Cesar D. Rodas

Since the past week, WP-Storage is alive with the YouTube plug-in. This mean,that you can upload videos to Youtube directly from your blog, and then include it into you any post.What I did the past week was

• Â Add the “cancel button” for uploads.
• Add cache for browsing content, recreating cache, only when a new file is uploaded.
• Final testing of the Amazon S3 Plug-in. (not yet commited on the svn)
• Optimization for add content on the post. (not yet commited on the svn).

Here are my to-do for the next week:

• Add pagination on the “browse” tabbet.
• Improve the youtube “browsing”, right now it only brings the first 12 videos.

Here are some Wp-storage screenshots:

This is how the wp-storage looks like

We’re uploading a video to youtube

Here we’re browsing…

As you should know the Google Summer of code 2008 is near to its beginig. They are many projects where you can contribute writing free softwares for these project (extense functionality or write plugings almost all the times). There exists many projects where you can send proposal and if your proposals are accepted, you can work on the project.

I have wrote two proposals (and I hope they accept) for write applications for WordPress blog publishing system.

I will talk a few about my proposals, please write your feed back if you can.

WordPress Cache

This project focus to help those blogs with huge traffic. Unlike most of cache which only focus on server side cache, it will focus on server and client side cache, because server side cache offload the server but dont save bandwidth.

Projects features:

• Cache in client.

  • The cache will send cache headers to the client with the TTL, so the browser can cache the contents. Also the browser can send a especial query to see if their cache is already valid.

• Cache in server

  • Server compressed an uncompressed pages, useful to save bandwidth, and it will not overhead the server compressing for every request because the cache will have two versions of a page, the compressed and uncompressed one, and the cache will select which one to serve.

  • Storage independent: It will come with FS (cache are mere files), APC and Memcached storage support. Every developer will be free to write a storage driver by defining a simpling class with some methods.

Category suggester

This project is an idea that I got while I was reading the N-gram text Categorization paper wrote by William B. Cavnar and John M. Trenkle. The idea is to suggest categories to new post while it is written based on similarities with previous post’s categories.

Using n-grams (a n-gram is a sequence of n letters) instead of words had many advantages:

• Language independent: it is not necessary to use stemming algorithm, to use word’s root (i.e. working, worked = work). Also, it doesn’t work only for English, since the algorithm learns about previous post.

• Easy tokenization: it has a unique way to parse and extract features, since it is not working with words it doesn’t care about the language.

• Perfect for blogs: It is perfect for blogs since most of authors do not write their post with a program that can check misspell errors, therefore most of them have errors. The n-grams are tolerant to misspell errors.

The project will be based on Cavnar’s work and also will extend it using Naive Bayes classifier, and others method used today to classify texts.

Well, before we begin with this post I’d like to say that this blog will not focus in only in PHP but of course you can visit my PHP Blog. BTW, this blog always will be opened, but the target will be more than PHP.

Unix and Unix-like (BSD, GNU/Linux and others) have a and feature different to most operating system that is “every is a file”, this mean that you can access to the hardware as you access to a mere file. This may look like a insignificant feature for more people, but let me ask you one simple cuestion, how can you do advances feature with you operating system such as create an image file of a compac disk? Do you always need to use other software for do that? Read the rest of this entry »

There are many Database abstraction (DBA) for PHP, the well known PDO (PHP Database Object) is a good implementation of a DBA. The small problem is that PDO is only for PHP5, and therefore there many web developers (like me) are not able to use PDO because most of our work was code for PHP4, and PHP5 has many backwards incompatible changes with previous versions. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello to every one, you may be surprised by the title of this post and you may be wondering why a remote file-system in PHP? If around there exist many projects that do that, why re-invent the road?

Well, there are sometimes that you are not the root and you need to share files, especially when you had shared hosting or simple, you wanna became the competition of Amazon S3 (I don’t know why the first example is a bit more possible than the seconds =) ). Read the rest of this entry »

Some times web sites require image resize, let’s say… upload, resize and display image. That process is harder to handle by PHP (internally) because resize an image require a lots of computers resources (CPU, memory, time), so for a good results there must exist a cache system, which simply is do not re-do what is done. Read the rest of this entry »

Write programs in PHP is very easy, that is because PHP syntax is simple and very effective. But also in PHP you must have some concepts for write effective programs, because if you are planing to have a very busy web site that little optimizations tips could help you to handle more visitors and to offload a little the processor. Read the rest of this entry »

• Text Categorization by Content (Spanish)
  ETyC 2007 - Facultad Politecnica - Universidad Nacional de Asunción

PHP since version 4 comes with a great feature that is with the possibility to register new Stream Wrapper. (see this articles are good, this, an this too).

Usually IO functions (fopen, unlink, mkdir and others) are handle by the Operating System or an Deamon(service) that works with the hardware for do the operation. PHP because is an JIT (just in time compiling, a kind of interpreted language) gives a tool to developers that is create a Class that manage a type of IO operations, for example take a look behind: Read the rest of this entry »

Today in PHPclasses I saw a new class that is very useful. A Stream wrapper that uses the smbclient to access access Windows shared files.

Very useful when you need to work with Windows and shared resources, because use the native PHP may not work correctly sometimes, not because there is a bug, that is simple a windows bug, for further details about the problem, please read this.

The class description said:

This class is a stream wrapper that can be used to access remote files and directories on Windows or other operating systems that support the SMB protocol.

It uses the smbclient program to access Windows network shares, so it works under Linux, other Unix platforms or even under Windows with the Samba client packages installed.

The class implements functions to create, read and write to files available in the local network shares.

It can also list the local network hosts, available shares in an host, and directories of a share.

Congratulations Victor M Varela, and keep writing good and useful class.

While I was writing this post I saw that this class has a Notable package notification with following comment of the site administrator:

Useful package that can simplify accessing local network files on Windows shares or other operating systems that support the SMB protocol.

Once again congratulations Victor.

Download the class