Incero

Number Of Available CPU Cores In PHP

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 04:26:22 +0000

It is simple enough to check and then load the number of available processing cores on the current machine into a PHP variable. You can do so with the code below, which uses shell commands to grab data from /proc/cpuinfo and then removes unneeded data with PHP.

<?php

 /*How to check how many processors are available on the current machine.

 by gordon@incero.com http://www.Incero.com. Feel free to use this code,

 but keep this header. June 30th, 2010.*/

 $numberOfProcessors=`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | tail -1`;

 $numberOfProcessors=preg_replace('/\s+/', '',$numberOfProcessors);

 $numberOfProcessors=str_replace(":","", $numberOfProcessors);

 $numberOfProcessors=str_replace("processor","", $numberOfProcessors);

 $numberOfProcessors++;

 echo "Number of processors on this machine is $numberOfProcessors!";

?>

We use this code to help our programs assign the most efficient parameters to others processes, such as FFMpeg video conversions, that we spawn from PHP across various machines.

Tested on CentOS 5.4, should work on most Linux distributions.

Zend 2003120701 Error

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:22:37 +0000

If you see an error on your website like the one below, it means that you need to install Zend Encoder to load the file.

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If you are running cPanel/WHM on your server you can easily install Zend Encoder from the "Easy Apache" menu. Below are some screenshots detailing the process in WHM, simply use your existing Apache/PHP settings and then check the Zend Encoder checkbox on the options list near the end of the process.

PHP Upload Progress Bar Script

admin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:00:18 +0000

We have developed an amazing PHP upload progress bar script, which uses Javascript and PHP to report back the upload status data to the user. This script makes it extremely easy to add an upload progress bar to your website without using Flash, Perl, cgi, or other complex solutions.

Demo

You can see the upload progress bar in action on a live site at http://www.PutFile2.com. You can also see a video of it in action at the bottom of this page.

Features

Uses simple HTML form, allowing you to post additional data such as a description of the file, user-name, etc
100% PHP and Javascript
Customizable progress update interval, have it update as often as you like, specify the interval in milliseconds
CSS based upload progress bar, change colors and size easily
3 easily selectable display modes:
1. Percent Uploaded
2. Percent and Megabytes Uploaded
3. Percent, Megabytes Uploaded, and Time Left

Customizable & Well Documented

All of the code is easily customizable by any novice web programmer. All of the PHP code is very well commented in clear and easy to understand English. If there are any features that you want to add you can easily edit the source code to meet your needs.

Help Available, If You Need It!

We answer emails to info@incero.com within 1 business day, but usually within a couple of hours. We can also be reached on (512) 394.8803. We can install the script for you, integrate it into your website, or perform nearly any other programming task for you for a reasonable fee. We are a real web development company located in downtown Austin, TX and are always happy to assist our clients!

Buy Now

We are a PayPal verified business, once you have completed the payment we will email you a copy of the script. Please feel free to contact us if you have any troubles, we are here to help!

Single Domain, $69	Personal Domains, $119	Developer, $249
Use the code on only one domain.	Use the code on an unlimited number of domains that you personally own. May not be used by web developers or businesses.	For developers and business users. Use the code on any number of your own and your client’s domains.

Sever Requirements

PHP 5.2 or newer
PHP PECL UploadProgress (very easy to install, install script included)

Securing Joomla Media Files With Login Sessions

admin — Tue, 11 May 2010 21:08:30 +0000

We recently completed an excellent Joomla file protection script which allows Joomla CMS webmasters to secure their digital files based on the current user login session preventing leeching.

Using our Joomla file protection script you can simply drop our securefile.php in any folder that contains files that you want to protect and they will only be loadable by registered and logged in users.

Here’s how it works:

All file requests for media files including videos and images are automatically passed to securefile.php
securefile.php checks that the user is already logged by checking the Joomla session and cookie data
displays the requested file, or shows an error message if permission is denied.

An example usage would be that you have a several .swf presentations that you want to show to your registered users only, they view your webpage source code and then steal the link to the .swf (such as http://www.mywebsite.com/files/presentation4.swf). The user then shares that direct link to your presentation with non registered users resulting in bandwidth usage and lost revenue. With the leech protection system those direct links will not work for non registered users.

This beauty of this system is that you can keep using your existing video players and presentations on your site as you always have without having to modify your code. We can set this up for you from just $60, contact us for more information.

How To Generate Thumbnails On The Fly With PHP

admin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:25:03 +0000

There are two great ways to generate thumbnails for images on the fly with PHP:

Use GD to resize the image on the fly and output it
Extracts the thumbnail from the Exif data. (If this fails, you could revert to method 1 above.)

The latter assumes that the image file has exif data, which most photos do. To ensure the fastest loading thumbnails it would be best to generate thumbnails when images are uploaded to the server, but there are times when you don’t want to have to store thumbnails for every image uploaded.

Method 1: Using GD To Resize On The Fly

Using this 8.5MB image, and the code below, the following URL will load a thumbnail that is dynamically created: http://www.incero.com/codesamples/thumbnailonthefly/thumbnail.php?image=highres.jpg&width=160

<?php

 /*How to extract a thumbnail from Exif data using PHP

 Created by Gordon Page, gordon@incero.com. April 30th, 2010.

 Incero.com offers custom coding and hosting solutions.

 */

 header("Content-type: image/jpeg");
 // get image size

 $file = $_GET[image];

 if($size = GetImageSize($file)){

 $w = $size[0];

 $h = $size[1];

 //set new size

 $nw = $_GET['width'];

 $nh = ($nw*$h)/$w;

 }

 else{

 //set new size

 $nw = "160";

 $nh = "120";

 }

 //draw the image

 $src_img = imagecreatefromjpeg($file);

 $dst_img = imagecreatetruecolor($nw,$nh);

 imagecopyresampled($dst_img, $src_img, 0, 0, 0, 0, $nw, $nh, $w, $h);//resizing the image

 imagejpeg($dst_img,"",100);

 imagedestroy($src_img);

 imagedestroy($dst_img);

?>

You’ll notice that with this method it takes about a second to generate the thumbnail so you may want to default to the method below which is faster, and if that method fails then fall back to this first method.

Method 2: Extracting The Thumbnail From The Exif Data

Using the same 8.5MB image, and the code below, the following URL will extract the thumbnail from the Exif data: http://www.incero.com/codesamples/thumbnailonthefly/exifthumb.php?image=highres.jpg


<?php

 /*How to extract a thumbnail from Exif data using PHP

 Created by Gordon Page, gordon@incero.com. April 30th, 2010.

 Incero.com offers custom coding and hosting solutions.

 */

 // file to read

 $file =$_REQUEST['image'];

 $image = exif_thumbnail($file, $width, $height, $type);

 // width, height and type get filled with data

 // after calling "exif_thumbnail"

 if ($image) {

 // send header and image data to the browser:

 header(‘Content-type: ‘ .image_type_to_mime_type($type));

 print $image;

 }

 else {

 // there is no thumbnail available, handle the error.

 //This would be a great place to revert to the GD resize method.

 print ‘No thumbnail available’;

 }

?>

Feel free to use the code above in your own projects. If you are in need of paid programming services please contact us.

PHP file_exists() Performance

admin — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:45:17 +0000

For one of our projects we need a large amount of cheap storage, an NFS mounted NAS suits us. But we also want to load most recently used files from the server’s local disk, so that the notoriously slow NFS protocol doesn’t get the better of us during peak times. We’ll simply run a cron each hour to mirror our most recently used files to the local disk. Think of it as a very simplified reverse proxy cache.

Now, we could store the current location of the files in the database, e.g. file1 is on the nas, file2 is on the nas and the local disk but that would mean more work, and an extra query on the database.

Databases are generally more expensive to scale than other website components, so we are simply going to check if the file exists on the local disk and if it does then serve it from there, and if not then load it from the NAS directory.

This raised the question of whether checking if the file exists on the local disk take too long, especially when checking several million times per day. The answer is no. Using PHP to check whether 10 million different files exist on the local disk takes approximately 40 seconds, that’s about 4 millionths of a second per check which is acceptable for our needs of 100,000 image loads per day.

Here’s the code we used to check:



<?php

 $x=0;

 $start_time=time();

 while($x<10000000)

 {

 $x++;

 }

 print "loop without checks took ";

 echo time() – $start_time;

 print " seconds <br /><br />";
 $x=0;

 $start_time=TIME();

 while($x<10000000)

 {

 $name=$x . ".wmv";

 if(file_exists($name))

 {

 //do nothing

 }

 $x++;

 }

 print "loop with checks took ";

 echo time() – $start_time;

 print " seconds <br /><br />";

?>

And here was the output from the script:

loop without checks took 1 seconds

loop with checks took 41 seconds

Obviously the next step to increase performance would be to have the “local disk” which caches the files actually be a RAM disk, however we’re many millions of image loads per day away from needing to do that. For now we’ve solved our limited storage issues without taking a performance hit.

Paste Image Upload Java Applet

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:35:39 +0000

We’re the creators of the awesome Java applet that allows users to paste images or screenshots directly from their clipboard and upload them to the web. We use this functionality on our site UploadScreenShot.com.

You may now purchase a version of the applet which can be easily integrated with your own website. Simply embed the Java applet, specify where the image data should be posted to, the URL to redirect to when the upload is done, and a session identifier string which will be included in the post data if you wish (so that you can track which user uploaded which image).

Applet Features:

pasting images directly from the user’s clipboard
supports pasting and dragging and dropping of png and jpg image files
browse for and upload png and jpg image files
functions in the same fashion as the applet demonstrated on UploadScreenshot.com
unobtrusive copyright notice in the bottom right hand corner which can be seen here
includes example PHP code for handling the image uploads

Each purchase provides you with a license to use the Java applet on one website only, if you need to use it on multiple websites please purchase multiple licenses. You will be emailed the Java applet and sample PHP integration after completing the payment via the PayPal button below, all purchases are final.

We offer installation services at reasonable rates, please contact us for more info.

Install IonCube Loader On A Cpanel/WHM Server

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:55:59 +0000

If you’re running a webserver with Cpanel and need to use Zend’s IonCube Loader, you can easily install it by running this command via SSH:

/scripts/phpextensionmgr install IonCubeL oader

It will output something like this:

Updating md5sum list
Fetching http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/cpanelsync/easy/targz.yaml (0)….@75.127. 84.226……connected……receiving…100%……Done
Downloading tarball for IonCubeLoader
Fetching http://httpupdate.cpanel.net/cpanelsync/easy/targz/Cpanel/Easy/IonCubeL oader.pm.tar.gz.linux-generic-64 (0)….@75.127.84.226……connected……recei ving…2%…4%…6%…8%…10%…12%…15%…17%…19%…21%…23%…25%…28%.. .30%…32%…34%…36%…38%…41%…43%…45%…47%…49%…51%…54%…56%…5 8%…60%…62%…64%…67%…69%…71%…73%…75%…77%…80%…82%…84%…86% …88%…90%…93%…95%…97%…99%…100%……Done
Installing IonCubeLoader
Creating install directory at /usr/local/IonCube
Determining PHP version
Installing IonCube Loader binaries
Activating IonCube Loader extension in /usr/local/lib/php.ini
IonCube Loader extension activated

You can then check that it is indeed installed by entering this command via ssh:

php -v

Which will output something like this:

PHP 5.2.9 (cli) (built: Feb 23 2010 19:52:35)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies
with the ionCube PHP Loader v3.3.10, Copyright (c) 2002-2009, by ionCube Ltd.

There are plenty of other methods to install IonCube Loader, but this simple Cpanel script seems to be the easiest. Many scripts, like our media hotlinking protection script, make use of IonCube Loader to run Zend protected PHP source code.

Use Memtest86 Before Deploying Servers

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:39:49 +0000

We’ve been building a few servers recently, and as part of our testing we performed a memory test on each of the machines. In doing so we discovered that one of the RAM modules was defective. We confirmed that the memory, not the cpu nor motherboard, was at fault by then testing the RAM in another machine.

System memory can be defective without being overly apparent, allowing you to install your operating system and use it normally for a period of time. After a while programs may begin to crash unexpectedly, and other system errors may occur.

By running Memtest86 before shipping the servers to the datacenter we have saved ourselves countless hours of remotely debugging the issue and coordinating a replacement of the hardware.

Memtest86 is free and can be downloaded as a bootable iso and in many other formats here. It is also bundled on Ubunutu installation disks, just boot from the cd/dvd and run the “memory test” option.

Below is a screenshot detailing over 400,000 memory errors. Working memory should not return any errors at all, one single error is cause for concern.

Check out the Memtest86 website for more details on how to determine which memory module is at fault, and whether your bios or voltage settings may be to blame.

UploadScreenShot Without Java

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:44:21 +0000

We’ve added a basic upload fall back option so that users without Java enabled in their browser can still use UploadScreenShot.com.

Below is a screen capture of what the site now looks like, with a file upload form, when you visit the site with Java disabled: