If you get some spare time at your screen then you might want to start getting involved in online bingo. There are a lot of different online bingo sites out there and their main aim is to help you have fun while giving you a hope of winning some excellent cash prizes.

If you play Cheeky Bingo, for instance, you could put yourself in with a shout of winning jackpots every single day just by signing up. The site offers free games with cash prizes as well as games that you have to pay to enter, but which offer more lucrative prizes.

Take your mind off some of that troublesome and complicated code by enjoying the entertainment you can tap into online. For a better idea of the kind of promotions that appear on some of the best bingo sites online, have a look at ohmybingo.com.

Case in point: text editors. When I first went to edit a file in a pure Linux text console, I thought I would try out vi. When I found my head spinning after just a few minutes of trying to edit one line of a config file, I gave up and tried emacs. When I got overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff bolted into the text editor, I thought that I would go for the Linux text mode equivalent of Notepad, nano. I edited the file and moved onto the next thing I had to do.

But it really got me thinking. There is always a place for an alternative application in a given area – vi and emacs both do the same thing (edit plain text) but offer 2 very different ways of doing this, and both are highly configurable and so on and so forth. But what this doesn’t explain is the vitriolic debate which springs up around the users of each.

You don’t see this on other platforms – Windows users typically have to put up with Notepad until they discover something like Notepad++ and OS X users have Textmate (which seems to be very popular on that platform). However, you don’t get the users of UltraEdit insulting the entire families of those who use Notepad++. You don’t get arguments which have raged for 20+ years. In short, its all a bit more civilized.

So I get to my point – out of all these text editors on Linux, which one do you use and why? Functionality? The way the app looks? The price (or lack of it)?

While some people may think Google Code is yet another SourceForge clone, they’re only half right. What Google Code brought to the table was more than just project hosting, it was a whole ethos of development which is now sweeping the world as if it were a brand new concept: open source.

With the Summer of Code schemes run by Google to promote open source development in universities, hosting of all of their own APIs on the service (going from a handful to a few dozen by now), along with the code for all their open source projects (now numbering in the hundreds), Google Code has shown off the more ethical side of the advertising giant.

So happy birthday Google Code, long may you prosper and others follow in your path!

No, modern browsers are better behaved. They tend to begin requesting CSS files before the HTML file has finished loading, grabbing images left, right and centre and a whole lot more. Sounds great, doesn’t it ? Well, kinda.

One big pitfall of this is that you could be dealing with a lot of overhead from the raw HTTP requests in themselves. They are composed of data too, and take resources to manage (both client- and server-side). If you have dozens of images on one page, a CSS file or two and maybe a few JavaScript files, this can quickly bring a server to it’s knees with heavy traffic.

Lots of techniques exist to optimise your page load experience which are beyond the scope of this quick post. However, I would recommend reading up on the following:

• CSS sprites
  You may well have heard of these – a CSS sprite just means putting multiple images into one image file and using background positioning tricks to display each individual image. The benefit is great here since you make less HTTP requests and your file sizes will drop (less image header info).
• Compiling multiple CSS and JavaScript files into one file
  This is pretty simple. Just whack all your JavaScript into one file (if possible) and the same with your CSS. This is more difficult to implement if you have a defined build and deployment system, but well worth trying.
• Reduce the keep-alive on your HTTP server
  If you are serving lots of files, try to reduce the keep-alive timeout of HTTP connections. Keeping a connection alive for 15 seconds after it was opened may sound like it would reduce overhead (less connections need to be opened) but just thing of how a few dozen connections sitting around idle will sap your server resources. Better to kill ‘em early!
• Don’t serve content from domains with cookie data
  Every time you make a request to a file on a web server which has cookie data associated with it, that cookie data gets sent in the request too. Chances are you don’t need to know if the user was logged in just to retrieve your site’s logo, so try running was is known as a “CDN” – Content Delivery Network. Google it and see!
• Utilise caching well
  Caching is awesome. Well, if you don’t mess up. Try setting far-future expires times (such as 1st Jan 2038) on unchanging content such as CSS files, JavaScript files and images. The browser won’t even make the request in the first place, then! If you do need to change one of these pieces of content, a simple trick can avoid the cache not updating: append a query string to the URL. So for http://www.example.com/cssfile.css, change it to http://www.example.com/cssfile.css?v=1. When you update it, update the links to it to say http://www.example.com/cssfile.css?v=2 – that way the caching will not interfere.

That should be enough to be going on with!

But what does it do? In short, HipHop translates PHP code into C++ code, which can then be compiled into native machine code. This, in theory, should remove a bottleneck or two from PHP itself – namely the interpreter – as a good deal of slow, interpreted code can be compiled into uber-fast native code. Well, in theory.

While there is a performance increase (just Google for benchmarks, there are bound to be dozens by now) I think that it simply does not justify the end for most PHP driven sites. The added complexity of ensuring all your PHP code can be understood by HipHop would be enough to drive me mad, in particular. Adding to that is the number of issues I have seen people encountering whilst trying to compile HipHop on anything other than Facebook’s own platform of choice… Not pretty.

It isn’t just that though. I believe the only real increase in performance is in processing-limited scenarios which just aren’t that common in real life. Sure, Facebook need it, but they serve hundreds of millions of pageviews each day. For Joe Bloggs’ e-commerce store the benefit of having slightly faster C++ code would quickly evaporate when it came to any code changes needing to be first done in PHP, passed through HipHop before being compiled and then debugged for a second time as C++ code.

Stability isn’t really an issue due to the above reason (it has apparently been powering Facebook for a while) and apparently HipHop supports ‘most’ PHP code, but I really do not think you should consider it for your next project. Well, unless you’re re-coding MySpace…

However, the time has now come for someone new to begin posting to this blog. I can’t guarantee that the posts will be quite as regular – what with work and other commitments – but what I will say is that I will be trying my hardest to provide nifty tips, tricks and news on the programming world to make your life easier.

So, enough about that – what do you guys want to see here? My focus is on web development (the same as the previous author), but I hope to take a little twist with more posts about the art of programming and updates on the latest tools and news. Anyway, this is me signing out for now – until the next time…

You might see the blog being updated non-regularly in the future as I have now passed the rains on to someone else.

This is Tech, signing off.

The first thing the function defines is a list of "stop" words. This is a list of words that occur quite a bit in English text and would therefore interfere with the outcome of the function. The function also uses a variant of the slug function to remove any odd characters that might be in the text.

function commonWords($string){
    $stopWords = array('i','a','about','an','and','are','as','at','be','by','com','de','en','for','from','how','in','is','it','la','of','on','or','that','the','this','to','was','what','when','where','who','will','with','und','the','www');
 
    $string = preg_replace('/ss+/i', '', $string);
    $string = trim($string); // trim the string
    $string = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9 -]/', '', $string); // only take alphanumerical characters, but keep the spaces and dashes too…
    $string = strtolower($string); // make it lowercase
 
    preg_match_all('/([a-z]*?)(?=s)/i', $string, $matchWords);
    $matchWords = $matchWords[0];
    foreach ( $matchWords as $key=>$item ) {
        if ( $item == '' || in_array(strtolower($item), $stopWords) || strlen($item) <= 3 ) {
            unset($matchWords[$key]);
        }
    }
    $wordCountArr = array();
    if ( is_array($matchWords) ) {
        foreach ( $matchWords as $key => $val ) {
            $val = strtolower($val);
            if ( isset($wordCountArr[$val]) ) {
                $wordCountArr[$val]++;
            } else {
                $wordCountArr[$val] = 1;
            }
        }
    }
    arsort($wordCountArr);
    $wordCountArr = array_slice($wordCountArr, 0, 10);
    return $wordCountArr;                
}

Here is an example of the function in action.

$text = "This is some text. This is some text. Vending Machines are great.";
$words = commonWords($text);
echo implode(',', array_keys($words));

This produces the following output.

some,text,machines,vending

To allow the indexing and searching of Excel documents using Zend_Search_Lucene you need to use the Zend_Search_Lucene_Document_Xlsx class. However, to use this class you must have the Zip module installed with PHP. For Windows users this means editing your php.ini file and uncommenting the following line:

extension=php_zip.dll

For Linux users you will need to recompile PHP with the –enable-zip configure option.

Create and/or open the index in the normal way and you can index Excel documents using the following code.

$filename = 'C:\Book1.xlsx';
$doc = Zend_Search_Lucene_Document_Xlsx::loadXlsxFile($filename);
$index->addDocument($doc);

You can now set up a query and search for the document in the following way, although you would normally expect the input string to be some kind of user input.

$queryStr = 'wibble';
$userQuery = Zend_Search_Lucene_Search_QueryParser::parse($queryStr);
 
$query = new Zend_Search_Lucene_Search_Query_Boolean();
$query->addSubquery($userQuery, true);
 
 
$hits = $index->find($query);
 
foreach ( $hits as $hit ) {
    echo $hit->score.'<br />';
    echo $hit->filename.'<br />';
}

The score is always returned with a hit object. Other parameters available to display are filename, title, subject, creator, keywords, description, lastModifiedBy, revision, modified, created. However, some of these depend on the contents of the document. It is possible to add keywords and subjects to an Excel document, so if they are not present then you will need to check for the existence of that parameter before displaying it. The following code looks for the existence of the keyword parameter before trying to print it out.

if ( isset($hit->keywords) ) {
    echo $hit->keywords.'<br />';
}

By default, this function indexes the document meta data and will tokenise and store the tokens as an index. The loadXlsxFile() function has a second optional parameter which is by default set to false. If this is set to true the contents of the Excel document will be included in the index. You can then use the following code to print out the contents of the document.

echo .$hit->body.'<br />';

Bear in mind that this output will not contain any row or column information and will therefore look like a dump of the data.

There are two ways in which it is possible to do this using PHP.

The first (and simplest) is just to cycle through the items submitted on a previous form and print them out as hidden fields. Our first page source code will look like this:

<form action="form2.php" method="get">
Name: <input type="text" name="name" />
<br />
<input type="submit" value="Proceed">
</form>

On submitting the form we are taken to form2.php, which asks the user a different question and prints out the hidden fields. Because we used a get request for our first form we need to use the $_GET array.

<form action="end.php" method="get">
Colour: <input type="text" name="colour" />
<br />
<?php
foreach ( $_GET as $key=>$value ) {
    if ( $key!="submit" ) {
        $value = htmlentities(stripslashes(strip_tags($value)));
        echo "t<input type="hidden" name="$key" value="$value">\n";
    }
}
?>
<input type="submit" value="Proceed">
</form>

This same code can be used on the different pages of the form. This method is fine, and works quite well, but it doesn’t account for users going back through the form and resubmitting a previous item. The $_GET array will only contain information about the previous forms.

To make this more user friendly, and robust, we need to employ a session to store our form values as the user goes through the form. Using sessions means that the user can cycle back and forward through the forms with no ill effect on the form data. The following code will take the input of the previous form and save it as a PHP session.

session_start();
foreach ( $_GET as $key=>$value ) {
    if ( $key!="submit" ) {
        $value = htmlentities(stripslashes(strip_tags($value)));
        $_SESSION[$key] = $value;
    }
}

This must be included on every page of our multi page form. If it is not then the data will simply not be saved for that step. Your users can now move back and forward through the forms, saving the information as they go. You need to supply a back button for this to work as using the browser back and forward buttons will also not save the data.

Finally, when testing this code I found that using GET rather than POST was beneficial in terms of usability. This is mainly because if you use POST requests and the user clicks the back on their browser they will be asked if they want to resubmit the information for that form.

Does anyone else have any ideas about how to do this? If so then post a comment and suggest it. You can even put a post in the forum!