Second day of MSU program

In the second day of MSU a program , we continue talking about culture.
The exercise wise to find 1 feature of the culture in our company that needs to be improved to benefit the employees at the company. Our team pic was punctuality , also other teams and selected of chocolate . This indicates that functionality is a serious issue in the company for employees that they  are suffering from.

Suggestions to fix this issue was by being flexible company allowing  employees to work in the time they  need to work not the time that is mandated by the company that all employees should be complying with.

The benefits will be for the company having more productivity and for the employees to have comfortable time and work environment .

Then we talked about social media .
we define social media as a channel for networking socializing sharing and connect with people andy did you tell and virtual world .

social media has negatives including addictiveness , no authenticity ,fake avatars and I DEAS ,  , source of rumors ,no accountability.

There are categories of social media. There are social media networking sites such as Facebook Twitter and YouTube. Microblogging sites
blogs
forums and review an opinion sites
.

In facebook there are 4 type of advertising
Paid that target audience .
Organic which is a simple page
Sponsored which I didn't understand
A platform such as games
,  Museum of me for Intel and mellow yellow .

Facebook is good for these things
monitoring conversation
Starting conversation
advertising to target audience
Increase brand exposure
ialog
.
How to properly and stretches you please use the Facebook we need the information
Basically why people use Twitter are white people use Facebook or why people use YouTube
.

for presentation 2.0 we have
Engagement
virality
Behavior
These 3 translate to like share and comments
.

From the book of dragonfly affect
design principles for engagement includes 4 steps
Tell a story to engage people
get the audience sympathy by focusing on their emotional side.
Be authentic , personalize and human eyes your interaction and celebrate loyal fans.
Match media so all are conveying the same message.

Then we talked about that presentation tips and strategies
Verbal communication verses written communication
why we need to know how are audience
I'm how to prepare to present our presentation

Finally that was an exercise to present a project are a topic sentence select. Because we are studying communication I selected communication for my presentation.
I interdeuced myself and my job in the company, and directly asked the audience to help me in  presenting the company in the online digital media social network and by suggesting strategies for our company to implement in the website and that digital media and in Mobile space.

See you tomorrow

Communication , Michigan State University

Today was the first day in the Michigan State University communication program.

It started with an introduction about the program and MSU.

There was an exercise to pick an objective of the ATP program, then it shows the message , identify target audience , the medium to deliver the message , and an  evaluation a plan.

This basically was to deliver a strategic thinking process.

Later, we  talked about culture. Define what culture is in general. Then link it to the company's culture.
The interesting part was, the company has a culture, consisting of certain elements that were mentioned in the definition, and employees may not accept or  recognize  these elements .

1. values
2. Heroes
3. rituals
4. cultural networks

The company will have officially listed values that all employees share. Also informal values that are part of the culture.

The company has heroes that tell stories about the company history . Although not all  employees may be aware of these heroes.

php5 handler

Common question as people are suffering the PHP4 EOL!

Question: How to set php5 handler?

Answer:
using CPANEL, click on Apache Handler, and add

Handler:
application/x-httpd-php5
Extension:
.php


and you are done.

there are other ways using the .htaccess or apache conf but cpanel has made it easier!

Prototype Form Validation

Tags: prototype, validation, dhtml

Utilizing DHTML abilities is one of the trendy features that when used with AJAX, you get to claim using some "buzz words" technology!

What a buzz word could be related to Ajax and DHTML?
as you might figured out already, Web 2.0!

Many web applications are becoming more user friendly as they are employing the DHTML technique but with a lot of work being done on the CLIENT side to validate user's input and saving a round-trip to the server for validation. Then there comes the need for a Javascript framework that makes controlling DHTML an ease of mind.

Prototype is one of the most known javascript frameworks, and is being used in different sites in combination with Sscriptaculous (mainly to add effects and animations). However, other useul extensions are available, Easy Field Validation is one of the most useful ones, and a must for any website utilizing forms and inline-edit-boxes.

The website for the script is here:
http://tetlaw.id.au/view/javascript/really-easy-field-validation

it has a demo, documentation, and other scripts.

Utilizing the script is very easy, althuogh mentioned in the main website, I will put this as a simple example:

excerpt form.html file:

<script src="prototype.js"></script>

<script src="effect.js"></script>

<script src="validation.js"></script>

:

:



<form id="'test_form'" action="'#'">

<input name="'name'" class="'required'">

<input name="'email'" class="'required">

<input type="'submit'" value="'Submit'">

</form>

:

:

<script>

new Validation(test_form, {onSubmit:false,stopOnFirst:true, immediate : true});

</script>

and you are using a very useful javascript extension!!

Enjoy.

Free Service: CSS for Firefox and Internet Explorer

Tags: CSS Firefox Internet Explorer (IE)

Those involved in designing web pages have faced a lot of difficulties managing different rendering engines, namely found in Firefox and Internet Explorer, the two most used browsers according to some published researches.

A service was started over three years is being still offered in a new application. All you have to do is to sign up to create your new account, and start testing your code.



as you can see, most of the A+ Browsers are supported, and you wont have to worry about CSS compatibility anymore.

Start here: http://litmusapp.com/browser-testing

FastCGI Extension by Microsoft to run PHP on IIS

TAGs: IIS, FastCGI, PHP

Microsoft has recently made FastCGI Extension available for download from its downloads site, that will enable IIS to run scripting languages other than asp.net, for example PHP.

As described by Microsoft

Brief Description

The FastCGI Extension for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 and 5.1 enables popular application frameworks (such as PHP) to be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way.


The FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 and 5.1 enables popular application frameworks that support FastCGI protocol to be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way. FastCGI provides a high-performance alternative to the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), a standard way of interfacing external applications with Web servers that has been supported as part of the IIS feature-set since the very first release.

CGI programs are executables launched by the web server for each request in order to process the request and generate dynamic responses that are sent back to the client. Because many of these frameworks do not support multi-threaded execution, CGI enables them to execute reliably on IIS by executing exactly one request per process. Unfortunately, it provides poor performance due to the high cost of starting and shutting down a process for each request.

FastCGI addresses the performance issues inherent to CGI by providing a mechanism to reuse a single process over and over again for many requests. Additionally, FastCGI maintains compatibility with non-thread-safe libraries by providing a pool of reusable processes and ensuring that each process will only handle one request at a time.

An important note for running FastCGI, that IIS 6.0 or 5.1 must be enabled on the operating system in order to be able to use FastCGI Extension. There is another FastCGI extension to make APACHE handle the desiered file extensions by FastCGI.

HOWTO: Using xdebug and PHPEclipse for PHP debugging on Windows

TAGS: php xdebug phpeclipse

After struggling for a while to get the ability of debugging PHP scripts, reading here and there on xdebug wiki, and other php developers websites, I finally managed to assemble the needed information into this HOWTO which I hope is going to help someone to setup the proper environment for using PHPEclipse and xdebug to debug PHP scripts.

To debug using xdebug extension and PHPEclipse editor on windows (vista or other versions should equally the same) there are two main steps:

A- Installation of xdebug.
B- Preparing PHPEclipse.

Follow the steps exactly as explained and you will be safe.

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A- Installation of xdebug:

If you are familiar with php extensions, just download the xdebug extension and modify php.ini to load it as a zend extension, and skip reading to section B.

In details, follow these five steps:

1- Download the xdebug http://www.xdebug.org/download.php.
make sure to select the proper version matching the server threaded mode.
I am using WampManager 2.0 ( which is bundled with PHP5, MySQL, Apache 2.x)

2- Extract the dll file and put in the ext folder of your PHP.
(in my case, c:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.5\ext\php_xdebug.dll , match your php version and path)

3- Open php.ini and put these lines at the end of the file

zend_extension_ts = "C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.5\ext\php_xdebug.dll"
xdebug.remote_enable=1

(remember, the path must match your php installation path)

NOTE:
extension=php_xdebug.dll
to load xdebug as an extension instead of a zend_extension was not helpful! I tried it and wasted time trying to make it work, avoid it unless you know what you are doing.


4- Restart Apache.
With WampManager, it is as easy as a click on the WampManager Icon and choosing Restart All Services.


5- After Apache restarts, open the phpinfo page to check out xdebug is loaded properly.
if you dont have a phpinfo page, just create a new phpinfo.php file as follows:

If the dll was inserted in the correct path, and the php.ini was updated correctly, then you will see the following:

This program makes use of the Zend Scripting Language Engine:
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies
with eAccelerator v0.9.5.3, Copyright (c) 2004-2006 eAccelerator, by eAccelerator
with Xdebug v2.0.4, Copyright (c) 2002-2008, by Derick Rethans

If you can not see that line, go over the steps.
1- Check your Apache version.
2- Check your PHP version.
3- Check the dll name (that it has no version number, only php_xdebug.dll).
4- Download the correct xdebug version if needed and repeat the above steps.

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B- Using xdebug in PHPEclipse

1- Create a script you want to debug.

2- Create brake points by a Double Click on the line margin, or right click -> Toggle Breakpoint.

You will notice small blue dot at each breakpoint location.


3- Open Debug Configurations ( in Run menu).

4- Double Click the PHP Debug Remote Script option.

5- Specify the IDE identification string , for example: testID.
(it is the ID we will use to start debugging later on, important to choose something easy to retype).

The project name is filled automatically, and you can type the folder name which the script will be saved it, if you have not created a project already.

6- Click on PATHMAP tab.

7- Click on NEW and type the path to your script.

8- Click Debug button.
(the window will close and you will be taken back to the PHP editor).

9- Click on Debug Perspective Button (found on the top right corner, if not, window -> show perspective -> debug).

the perspective will be empty but of the original code.

10- Point your browser to the test.php script

in my case, http://localhost/debug/test.php

So far, no debugging session has started, check the PHPEclipse:

but once you click on debug, which passes

?XDEBUG_SESSION_START=testID&test=1

the debug session will start. You will notice the perspective windows in PHPEclipse starting to populate with debug info and variable values.

Stepping in / out is possible by clicking the yellow arrows in the Debug perspective.


That's it. Enjoy :)

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Yahoo! Media Player Widget

A nice release from Yahoo!
http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/

Yahoo released a new widget which allows any web owner to play media (sound or video) files with a simple link to include the media player into any webpage, and giving full control over the player.


Pros:
- Lay web users would be able to embed media easily.
- Nice slim player that can be hidden once unneeded.

Cons:
- XSS / CSRF exploits.
- Floating Player does not continue playing if a link is clicked.