Andrei DANEASA

I’ve been asked by Packt to review one of their last books on Oracle, “Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Professional Guide“.
Like many of the Packt books, it’s highly recommended to read the subtitle as well, in this case “Master advanced PL/SQL concepts along with plenty of example questions for 1Z0-146 examination”.
So in case you’re preparing for this Oracle University exam and ready to become “Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Certified Professional“, this book is a good start.

The structure of the book if following in detail the 1Z0-146 exam topics and the user will find a separated chapter for each topic, exactly in the same order, which makes the book a very good companion when preparing for exam. The examples used trough the book are clear and easy to understand. Starting chapter 7 onwards there are topics with high applicability like SecureFiles, tuning, caching, profiling and tracing and SQL Injection prevention techniques that should be read by every Oracle PL/SQL developer but are not very well understood and unfortuntely underused by the community.

If the reader is not necessarily keen to take the exam, he can then switch to Oracle documentation available on tahiti.oracle.com, where he can read more about each of the topics in the book and many other advanced PL/SQL topics that Oracle University didn’t include in the exam curriculum.

Apex is a great tool for rapid web applications based on Oracle Database. It’s free, and if you’re happy with Oracle XE’s limitations, then it’s perfect, you have the database free as well. I’ve been following APEX for long time ago, since it was called HTML DB, and wrote 2+ years ago a guide how to install APEX on XE.

Now APEX 4.0.1 is GA and most of the people would like to upgrade. It’s very simple.

1. Download APEX from OTN
Read the rest of this entry »

PHP is one of my preferred languages. I’ve been using it for almost 10 years, since version 3, I witnessed the release of 4.0… in some words: I have a bit of experience.
I’ve been given by Packt one of the latest PHP books they published, called “PHP 5 e-Commerce Development“. The title sounds very promising and I expected to get an update on the latest technologies and techniques related to e-Commerce out of it.

First, the book is following what it says in the title, creating one e-Commerce site from the ground. From authentication to discount codes, everything is covered by the book. It touches also some APIs from payment gateways and Google. So who wants to have a ride in knowing how to build an eCommerce site with PHP 5 should read the book.

If you want just the positive feedback you should stop here. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been tasked to add some features (subversion is one of them) under a Virtual Private Server (cPanel WHM) on a Hosting site.

First I downloaded and unarchived subversion:

Since the last versions are requiring SQLite, I had to download and copy one file from sqlite folder to subversion folder: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a constant user of Google Analytics. It’s a great piece of software with lots of useful reports, easy to read and to understand. However, I was never curious how far I can go with it.

Last week I had a discussion with someone in Oracle about Real-Time Decision (RTD) Server and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI), so I decided to find out first all the capabilities of Google Analytics.
After half of day of reading the course materials on Google Conversion University, I decided that a challenge might worth 50$, so I took the exam.

More than an hour later I passed the 70 questions exam, much difficult than I expected, with a score of 87%:

Now having the proof I understood correctly what’s happening with Google Analytics, I can jump into conclusions: Read the rest of this entry »

Today afternoon on any seach on google.com the user was unable to click any of the results since google said it has interstitials. I mean strange, very strange…. all of them?

For those of you that don’t know what an interstitial is, it’s an intermediate page shown before the desired page, usually used to advertise something.

Here is the proof that it was either a hack either a very poor programming:
– A search for word “google“:

– If i am clicking the link for Google.com, I’ve got: “Warning – visiting this site may harm your computer!“:

Now after more than half an hour Google is working well again… hopefully this will not happen again in the future…

Andrei

Seems that my thumbnail generation tutorial was somehow appreciated by community and somebody posted an article on Zend Developer Zone describing my tutorial as “Advanced Thumbnail Trickery with PHP“.

First, thank you!
Second, I never had so many visitors coming from the same referred. When I saw my statistics I thought that my internal statistics tool went crazy and I checked my google analytics account. Seems that it’s true.

I promise I will elaborate the topic and make a class with it. I will also try to do the same thing with ImageMagick as a visitor suggested.

No, it’s not yet another PHP thumbnail generation tutorial! I recently needed a function to:

• create square thumbnails
• don’t crop the initial image, but scale it and fill with white background
• center the thumbnail in the square
• call the function in a loop to process an entire folder

I found no suitable example and I decided that instead of digging too much it’s better to create my own function and a class for it.

Let’s start with a photo that we need to create a thumbnail for:

Nice kid, huh?

First step would be the thumbnail generation snippet:
Read the rest of this entry »

I expected this release for some months, but didn’t have the time to test it yet. What you can do? Here’s the official description:
“SQL Developer Data Modeling offers a full spectrum of data and database modeling tools and utilities, including Entity Relationship modeling, Relational (Database Design), Data Type and Multidimensional modeling, full forward and reverse engineering and code generation. It includes importing from and exporting to a variety of sources and targets, provides a variety of formatting options and validates the models through a predefined set of Design Rules.“.
Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently windows console does not take the environmental settings from Internet Explorer, so if you properly set your proxy in IE, it is not valid in console.
And if you are running a console application that need to connect to the web and you are after a proxy, then you have a problem.

The solutions are:

• run windows utility proxycfg.exe like this:
  C:>proxycfg -p proxy_name:proxy_port
• move to a network where you don’t need a proxy 😉

Enjoy