Author: Jay

Do what you do best in – that’s what I’ve always believed in and that’s what I preach. Over the past 25+ years (yup that’s my expertise ‘n’ experience in the Information Technology domain), I’ve been consulting to small, medium and large companies ‘About Web Technologies, Mobile Future as well as on the good-and-bad of tech. Blogger, International Business Advisor, Web Technology Expert, Sales Guru, Startup Mentor, Insurance Sales Portal Expert & a Tennis Player. And top of all – a complete family man!

CloudLinux’s Recent Integration of PHP 5.5 Alpha 2 Version

Posted on January 2, 2013 by Jay

Shared hosting operating system provider CloudLinux has expanded their PHP offerings by declaring the availability of PHP 5.5 Alpha2 version to its PHP selector tool.

With the ability to select PHP versions, PHP selector allows the users to get the latest feature updates

and preferred PHP version like PHP 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and now, 5.5 Alpha2 from their web hosting control panel. CloudLinux places each individual website in a virtual private server.

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Each account is then assigned a specific amount of hardware resources and a desirable PHP version, by using the PHP selector tool.

PHP 5.5 Alpha2 version includes new features like the most awaited password hashing API and providing users the ability to use bcrypt along with loop-controlling generators.

Igor Seletskiy the CEO of CloudLinux has expressed that the availability of PHP selector has made it easier to get access to PHP features. He quoted “PHP is possibly the most widely used aspect of any shared web hosting plan.”

Igor Seletskiy also added “Like the rest of the web hosting community, we are excited to start exploring the new features of PHP version 5.5.

However, many hosting companies and their customers would not usually deploy an Alpha version on a large-scale, server-wide basis.

CloudLinux and PHP Selector make it possible for hosting providers to assign individual accounts their own PHP version without affecting other sites on the same hardware.” Integrating such features in CloudLinux has helped PHP development to become easier and more productive

How to Generate SEO Friendly URL in Rails 3.x

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Jay

SEO friendly URLs are more important to make a page popular & search engines to crawl.

FriendlyId is the slugging and permalink plug-in for Ruby on Rails. It allows you to create pretty URLs and work with human-friendly strings.

The URLs created by slug are very useful for SEO. It is designed for generation of URL slug and history maintenance.

Steps to create Pretty URLs:

Step#1

Include gem in your Gem file:

gem 'friendly_id'

Then run bundle install.

Step#2

Modify your model on which you want the pretty URL:

extend FriendlyId
 
friendly_id :title, use: :slugged

Step#3

Add the slug column in your migration file to add it on the table

add_column :articles, :slug, :string

Then run

rake db:migrate

Now if you create an article with Title like “This is a demo title for testing”,
it will create a SEO friendly URL like “this-is-a-demo-title-for-testing” and will
save into the articles table under slug column.

Merge And Split PDF In PHP Using PDFtk

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Jay

Merge a group of PDF files to a single PDF file without disturbing the contents using PDFtk.

PDFtk runs on a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
It does not require Acrobat and allows you to manipulate PDF easily and freely.

What All You Can Do in PHP Using PDFtk

Merge PDF documents to one.
Rotate PDF Pages or documents.
Split the pages of the PDF into a new document.
Encrypt the output as desired.
Decrypt the Input as necessary but requires a password
Background watermark or a foreground stamp can be applied
Report on PDF metrics can be generated such as metadata, bookmarks, and page labels.
Update PDF metadata.
Attach numerous files to the PDF document.
Compress a PDF document into a single page.

Under the GPL, PDFtk is licensed for the public.

Download Link: https://github.com/bensquire/php-pdtfk-toolkit

Examples:

You can provide two or more PDF files as arguments to create a single PDF file as output.
Merge two or more PDFs into a new PDF file with all the original contents

pdftk example1.pdf example2.pdf example3.pdf cat output result.pdf

Rotate the first page of a PDF to 90 degrees clockwise

pdftk in.pdf cat 1E 2-end output out.pdf

Rotate all the pages of the PDF document by 180 degrees

pdftk in.pdf cat 1-endS output out.pdf

Report on PDF document metadata, bookmarks and page labels

pdftk mydoc.pdf dump_data output report.txt

Security Flaws Persist in Java 7u10 Update

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Jay

Oracle has released new updates for Java with security enhancements for better performance.

This new release of Java SE 7 update 10 is now certified for both Windows 8 and Mac OS X operating systems.

These updates include the ability to use the control panel to prevent Java applications from running in browsers, as well as to set a level of security for unsigned applets, Java FX applications, and Java Web Start applications.

It also adds a dialogue box to warn people when Java plug-in updates are available for download.

But the update of JDK 7u10 has failed to fix some major security troubles and have brought only minor improvements, experts say.

Andrew Storms, the director of security operations at ncircle quoted “New features notwithstanding, Oracle still has a long way to go to improve security” referring to the fact that the hackers are aware that most people do not keep the Java plug-in up to date, hence leaving old flaws open to misuse by the trespassers and attackers.

HP’s security research division reported that in the year 2011 an attack integrated with the black hole toolkit had more than 75 percent success rate for the attackers.

According to the reports it is also said that for large businesses and Industries, only a full-time IT security staff will be able to figure out the new settings help and if managed centrally from Microsoft Active Directory or other directory servers.

Storms also stated “Without this access, the new settings will essentially be useless to enterprise IT teams” and pointed out that consumers are not worrying to update Java; they are unwilling to learn the uses control panel.

Besides the security flaws, other fixes include Windows command line issues, the ability to allow sandbox warning banner to grant access.

Collecting Contacts Using Cardmagic-Contacts Pplug-in in Rails 2.3.8

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Jay

Cardmagic-Contacts is a rails plug-in which provides an interface to fetch contact list information from various email providers including Hotmail, AOL, Gmail, Plaxo, Yahoo and many more.

This example narrates how to extract contact list using Rails 2.3.8 and cardmagic-contacts plug-in

Step#1

Download the plug-in by running the command below to store the plug-in in the folder “vendor/plug-ins”

Windows

ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/cardmagic/contacts

Linux

ruby script/plugin http://github.com/cardmagic/contacts

Step#2

Write down the following code on the top of the controller class

require 'contacts'

Step#3

Pass the required gmail/yahoo/hotmail/AOL login & password from view

<div>
 
<div style="margin-left:25px;" >Invite <img src="../images/yahoo.JPG">Yahoo
 
Friends </div>
 
<div style="margin-left:25px;">Yahoo Email: <input type="text" name="email"
 
id="yahoo_email_id"></div>
<div style="margin-left:25px;">Password:   <input type="password"
 
name="email"  id="yahoo_pwd_id"></div>
 
<div style="margin-left:122px;margin-top:20px;"><input type="button"
 
value="Login" name="btn_submit" id="btn_submit" ></div>
 
</div>

Step#4

Create an action to fetch the list of contacts for a specific email id

def grab_contacts #Grab gmail contacts @gmail_contacts=Contacts::Gmail.new(login, password).contacts #or @gmail_contacts=Contacts.new(:gmail, login, password).contacts #Grab yahoo contacts @yahoo_contacts = Contacts::Yahoo.new(login, password).contacts #or @yahoo_contacts = Contacts.new(:yahoo, login, password).contacts #Grab hotmail contacts @hotmail_contacts =Contacts::Hotmail.new(login, password).contacts #or @hotmail_contacts = Contacts.new(:hotmail, login, password).contacts end

Step#5

Here is also alternate method to get the contacts by providing email_id and password

any_mail = Contacts.guess(login, password).contacts

The “Contacts.guess” method will automatically concatenate the entire
address book from each of the successful logins. If the login and password is
working with multiple email accounts then it will grab the contacts from all accounts.

Step#6

Display the friends list in your view page

<table>
<th>
<td >Friends Name</td>
<td >Friends Email</td>
</th>
<tr>
<% @gmail_contacts.each do |contact| %>
<td><%=contact[0]%></td>
<td><%=contact[1]%></td>
<% end %>
</tr>
</table>