Several years ago I got a job working at a computer help desk providing tech support to people who had purchased a Juniper firewall product. I didn't much like work at the help desk, both because of having to deal with the public, but also because I didn't have enough experience supporting the equipment they had questions about. However, I did buy one of the products I was supporting off e-bay for about 100 dollars. It was called a Juniper Netscreen and I got it working on my home broadband connection. However, several months ago it died and since then I have been using a Linksys wireless router, which works, but doesn't seem as secure as what I would like to have. Yesterday I ordered a NETGEAR FVS318. It probably has features I don't need and will break in 2-3 years and need to be replaced, but the truth is that computer security is a foundation of how the internet works, and an understanding of how it works and an amount of over-caution is a good thing.
I have recently updated the web site at work with a page that logs into the site to allow certain additional functionality. I had also been trying to learn JQuery and AJAX. It turned out that I was able to use a combination of these to provide the functionality I desired.
JQuery is a new and seemingly expandingly popular JavaScript library. It uses the concept of CSS selectors to identify HTML page elements, and then provides a number of methods to modify and act on these elements. One of the class of methods it provides are the AJAX methods. AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) allows the server to dynamically update a web page without reloading the whole page. AJAX is now very popular and if you go on an interview for a web programmer, you might be asked if you can use AJAX. The JQuery is an easy and excellent way to learn how to use AJAX and deploy it on your site.
I have been using the PHP programming language to develop a web site at NC State University for the last 3 years. Although a web site consists of many things such as planning, data import, HTML, and JavaScript - PHP was an integral part of it. As I continue in my career, hopefully in web site development, I decided last year that now was a good time to get a certification to make sure I know more about the advanced features of PHP, to prove my mastery, and last but probably not least to improve my chances of a nice job in the future.
Last January I ordered the study guide, practice exam, and test voucher from http://www.zend.com/en/. Yesterday I took the exam and passed. Yahoo! I even have a link on the Zend web site
http://www.zend.com/store/education/certification/yellow-pages.php#show-ClientCandidateID=ZEND009826
I learned something recently about using PHP/Mapscript, which is an object-oriented PHP interface to MapServer. On the Mapserver mailing list someone posed a question about persisting Mapscript objects, and I made several response postings. My first coment had to do with the general problem of persisting PHP objects in a session. There is a trick to it which is to include the class definition before the session start, e.g.
require('myclass.php');
session_start();
However, Mapscript is included as a .so extension, and this does not work. The best way to do this was from another poster, who suggested using the save function, e.g.
$map->save('saved_map.map');
$map2 = ms_newMapObj('saved_map.map');
The save function evidently saves the new map in a mapfile, which can be saved to a session, and then used at a later time to create a new object from this saved file. One interesting thing is that the saved map is perfectly formatted, although without any comments, and could be used for just formatting a mapfile.Here I will put random thoughts about things I am interested in or working on that people might find of interest - otherwise called a blog. I wrote this to practice using a database connection method for PHP called PDO, and then decided to use it for my blog.
I decided to write the page using XHTML strict dtd, and discovered my first subject and that is how to center a div element using XHTML strict, which does not permit use of the center tag. The solution I found is as follows.
div { width: 800px;
padding: 20px;
border: solid 1px black;
position: absolute;
left: 50%;
top: 0%;
margin-left: -400px;
background-color: white;
}