Andrei DANEASA » Programming

Upgrade Oracle APEX 3.2.1 to 4.0.1 on Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE)

andreiash — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:29:03 +0000

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

2. Unzip it making sure you don’t change the name of the apex folder inside the zip.

unzip apex_4.0.1.zip /tmp/
cd /tmp/apex

3. Connect to your XE installation

sqlplus / as sysdba

4. Run the installation script

SQL> @apexins SYSAUX SYSAUX TEMP /i/

5. Wait 10-15 minutes then connect again as sysdba and import images

SQL>@apxldimg.sql /tmp

!do not put the “apex” folder in the path there

That’s it, no more unlock account, set password, set port, you already did this on the previous installation.

Enjoy!

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Book review: PHP 5 e-commerce Development by Michael Peacock (Packt Publishing)

andreiash — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:53:19 +0000

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.

Secondly, I don’t think the book has a well defined target, because author’s own framework is used all over the book and the explanations are not sufficient enough in my opinion. When there are so many frameworks on the market, it’s a very high chance that the users to use one of these frameworks (not the author’s one) to build the eShop. In this case most of the code is useless and you’ll remain just with the explanation of the logic behind. I also expected more specific info on payment processing, SEO, marketing, newsletters, admin alerts, and not necessary all the source code out there.

I reckon I didn’t read the description, excerpt or anything else about the book before starting to read it, so that’s why I was a bit dissapointed. The book’s description on Packt is correct: “This is a fast-paced tutorial focusing on creating a framework and using it to build an online store through an ongoing case study. Later chapters include examples to illustrate how easily the framework can be adapted for different situations. The framework and code are enhanced and built upon with each chapter, adding more and more functionality. “. So online store is just a case study, the book is focused on the framework.

However, the book is still very interesting for people that want to create their own in-house light framework and that don’t want to rely on a fat framework like CodeIgniter, phpCake, ZendFramework.

My conclusion: a nice reading, 4 stars out of 5, but if you don’t plan to use the framework presented in the book, then the source code is too much and hard to follow.

****~ (4.0/5)

openSource e-shop solutions: prestaShop, osCommerce.

Enjoy!

I’m going to review one/some Packt book(s)

Thank you ZendEditor !

Thumbnail generation with PHP tutorial

Install subversion for VPS (cPanel) under CentOS

andreiash — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:26:33 +0000

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:

mkdir -p /usr/local/src/subverison
cd /usr/local/src/subversion
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.9.tar.bz2
tar xfj subversion-1.6.6.tar.bz2

Since the last versions are requiring SQLite, I had to download and copy one file from sqlite folder to subversion folder:

cd ..
wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-amalgamation-3.6.13.tar.gz
tar -xvf sqlite-amalgamation-3.6.13.tar.gz
mkdir subversion-1.6.9/sqlite-amalgamation
cp sqlite-3.6.13/sqlite3.c subversion-1.6.9/sqlite-amalgamation/sqlite3.c
cd subversion-1.6.9

Configure, make and install:

./configure –with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs –with-apr=/usr/local/apache/bin/apr-config –with-apr-util=/home/cpeasyapache/src/httpd-2.2.9/srclib/apr-util \
make
make install

Then creating a repository:

cd /
mkdir svn && cd svn
svnadmin create –fs-type fsfs

Create a template for my projects and initialize repository:

mkdir /svntemp
cd /svntemp

mkdir website1
mkdir website1/trunk
mkdir website1/branches
mkdir website1/tags

svn import /svntemp file:///svn/ –message "Creating initial repo."

svn list –verbose file:///svn/

Create users inside authz file and add them to svnserve.conf. You might want to set anonymous permissions to none.

Access your svn via internet with:

svn:///svn//website1/trunk

Voila!

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Passed Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ)

andreiash — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:02:48 +0000

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:

GA it’s a great piece of software for analyzing trends, keywords and content.
GA it’s staying on another server than your web server and the communication is uni-directional. This means GA will get information about your site, but you cannot implement real-time decisions based on GA
GA it’s free, same Urchin, so if you own a blog or have a small budget, these will be your choices
Both RTD Server and RUEI are licensed products with a price per processor over 80K USD, which makes them a choice just for big enterprises
RTD Server will be able to serve real-time content based on your behavior, just like Amazon is doing
GA is not able to track 404-pages, loading times, code execution times

To summarize: if you’re big, go with RTD and/or RUEI. If you’re not so big, stay with GA, Urchin or other free stuff like them.

Achieved OCP DBA certification

First post on 2011

Upgrade Oracle APEX 3.2.1 to 4.0.1 on Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE)

Old geek… more than 5 years of blogging

Google.com has interstitials ?

andreiash — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:41:38 +0000

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

Thank you ZendEditor !

andreiash — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:21:42 +0000

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.

Thumbnail generation with PHP tutorial

andreiash — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:19:25 +0000

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?

… and what we want to achieve:

First step would be the thumbnail generation snippet:

$square_size = 167;
$quality = 100;
//get original image attributes
list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize($photos_dir."/".$file);
$thumb=imagecreatefromjpeg($photos_dir."/".$file);
$thumb_p = imagecreatetruecolor($square_size, $square_size);
imagecopyresampled($thumb_p, $thumb, 0, 0, 0, 0, $square_size, $square_size, $width, $height);
//save the file
imagejpeg($thumb_p,$thumbs_dir."/".$file,$quality);

This would be the result:

As we can see, the photo is distorted and we need to scale it, by adding 2 variables:

//set dimensions
if($width> $height) {
$width_t=$square_size;
//respect the ratio
$height_t=round($height/$width*$square_size);
} elseif($height> $width) {
$height_t=$square_size;
$width_t=round($width/$height*$square_size);
}
else {
$width_t=$height_t=$square_size;
}

We also need to change the imagecopyresampled function call to add these 2 new variables:

imagecopyresampled($thumb_p, $thumb, 0, 0, 0, 0, $width_t, $height_t, $width, $height);

The new result would be:

The image is not distorted anymore but now it’s not centered. We need to move the point where the scaled image appears on the thumb to the right with a number of pixels equal to the half of the difference between height and width of the thumb. This offset is implemented also in the imagecopyresampled function, the first 2 zeros from the set of 4.

//set dimensions
if($width> $height) {
$width_t=$square_size;
//respect the ratio
$height_t=round($height/$width*$square_size);
//set the offset
$off_y=ceil(($width_t-$height_t)/2);
$off_x=0;
} elseif($height> $width) {
$height_t=$square_size;
$width_t=round($width/$height*$square_size);
$off_x=ceil(($height_t-$width_t)/2);
$off_y=0;
}
else {
$width_t=$height_t=$square_size;
$off_x=$off_y=0;
}

We also need to change the imagecopyresampled function call to add these 2 new variables:

imagecopyresampled($thumb_p, $thumb, $off_x, $off_y, 0, 0, $width_t, $height_t, $width, $height);

The new thumbnail look like this:

It’s better, the last thing I want is to set a white background to the thumb and I’m done. By default imagecreatetruecolor is creating a black canvas with no parameter to change it to white. In order to do this we need to declare a white background and fill the canvas with it BEFORE adding the scaled image:

$bg = imagecolorallocate ( $thumb_p, 255, 255, 255 );
imagefill ( $thumb_p, 0, 0, $bg );

Now it’s what I want:

The whole source code is the following:

function set_thumb($file, $photos_dir=‘uploads/photos’,$thumbs_dir=‘uploads/photos/thumbs’, $square_size=167, $quality=100) {
//check if thumb exists
if (!file_exists($thumbs_dir."/".$file)) {
//get image info
list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize($photos_dir."/".$file);

//set dimensions
if($width> $height) {
$width_t=$square_size;
//respect the ratio
$height_t=round($height/$width*$square_size);
//set the offset
$off_y=ceil(($width_t-$height_t)/2);
$off_x=0;
} elseif($height> $width) {
$height_t=$square_size;
$width_t=round($width/$height*$square_size);
$off_x=ceil(($height_t-$width_t)/2);
$off_y=0;
}
else {
$width_t=$height_t=$square_size;
$off_x=$off_y=0;
}

$thumb=imagecreatefromjpeg($photos_dir."/".$file);
$thumb_p = imagecreatetruecolor($square_size, $square_size);
//default background is black
$bg = imagecolorallocate ( $thumb_p, 255, 255, 255 );
imagefill ( $thumb_p, 0, 0, $bg );
imagecopyresampled($thumb_p, $thumb, $off_x, $off_y, 0, 0, $width_t, $height_t, $width, $height);
imagejpeg($thumb_p,$thumbs_dir."/".$file,$quality);
}
}

*Note: Nobody was hurt during this tutorial. The cute dude is Razvan‘s son, Danut.

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeling 1.5.1 Early Adopter release launched

andreiash — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:13:46 +0000

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.“.

The official download link is here. Pay attention that it’s still an early adopter release.

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How to change proxy in Windows console

andreiash — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:47:42 +0000

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

Oracle APEX 3.1 installation on Oracle Database 10g XE

andreiash — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:47:14 +0000

I’ve been asked many times if there is possible to install Oracle Application Express on Express Edition of 10g database, both of them being free products. The answer is YES, and the procedure is quite simple, as very well indicated on Oracle website

The steps would be:

Download the latest version from APEX website
Unzip the archive in a convenient location on your hard-disk
Start a SQL*Plus from that location( C:\apex\> sqlplus / as sysdba )
Install apex:
@apexins SYSAUX SYSAUX TEMP /i/
Change admin password:
@apxchpwd
Set images path (APEX_HOME is the folder where you unziped the archive):
@APEX_HOME/apex/apxldimg.sql APEX_HOME
Run the following script where “password” is the admin password set 2 steps before:
@APEX_HOME/apex/apxxepwd.sql password

Good luck