode, which meant flash and quicktime among other players would not be able to play the file correctly. Problem fixed in this version.

Download This Episode

Download This Episode

Article: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/sun-to-acquire-mysql.html

I think the move is a good one for MySQL. With the recent purchase of the InnoDB storage engine by Oracle, there has been some concern that MySQL could end up in the hands of a company that’s best interests do not involve the open source community.

The recent influx of participation in the development of MySQL by Google gives me a lot of hope that MySQL’s future will be a bright one. The next generation storage engine called Falcon hopes to become a replacement for InnoDB and many of the performance tweaks Google has implemented over the years will most likely find their way into the future versions of MySQL.

More information is available at the Geek News Central.

Below is the solution I implemented for the problem.

Fix

<a href=”< ?php
$title_for_zune = ereg_replace(‘[^A-Za-z0-9 ]‘, ”, $show_title);
$title_for_zune = str_replace(‘ ‘, ‘_’, $title_for_zune);
echo ‘zune://subscribe/?’.$title_for_zune.’=’.$feed;
?>” title=”Add to Zune”>Add to Zune</a>

Having spaces in the URL does not validate, so I replace spaces with the _ character. If you are not worried about HTML validation, you can remove the str_replace function call.

I am not sure who came up with this protocol for the add to Zune 1-click subscription, as it does not appear to be very well thought out. Most other sites like Digg only require the feed url, which will never contain characters that could break your web pages.  As Jason Van Orden points out, the format is more complex than it needs to be.

Be forewarned, none of the user contributed get_headers() functions on the get_headers() documentation page on PHP.net will replicate the behavior of PHP 5′s get_headers() for URLs that use the ‘Location:’ redirect header or return File Not Found headers.

According to RFC1945, A user agent should never automatically redirect a request more than 5 times, since such redirections usually indicate an infinite loop.  For true compatibility, the functions below should be able to handle up to 5 Location redirects within one function call.  Only the native get_headers() function exhibits this behavior.  None of the user contributed functions on PHP.net handle the ‘Location’ redirection.

The native PHP >= 5 get_headers() function will not return headers in some instances where the user contributed functions would.  For example, if the server returns a 404 status, get_headers() will throw a PHP warning.  Unfortunately, the 404 error can only be known by looking at the headers.  From first glance, all of the user contributed functions will return 404 headers, which may be a desired effect but does not replicate the behavior of the native get_headers() function.

The function I created is included below.  It works well if the file exists.  Unfortunately for the project I am using the code for, I also need to verify if the file exists on the server.  I will not be able to use this function.

<CODE>
function remotefsize($url) {
$sch = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_SCHEME);
if (($sch != “http”) && ($sch != “https”) ) {
return false;
}
$headers = array_change_key_case(get_headers($url, 1),CASE_LOWER);
if ((!array_key_exists(“content-length”, $headers)))
return false;
if( is_array($headers["content-length"]) )
return array_pop($headers["content-length"]);
return $headers["content-length"];
}
</CODE>

The mod_deflate module in Apache is not new. What is new is the trend to use it. The deflate module uses gzip compression and is relatively fast in comparison to the bandwidth time. You can do the math, but if your page was 1MB and took 20 seconds to download, and compressed it is 250k and takes 1 second to compress, 5 second to download, and 2 second to decompress, the compression method is faster. You can crunch numbers till you are blue in the face, but the basic premise holds true.

First, you need to make sure the mod_deflate module is enabled in apache. Look for the line in your apache configuration files and uncomment:

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

Then add the following lines within a <Location> or <VirtualHost> section.

SetInputFilter DEFLATE

The above will compress everything. Instead of compressing everything, especially if you have a lot of files on your web site such as images, media, zip files, etc.. that are already compressed, you may want to only add compression for particular content types. To compress specific content types, replace the SetInputFilter with one or more of the following.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php

If you work with other content types such as application/xml, you can add those as well.

You can test your server by using the GID Network gzip test located here: http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

Now that your web server is using compression, you can focus on other things like programming or eating pizza.

phpLens has a pretty detailed page on the subject that hits everything pretty well.

Link: http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/tuning-apache-php

For the most part I agree with everything this page says.  I do have a few other suggestions though.

Addressing the 3rd suggestion on the phpLens tuning Apache and PHP post, I recommend turning compression on for specific content types using the mod deflate module in Apache 2.0 or greater.  Apache 1.3 uses a different compression module which is a bit more complicated to setup.  Here is a link on ClarkConnect that describes how to add the deflate support to your web site and track its statistics with awstats.  Don’t forget to compress javascript, css and xml as well as html.

Link: http://www.clarkconnect.com/wiki/index.php?title=Howtos_-_Activating_content_compression_on_Apache

Web server or module level PHP accelerators seem ideal for speeding up the performance of php scripts.  Though the 6th suggestion, I would debate whether caching pages in the PHP level is faster or not.  Libraries like Smarty are great for templating your pages but they have their limits.  If you are hosting a web site with constantly changing dynamic content, the caching built into Smarty is minimal at best.  Granted that your original PHP script was well written, the cached Smarty version technically can’t re-optimize your database queries, which is most likely the source of any delays with a dynamic web page.

One suggestion that is missing from the post is optimizing your SQL queries and methods how you select the data.  phpLens mentions the concept of output buffering.  What I am about to explain is similar and should be deployed together.  First and for most, when you are working with a result set of data from a database, loop through all the data and store it in variables as quickly as you can and free up that queries resource.  This will use the time you are connected to the database as efficiently as possible and prevent you from accidentally creating nested queries.  Since this practice is very similar to output buffering, perhaps we should call it ‘database buffering’.  The database may still buffer data as well, but your script knows better than the database what to do with the selected data and your script definitely knows what queries are going to happen next.  Database buffering practices just make sense.

I would also recommend testing your web sites for security issues.  Check out Nikto, it is a pretty powerful web server scanner that looks for vulnerabilities and security issues.

Link: http://www.cirt.net/code/nikto.shtml