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WampServer (where Wamp stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) is a free, all-in-one program that includes built-in copies of recent versions of the Apache web server, PHP, and MySQL.

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Let’s we are building a dynamic photo gallery in flash using ActionsScript 3.0. The data is originally placed in a MySQL database, and through a web application written in PHP, the user is allowed to upload files to the gallery or delete existing files. Flash is used as a front-end in order to achieve better results for visual effects. When the user makes changes to the gallery, the PHP application updates the XML file located on the webserver with the new data. When accesing the page containing the flash galley, the user should see the updated gallery, but instead he sees the old one. The reason is that the browser loads the XML file from it’s cache and not the webserver. Not even a refresh won’t solve this problem on most browsers.

The solution is a small trick used by programmers to fool the browser into thinking it is always loading a different file, by adding an extra parameter (with a ramndom value)  to the URL of the file that is beeing loaded. So, even if the file name itself is the same, the URL changes on every request.

The changes must be made on the portion of the code where the XML file is requested throught ActionScript.

myIdentifier=Math.round(Math.random()*10000);
xmlData.load("gallery.xml?uid="+myIdentifier);

Simple as that!

As I am running a photography website, where community members are sometimes uploading images straight out of their digital cameras, I came across the following problem:

Digital cameras usually add a lot of extra information in the EXIF section of the JPEG file (regarding camera type, camera settings or the exposure conditions under which the shot was taken). When creating thumbnails for images, using the resize or crop functions from ImageMagick, all this extra information is kept inside the resized thumbnail, adding significant overhead to the resulting file. For instance a small thumbnail 48 by 48 px (like a member’s avatar picture) could take over up to 40 Kb if the file contains EXIF information, instead of abou 8 Kb without EXIF. Considering  you could have about 50 avatars beeing loaded on a page, reducing the size of the thumbnails could have an important effect on your page loading time.

The solution to this problem is quite trivial. All you have to do is add an extra parameter to your convert command: - strip

So if your convert command looked like this:

exec('convert '.$source_file.'  48x48 '.$destination_file.'');

The stripped version would be:

exec('convert '.$source_file.'  -strip 48x48 '.$destination_file.'');

For instance, in order to change the max_execution_time value, all you need to do is edit .htaccess (located in the root of your website, usually accesible by FTP), and add this line:

php_value max_execution_time 120

where 120 is the number of seconds you wish to set the maximum execution time for a php script.
There are 2 types of variables that can be set:

1. The values of  specific directives can be set using php_value name value. Ex:

php_value memory_limit 128M

2.Boolean varibles can be set using a php_flag name on|off directive. Ex:

php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off

Other values that can be changed through the .htaccess are:
allow_url_fopen
allow_url_include
arg_separator
arg_separator.input
arg_separator.output
asp_tags
default_charset
default_mimetype
default_socket_timeout
define_syslog_variables
detect_unicode
display_errors
display_startup_errors
docref_ext
docref_root
engine
error_append_string
error_log
error_prepend_string
error_reporting
gpc_order
html_errors
http.allowed_methods
log_errors
log_errors_max_len
magic_quotes_gpc
magic_quotes_runtime
max_execution_time
max_input_time
memory_limit
msql.allow_persistent
mysql.allow_persistent
mysql.cache_size
mysql.connect_timeout
mysql.default_host
mysql.default_port
mysql.max_persistent
post_max_size
register_globals
register_long_arrays
safe_mode
sendmail_from
session.auto_start
session.cache_expire
session.cache_limiter
session.use_cookies
short_open_tag
smtp_port
upload_max_filesize
url_rewriter.tags
user_agent
user_dir
zlib.output_compression

Note: You will need “AllowOverride Options” or “AllowOverride All” privileges in order to be able to use htaccess to modify php variables.

Asfter studying a few solutions with more or less results, I decided uppon SyntaxHighlighter Plus which seams to be the best solution out there.

However, although it worked great with the default Wordpress theme I realised that as soon as I applied the “ProBlogger” theme, the javascripts that do the highlighting work would not function corectllyany more. The documentation did offer some solutions, but not the one I needed.

So, if you run into problems when installing SyntaxHighlighter Plus on some wordpress theme, be sure that the header.php file in your theme, contains the following line, somewhere in the head portion of the file:

<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>