According to this article, you can now contract your web connection by satellite (at a zippy 768 Kbit/s) for the equivalent of only USD 20 per month.

The catch – you have to be a resident of Germany. Hope that comes to my country soon

From Jacob Nielsen’s useit.com
User interface complexity increases when a single feature or hypertext link is presented in multiple ways. Users rarely understand duplicates as such, and often waste time repeating efforts or visiting the same page twice by mistake.

Another PHP block – look up a word at dictionary.com in a new window. Very simple code, just plain HTML I’m afraid:

<div align=”center”>
<form name=”dictionary” method=”get” action=”http://www.dictionary.com/search” target=”new”>
<input type=”text” name=”q”><BR>
<input type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”get definition”>
</form>
</div>

While not exactly being PHP, this freeware dHTML calendar will doubtless come in handy for any date-related app.

After searching some time for a popup date picker for a project, I realised that I am unable to find one which at the same time has a layout that caught my eyes, and one that can fulfill the minimum requirement of cross browser compatibility and user friendliness. At the same time, I am beginning to be awed by the ability of DHTML, hence set myself this project to do after my work during my free time.

Add a field to your table called md5hash or something similar. Make this field unique. Then when adding a new record, concatenate the other fields into a string and md5 it. Then write the md5 hash into the md5hash field.

This way if the record already exists MySQL will ignore the duplicate entry.

This little function returns the current date stamp.

<?
function get_current_datestamp(){

//get the current timestamp
$currdate = gmdate(\"Ymd\");
$currday = substr($currdate,6,2);
$currmonth = substr($currdate,4,2);
$curryear = substr($currdate,0,4);
$currdate_stamp = ($curryear . \"-\" . $currmonth . \"-\" . $currday);
return $currdate_stamp;

}//end of function get_current_datestamp;

?>

Use:

$current_datestamp = get_current_datestamp()

It\’s kind of cool if you want to query a database and need a date based result – e.g. news added that day, people on holiday that day.

Check out this article by John Lim, author of the php.weblogs.com site, for tips on optimising your:

• PHP code
• MySQL setup
• Apache setup
• Object oriented code
• server hardware

The article features an insightful case study and a handy ’summary of tweaks’.

Taken from a recent posting on Zend:

After yet another round of these letters over the last couple of weeks, there has been a very long chat
between most of the developers as to where PHP is heading. For those who are interested – here it is
(paraphrased):

Read more for simple installation instructions for the Big Brother block for geeklog users.

Spida (js.spida.b.worm, also known as Double Tap and SQLSnake) is an Internet worm now attacking Microsoft SQL servers worldwide.

Written in JavaScript, Spida actively scans port 1433 for access into systems with blank system administrator accounts.

According to the SANS Institute, a computer research organization, system administrators began noticing an upsurge in scans on port 1433, which is used by Microsoft’s SQL servers, on Monday, May 20, 2002. Within the first 12 hours, the number of scanned and infected systems rose sharply to more than 1,600, and those systems are now scanning for others on the Internet.