Andrei DANEASA

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 »

Most software companies are not offering anymore the old versions on their websites in order to promote their last release and get rid of support issues with old versions. But what if I don’t like the last version or it has something that is not working for me?

Well… seems that somebody thought about this and managed to collect all old versions of 182 programs (so far) and made them public. All licensing terms remain the same.

The link is www.OldVersion.com.

Enjoy!

Absolutely true, but what about inviting somebody to visit your localhost? Hard to give him the IP address, especially when is changing frequently.

I often need to show to my friends/partners things that are located on my webserver, and from various reasons (e.g. Oracle hosting is damn expensive) I cannot upload them on a hosting server.

What are the possibilities?
Read the rest of this entry »

Translating something quickly is very easy today, by adding the corresponding bot as buddy in GTalk.

If you just add bots like:

• en2ro@bot.talk.google.com – English to Romanian
• en2fr@bot.talk.google.com – English to French
• ro2fr@bot.talk.google.com – Romanian to French
• fr2en@bot.talk.google.com – French to English
• the list includes all the languages supported by Google Translate

then you can chat with these “buddies”, telling something in the first language and they will reply with the translation in the second language, something like this:

(2:50:01 PM) andrei: I just want to test you
(2:50:14 PM) en2ro@bot.talk.google.com: Eu doar vreau să vă încerce

Of course it’s not perfect 🙂 but it’s a very nice feature.

For translating large amounts of text or websites, http://translate.google.com still remain the best choice.

Enjoy!

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

Half a year ago I bought an add-on for one hosting account that I have on QualityHostOnline.com . The add-on should be 3$/month, and they made a bill just for the first month. Starting with 30th of August they started to generate the invoices from the past like this:

There are some things that I don’t understand:

• why the due date is before invoice date?
• why they cannot aggregate all the old invoices in a bigger one
• why they need to generate an invoice per day
• why just after 1 day from invoice generation I am getting a notification with my password send in plain text

Later edit:
After paying all the invoices one by one, I cancelled the add-on and I am strongly thinking of cancelling the whole account.

Cine a avut cont la wuxing.ro (da, la ei comandai decat daca aveai cont) nu-l mai are. El trebuie recreat pentru ca au avut “probleme tehnice majore”

Acum n-o sa zic nimic de problema tehnica “majora”, se poate intampla oricui, insa nu ma pot abtine de la cateva intrebari:
– in tot acest timp nu s-a facut nici un backup al bazei de date? Read the rest of this entry »

Sunt unul din primii cititori hotnews, inca de pe vremea cand erau RevistaPresei.ro. In ultima vreme au angajat o multime de colabori care incearca sa tina site-ul in fruntea listei site-urilor stiri. Din pacate calitatea acestora lasa de multe ori de dorit, si personal am inceput sa caut si alte surse de informare.

Un exemplu este formularea: “Buffon salveaza incredibil din fata lui Buffon, scapat singur cu italianul“. Eram intr-un aeroport si asta era modalitatea mea de a fi la curent cu meciul impotriva Italiei. Cred ca din cauza exprimarii a ratat Mutu penalty-ul, pur si simplu nu a mai inteles cine cu cine joaca.

Hai Romania!