All I did was that I edited the plugin to UTF-8 encode the string before it makes the Ajax call.

Once you have downloaded the plugin from DevBridge open the jquery.autocomplete.js file in your favorite editor and scroll down to the getSuggestions function. Now just replace the line

me.options.params.query = q;

with

me.options.params.query = unescape(encodeURIComponent(q));

In the server side script to which the ajax request is being made UTF-8 decode(in PHP use the  utf8_decode( string $data  ) function) the string before querying your DB for the string. Now your autosuggest will work smoothly for all the writing systems on the web.

Hope this post helps other developers.

Now with two years into professional life, things have been really awesome, thanks to my 1st company that I was working with till late last month. I have now moved on to see how a change would make a difference to my career and life. Change is difficult(and this change was indeed difficult), but it is  said that if you look back at life, the most rewarding experiences were when you were open to change. So as I look forward to my future rewards, I thought of doing some retrospection and putting down the lessons I learnt till date in my professional life. These are the lessons I learnt from my colleagues, by making mistakes and by watching others make mistakes.

Small Company vs Big Company…
The above comparison shouldn’t bother you, what should bother you is the WORK you get at the company. It could happen that you get the best and most challenging job at an small-mid size company while a mere documentation or QC job at an big company.

Stay Hungry…
Set targets not limits to the work that your doing. Be restless to learn what your colleague knows and you do not. Having and doing loads of work is good as it helps keep the fire burning within us.

Be on the right side of the rotten apple…
You may have that arrogant creative guy or lethargic technical lead in your team, but remember that they hold that position because they  have some talent. Isolating yourself from them is a loss to your growth. Be on the right side of the rotten apple, learn what makes that other guy a good tech. lead or creative person and try to become a non-lethargic non-arrogant creative tech. lead.

Get into complexity before your pushed into it…
I have seen a lot of this happening, when a team is asked to pick up their own tasks there a major set of people that pick the simpler one’s first and leave the complex tasks to that small set of people who always do it and love to do it. If you belong to that major set, its high time that you move to the smaller set. Coz the day when you do not have that small set of people around you and your manager assigns the task to you, that complex task may seem to be an impossible task.

Don’t Expect Training…
I have seen a lot of freshers ask this question as they join their first company  ’Do we get training here?’ referring to 3-6 months of training that most of the Indian IT companies provide to freshers. My question to them has always been, What have you done in the past 3-4 years? Isn’t 4 years enough of time to train yourself? If you couldn’t train yourself in 4years, are you expecting some kind of miracle in the 3 months of training. I am not against training but there is a different kind of a joy in molding yourself than being molded by others, coz in the former you get to choose what you like, which mostly is not possible in the later. I have always looked at my career as one big training class and that has helped me big time.

Give back…
Remember it is your seniors who helped you when you were a junior and now its your responsibility to help your  juniors. And this would help you too to revise your basics. I realized that I had forgot the basics and history of PHP when I was preparing slides for a PHP talk to be given at a college Techfest.

Measure of Success…
Before you party on your weekend, look back at the week gone by and see have learned enough?  Was your week fruitful? Are you tired? If you have a positive answer to all these questions then go ahead party/relax else, get back to work. The best way to measure your success at the end of the year is not by checking the CTC you draw, but by counting the number of weekends you partied/relaxed and your achievements for the year. Your CTC will always be proportional to your professional achievements, so strive to achieve more.

Network…
One of  the biggest mistake in the first 2 years of my career was to be an introvert and confining my network to just friends and office colleagues. If you go beyond this, you will find that there are a hell lot of amazing and like minded people out there to connect with and learn from.  Facebook, LinkedIn and other forums were mainly built to facilitate this connect( not play silly games) and these channels have truly helped me meet and connect with some really good people in the past 6 months. Infact, some of the job offers that I got were via LinkedIn

These are some of the lessons that I have learnt from my professional life  so far. Some people may differ from my thoughts and without doubt they have every right to do so.

What lessons have you learnt? Share it with me in the comments :)

Create your Profile…
You need to start off by first creating your account and selecting the appropriate Account Type. For a business it would mostly be “company”, unless your a Marketing/PR firm or a Non-Profit who have their specific account types. Once you have confirmed your account, login and complete your profile by giving the description of your company, uploading your logo and entering the tags that best describe your company and the work done. It would be best to fill in every information in a detailed manner, as that is what people are going to look at first when they stumble upon your company on SlideShare.

Upload Great Content…
Now its time to dig out all the content(Tuesday TechTalk slides, White papers written by your employees, presentations that you made to your clients) that your company has generated over the years and is just lying under virtual dust in your Content Management System and post it to SlideShare. Any content that you think would be of great help to others and could draw some eyeballs to your account is a good post. Post content that acts as a proof to the profile information that you provided. Remember we are trying to use SlideShare not only as a knowledge sharing medium but also for your branding, so before you upload your content you need to dress it up.

1. Design 1 or 2 good templates and push your presentations in these templates before uploading them to SlideShare. By doing this people who have already viewed and liked some of your presentations before will be able to identify your other presentations in the search listings and prefer to pick them over others.
2. Let the first slide of your presentations have the company logo, authors name and company website along with the subject of the presentation.
3. Make sure your template has your company logo and/or your  company name in the footnote on every slide, certifying that the content is yours and at the same time giving it a professional look.
4. The last slide of each presentation could have a citation to the author, when and where was this presented, a link to the blog or document that briefly describes this presentation and the email id for feedback or more information on this presentation.

Publish your presentations with the appropriate title, description and tags so that people get a good idea of the presentation before they scan it slide-by-slide.

Socialize…
SlideShare provides quiet a few social networking features that would help you build your social graph. Start of by searching for people and company profiles in your field and start following them. Review their content and provide them with feedback, favorite presentations that you really liked, comment on them, provide them with a link to your own presentations on the same topic and ask for feedback. Basically you need to start a conversation, social media is all about starting a conversation, collaborating with people and  building communities.

Share your Content…
Socializing within SlideShare is a good thing to do, but you can even attract people from outside SlideShare by embedding and sharing your presentations on blogs and other social networking platforms. Make sure that you blog about each of your presentation giving in-depth explanation of your presentation and using the embed code provided by SlideShare to embed your presentation in your blog post. SlideShare has even built apps. on Facebook and LinkedIn, so you could even add these apps to display your content on your companies profile or fan page on these social networks.

One of my personal favorite offerings from SlideShare are their wide range of widgets and presentation playlists that you can embed on your blog and website to display a feed of your presentations.

SlideShare Business…
SlideShare recently launched SlideShare Business that provides a new way to reach professional audience, connect with more and the right people by advertising your content to them, but I would recommend to go for this only after you have built a good profile by following the above few steps.

The above steps provided by me are by no means exhaustive, there would be many other ways by which you could make use of SlideShare as a social media channel to promote your company and its work.

How are you using SlideShare to promote your business? Share it with me in the comments

SlideShare is a business media site for managing and sharing presentations and documents and currently boasts of having over 23 million visitors that view over 60 million pages every month. Going ahead in this post, I will be giving you a low down about SlideShare and why it becomes a critical element of the Professional Social Media Channels

Storing and Sharing…
SlideShare allows you to upload and share presentations, documents and spreadsheets of a wide variety of formats whether its from Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. It even supports upload via email and import from Google docs. Your files can be shared publicly  to all on the web or privately to some SlideShare users. You or the people your sharing the file with can even download your file in the same format as uploaded. Each presentation also comes with and embed code which can be used to embed it on blogs or other websites.

Accounts…
SlideShare started of with accounts for individuals but has recently launched 7 new account types for Companies, Non-Profits, Universities etc. So unlike before when companies created accounts and had to even specify DOB and gender of the company, now they can switch to the company account type where their profile page will have company specific options. Very soon SlideShare would be launching custom features for different account.

Networking…
SlideShare has a decent set of networking tools that you can leverage upon to build your social graph. You can follow like minded people to get their latest updates. You can favorite a presentation for future reference. You can create or join groups of users that share similar interests as you and interact with them by posting on the profile wall.

Widgets and Applications…
SlideShare has an simple interface to create Widgets and Presentation Packs that can be embedded on your blog or website to provide a feed of your presentations to your visitors. The Facebook and LinkedIn Applications allow you add a presentation gallery box on your profile and can be viewed by your connections.

Slidecasting…
Slidecasts are nothing but mashups of SlideShare presentations and streaming MP3.On SlideShare, in a few simple steps you can  create a Slidecast thus making your slides more meaning full and sending the right message to the viewers.

SlideShare Business…
SlideShare recently launched SlideShare Business that provides a new way to reach professional audience, connect with more and the right people by advertising your content to them. With AdShare you can promote your content to a community of professionals, by displaying your document next to documents on SlideShare that are from the same category or of similar content. LeadShare converts your content visitors into leads by enabling you to add a lead form within your presentations. This is more like a replacement of the traditional white paper and micro site campaigns.

You may find many file storing/sharing applications online, but the wide variety of features and the huge open community that you can share your content with makes SlideShare a great social media channel to try out.

Over the past decade the explosion of Social Networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has drastically changed the way how people interact socially.  The spectrum of its usability has grown widely since its inception, from users just building profiles and making friends to businesses using it for branding & interacting with their consumers, recruitment firms to find potential employees, science communities for exchange of ideas, non-profits for spreading social good and by students & teachers as a communication tool.This growth in its usability is due the hundreds of millions of active users together spending billions of minutes everyday on these sites building profiles, making status updates, uploading photos and building social graphs making them information rich.

While these sites have built some of the best tools on the world wide web, the opening up of their product to developers via APIs in the past 3 years have spawned “developer ecosystems” that build applications over popular services like Twitter and Facebook that help a person do everything from network with travelers to play social online games. Given below is a brief of 3 Social Networking Developer Ecosystems that would help you to better understand your options.

Facebook:
Facebook launched the Facebook platform in May 2007 for application developers that provides a framework to develop applications that would render within facebook.com and interact with core Facebook features.  Simultaineously a markup language called the Facebook Markup Language(FBML) was also introduced that is used to give applications the Facebook “look and feel”  and hook into several Facebook integration points, including the profile, profile actions, Facebook canvas, News Feed and Mini-Feed.  Since then, tens of thousands of applications have been built on top of the Facebook platform. Later on, Facebook Query Language (FQL) was introduced that allows you to use a SQL-style interface to  query Facebook social data without using the API. While most platforms force developers to use iFrames if they want to embed javascript within the application, Facebook answered this question with the introduction of FBJS that allowed developers to manipulate markup on the fly, animation and AJAX making applications more dynamic. Today, Facebook has over 350,000+ applications that play a critical role in maximizing Facebook’s active user base. Being the most popular application on Facebook, “Farmville” currently has over 60 million monthly active users.

In late 2008, Facebook announced Facebook Connect that allows developers to let users login to their websites with their Facebook credentials. It even allows other Facebook features, like your friend list and friend invite features to be implemented on your website, which can in turn send data back to Facebook as News Feeds. With over 15K websites already utilizing Facebook Connect, it has now become a must have feature for every social website for 2 main reasons : (1) Users do not have to go through the process of registering on your website if they are a Facebook user, your website can directly pull info from the users Facebook profile and (2) Your web site gets tons of exposure on Facebook as the users actvities on your site get posted to his Facebook profile.

Facebook has even gone a step further in encouraging developers by introducing the fbFund where developers can submit their applications to qualify for investments to grow their venture.

Twitter:
Twitter is one of the best examples of an very Open API and has provided developers a opportunity to build a full-fledged business by using it. Within a short span of time this ecosystem has transformed into a mainstream phenomenon with the development of Twitter apps that do everything from managing your twitter profile to analyzing tweets for real world trends. The Twitter API is nothing but a simple service that provides RESTfull access to the Twitter database and activity streams. Twitter initially started of with the basic authentication by which developers send the users credentials in the header of the HTTP request. But this being insecure and difficult to track hence in early 2009 they integrated the OAuth pattern of integration into the REST API permitting users a seamless experience of login into a 3rd party website using their Twitter account.

Twitter lacks many features in its pursuit of for simplicity and this gives openings to developers to fill the holes. Currently around 80% of Twitter’s usage is via 3rd party apps. and the Twitter API has 10x the traffic of its website. Twitter does not have 300+ million active user but it has momentum, excitement and virility which can cause your application to go from zero to a million users in a matter of days or weeks. Twitter is fast growing and new features are getting added regularly, requiring your application to adapt to it at the same time. A major problem with the Twitter ecosystem is its stability, so you have to make sure that your application doesn’t break and throw heaps of code when the API is down.

MySpace:
MySpace first got into the platform party by teaming with Google and a number of other social networks against the Facebook platform and releasing OpenSocial in November 2007, which were a set of API’s that would make applications interoperable with any social network system that supports it. The patnership spearheaded an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications. Later on in early 2008 MySpace  independently launched the MySpace Developer Platform(MDP) that supports the OpenSocial model to enhance the overall experience of users through the development of Social Applications.

MySpace has undertaken a recent expansion of their platform through the MySpaceID project. MySpaceID provides Developers the opportunity to access user identities within the context of third-party environments. The main components of the MySpace platform are pretty similar to that of Facebook, but since MySpace supports the OpenSocial model the same application can be ported to any other social network with just a few minor tweaks to the code. With just around 15k apps in the MySpace apps Gallery and just a few websites integrating with MySpaceID, the Facebook ecosytem emerges as the clear winner in this case.

No doubt that these 3 ecosystems are the best and most established but they aren’t the only ones. Networks like Bebo, Yahoo, Friendster and the recently launched Google Wave have opened up their set of API’s that would allow you to reach millions of users through your applications. All these platforms are fast-growing and frequently-changing for the good, so as a developer even though you have a lot of choice with the ecosystems, it is suggested that you pick one ecosystem that you are a big fan of and program for it as keeping pace with all the ecosystems would be a real challenging task.

References : Mashable

Birth and Naming…

The research and development of the Internet spanned over 10 years and hence no exact date can be attributed to its birth, but the day October 29, 1969 stands as the first 2 nodes of what became ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and SRI International in Menlo Park, CA on this day. Based on ARPA’s research packet switching network standards were developed in the form of X.25 by ITU. Later on UUCPnet was developed with the idea of using simple Bourne Shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line. TCP/IP unified the different network standards and became an important communication protocol for the internet. The term “internet” was coined in the first RFC published on the TCP protocol in 1974(5 years later)  as an abbrevation of the term “internetworking”. To keep it simple “any network using TCP/IP was internet“.

The first steps…

The progress in the 1st 12 years were really slow with only 213 computers being connected to the ARPANET network. From the mid 70’s to the mid 80’s Internet’s technologies spread world wide and many new applications(Email, telenet, compuserve etc.) were developed for it out of the interest of many researchers in wide spread networking. Email became the most important and highly looked up application as it reached 16m users in 1985. Although most of the basic application that made the internet were developed, it was still used mostly by techies, geeks in research labs and had not gained much public face.

Getting Young and Dynamic…

As the internet grew, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files which lead to projects like Gopher, WAIS, FTP archive list etc. but all these fell short of full filling the scaling requirements. In 1989, Tim Berners Lee invented the network based implementation of the hypertext concept via his project named World Wide Web. With the advent of the WWW things started moving faster and till today there has been no limit to the way the Internet is growing. With the arrival of web browsers and not to forget the browser wars that still goes on we had 500m+ users online by 2001.

Fast Forwarding to Today…

Today the internet has over 1.7 billion users most of whom cannot think of life without emails, social networking, chatting, gaming etc. Today it is more like a virtual but required addition to the basic necessities list of  food, clothing, shelter and education of most developed countries. I cannot think of a day without access   to the internet; if not on the PC then from my mobile. The Internet has change the way people interact and socialize, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. When the web was born it was just about digitizing content; web2.0 was driven by socializing, sharing content and has become the platform for the concept of linked data. Now concepts like Real-Time Web and Internet of Things are driving us into the Web3.0 generation.

I doubt 40 years ago anyone would have imagined that the successful connection between 2 nodes would go on to become one of the major and  fastest growing platforms in the field of technology. I would love to see how the internet evolves in the next 40 years but wouldn’t dare to imagine  coz whatever it may be, it will surely blow our imagination from today’s standpoint.

Getting There ….

Getting to Mahabaleshwar from Mumbai is pretty easy and quick. It would take you around 6-7 hrs on a luxury bus for the complete journey . I would recommend taking a sleeper coach that departs late in the night from Mumbai and arrives early in the morning at Mahabaleshwar. The same is recommended while getting back to Mumbai. You even have other options like a Volvo bus or a tourist car which are equally comfortable. Bookings can be done at any travel agent in Mumbai.

Where to stay…

Mahabaleshwar has a plethora of small and large hotels that you can stay in. If your not having your own vehicle to travel around Mahabaleshwar then i would recommend selecting a hotel in and around the market place. Nell’s House, Hotel Dreamland, Hotel Lakeview, Silverine being some of the good ones. If your very low on budget there are many small hotels on the market road. Staying in a hotel away from the market place comes with the added facilities of a peaceful environment and a beautiful scenic view from your room itself.

Hotel tariffs vary based on the season and type of hotel you check into. Mahabaleshwar experiences daily 2 hrs of load shedding, so if your very particular about your staying conditions make sure that your hotel has a good generator(most of them will have an inverter which is connected to only 1 lamp per room) and provide round the clock hot water through the tap.

Where n What to eat…

If your a vegetarian then Mahabaleshwar is a pleasure ground for you  and you need not worry, coz 75% of the food outlets out there are pure vegetarian. Meat eaters have quiet a few options around the market place which include Hotel Aman, Nukkad, Shere-e-Punjab that provide very good non-vegetarian food.

You would be sinning if you haven’t paid a daily visit to a ice cream parlour at Mahabaleshwar, which is famous for Strawberry n Cream,  Mulberry n Cream(my personal favorite) and many other fresh fruit ice creams. I would recommend going to Bageecha Ice Cream Parlour on the market road and trying out their entire menu as that is one of the best outlets I have been to out there. Another place that is a must visit is the Mapro Factory, the waffle cone ice creams and grilled sandwich out there are the best i have ever had and at the same time you can even shop for your favorite crushes, squashes and jelly sweets. Mahabaleshwar is even famous for chikki and fudge which you will get anywhere in the market place, Wilsons being one of the best shops to pich this stuff.

What to see aka. Sightseeing….

Located in the Western Ghats[pic] and having one of the few evergreen forestsin the world it is one of the scenic beauties to be watched in India. The entire sightseeing at Mahabaleshwar can be divided into 4-5 tours, each having a duration of 3-4 hours and costing around 350 - 550 INR.

• Tour 1 - Pratapgad Darshan[pic] [ Duration 150mins ]
  Pratapgad Fort, Bhawani Temple, Shivaji Statue[pic], Pratap Garden, Tomb of Afzal Khan
  The Pratapgad fort was one place where i could atleast see some kind of maintainence happening and efforts being made to keep the place clean which is very unlike other spots I visited
• Tour 2 - Mahabaleshwar Darshan 1 [ Duration 150mins ]
  Panchgani Mandir, Window Point, Tiger Spring, Echo Point,  Savitri Point, Monkey Point, Marjori Point, Arthur’s Seat…
  The Arthur’s Seat is known as the pride of Mahabaleshwar as you get one of the best views of the valley from that platform. The rest of the points are either on the way or around this point.
• Tour 3 - Mahabaleshwar Darshan 2 [Duration 150mins]
  Kate’s Point[pic], Needle Hole Point, Elephant Head Point, Strawberry Garden, Sunset Point[pic], Lodwick Point[pic], Venna Lake
  Needle Hole and Elephant Head point are nothing but Kate’s Point looked at from different directions. Venna Lake is a drop spot after the tour where you can go for boating and it even has a mini Chowpati. The lake is really big and very good for boating.
• Tour 4 - Panchgani Darshan [Duration 150mins ]
  Table Land, Parsi Point, Jam Factory
  Table land is one of the biggest plateaus in the world and you can try your hand on hose riding and para-sailing. Insist on your tour guide to take you to the Mapro Factory and not any other factory, coz some tour guides would take you to some small factory to make the tour quick and get their commission from the factory owner for the products you buy.

Other than these tours you can even go for the Wai Darshan if you like visiting temples and the Sunrise point for which you would have to wake up at 5:30 in the morning.

One spot which you would not find in any of the tours but is a must watch is the Roman Catholic Church[pic] at Mahabaleshwar which is near the market place. Its more than a century that the church has been built and has one of the smallest parishes(10 families) in the world.

Do not depend on your credit card when you travel to Mahabaleshwar coz 8/10 shops or outlets do not accept credit cards, you would have to withdraw cash from one of the few ATMs hidden in the bylanes of the market.

I have had some the best and most memorable times of my life when i have been to Mahabaleshwar and i hope this post helps you to have a pleasant vacation too

Summarizing PHP

Here I would be speaking more about the advantages of PHP.

• The HTML relationship
  PHP is always embedded in HTML in code islands. One key advantage to using PHP as opposed to some other solutions is that PHP code is all executed at the server, with the client only receiving the results of the script. What this means is that users never see your PHP source code because they are never sent it: they only see what you want them to see.
• Interpreting vs Compiling
  PHP uses a blend of interpretation and compilation in order to provide the best mix of performance and flexibility to programmers. Behind the scenes, PHP compiles your script down to a series of instructions (called opcodes) whenever it is accessed, and these instructions are then executed one by one until the script terminates. PHP re-compiles your script each time it is requested. This constant recompilation may seem a waste of processor time, but it is actually not all that bad because you no longer need to worry about hand recompiling your scripts when you make any changes. The speed hit of regular compilation is nullified entirely by the use of PHP accelerators. One major advantage to having interpreted code is that all memory used by the script is managed by PHP, and the language automatically cleans up after every script has finished. This means that you do not need to worry about closing database links, freeing memory assigned to images, and so on, because PHP will do it for you.
• PHP is cross-platform, free, fast, capable, extendable, reliable and advancing
  This may seem to be a simple point but it covers all the features that a superior programming language must possess.  It can be run on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris, as well as a variety of other platforms.
  In the majority of scripts, PHP will easily compete with both Perl and Python, and usually pull ahead of Microsoft’s ASP.NET by about 10-15%. Add to that the fact that PHP code can be cached for execution.
  What makes PHP capable is the thousands of pre-written functions that perform a wide variety of helpful tasks like database handling, file uploads, FTP, email, graphical interfaces, generating Flash movies, and more.
  PHP is extendable. Writing your own extension to PHP is a common and easy way to implement speed-critical functionality, and PHP’s extension API is a particularly rich and flexible system.
  PHP is reliable. As an official Apache Foundation software project, PHP is brought to you by the same people that produce Apache, the world’s most popular web server.
  PHP is advancing. With the release of PHP 5, PHP has introduced features that have long been waited for, including more comprehensive error handling, better object orientation, and, of course, more speed.
• When to and not to use PHP???
  Owing to its fast development time, easy maintenance, and overall fast execution time, it is rare to find PHP is not the best choice for a web application. Homepages (big and          small), database front-ends on the web, command line shell scripts where you want extra functionality, and even basic GUI development are all popular uses for PHP, and it excels  at them all. If you are doing anything that displays its text through a web browser, you are likely to find that PHP is your best choice. There are two situations when PHP is not recommended. Firstly, if your not developing a web application and you desperately need all the performance you can get, you should be  using C and C++. Secondly, if you are adding to a system which already has a lot of code already written in another language, then coding parts in PHP will only make your maintenance job more difficult, so you are likely to find it easiest in the long run to keep using the old language.

Extending PHP and Frameworks

The base of the PHP language is very simple, having just enough to set and retrieve variables, work with loops, and check whether a statement is true or not. The real power behind PHP comes with its extensions – addons to the base language that give it more flexibility.

• Core Extensions
  Core extensions are extensions that are bundled with PHP itself, and enabled by default. For all intents and purposes they are part of the base language, because, unless you explicitly disable them (few people do, and sometimes you cannot), they are available inside PHP.
• Bundled Extensions
  Bundled extensions are extensions that are bundled with PHP, but not enabled by default. These are normally commonly used, which is why they are bundled, but they are not available to you unless you specifically enable them. For example, the mechanism to handle graphics creation and editing is handled by an extension “GD Library” that is bundled with PHP.
• PECL - PHP Extension Code Library
  PECL stands for “PHP Extension Code Library”, and is as a subset of the PHP Extension and Application Repository, PEAR. PECL (pronounced “pickle”) was originally created as a place where rarely used or dormant bundled extensions could be moved if they were no longer considered relevant. PECL has grown a lot since its founding, and is now the home of many interesting and experimental extensions that are not quite important enough to be bundled directly with PHP.
• Third Party Extensions
  Third-party extensions are written by programmers like you who wanted to solve a particular problem that was unsolvable without them creating a new extension.
• DIY - Do It Yourself
  Finally, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) extensions are simply extensions you created yourself. PHP has a remarkably rich extension creation system that makes it quite simple to add your own code as long as you know C.

PHP has also attracted the development of many frameworks that provide building blocks and a design structure to promote rapid application development (RAD). Some of these include CakePHP, PRADO, Symfony and Zend Framework, offering features similar to other web application frameworks.

Swine influenza (swine flu) is a respiratory disease of pigs caused by type A influenza viruses that causes regular outbreaks in pigs. People do not normally get swine flu, but human infections can and do happen.

Is swine flu contagious?
Yes, but it is unknown how easily the virus spreads between people.

Who is at highest risk from H1N1 swine flu?
Most cases of H1N1 swine flu have been in older children and young adults. It’s not clear why, and whether this will change. But certain groups are at particularly high risk of severe disease or bad outcomes if they get the flu:

• Young children, especially those under 12 months of age.
• Elderly people are at high risk of severe flu disease. But relatively few swine flu cases have been seen in people over age 65.
• People with cardiovascular conditions (except high blood pressure).
• People with liver problems.
• Kidney problems.
• People with blood disorders, including sickle cell disease.
• People with neurological disorders.
• People with neuromuscular disorders.
• People with metabolic disorders, including diabetes.
• People with immune suppression, including HIV infection and medications that suppress the immune system, such as cancer chemotherapy or anti-rejection drugs for transplants.
• Residents of a nursing home or other chronic-care facility

People in these groups should seek medical care as soon as they get flu symptoms.

If I think I have swine flu, what should I do? When should I see my doctor?
If you have flu symptoms, stay home, and when you cough or sneeze, cover your mouth and nose with a tissue. Afterward, throw the tissue in the trash and wash your hands. That will help prevent your flu from spreading. If you have only mild flu symptoms, you do not need medical attention unless your illness gets worse. But if you are in one of the
groups at high risk of severe disease, contact your doctor at the first sign of flu-like illness. In such cases, see your doctor before rushing to an emergency room. But there are emergency warning signs.

Children should be given urgent medical attention if they:

• Have fast breathing or trouble breathing
• Have bluish or gray skin color
• Are not drinking enough fluid
• Are not waking up or not interacting
• Have severe or persistent vomiting
• Are so irritable that the child does not want to be held
• Have flu-like symptoms that improve but then return with fever and a worse cough.
• Have fever with a rash
• Have a fever and then have a seizure or sudden mental or behavioral change.

Adults should seek urgent medical attention if they have:

• Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
• Pain or pressure in the chest or abdomen
• Sudden dizziness
• Confusion
• Severe or persistent vomiting
• Flu-like symptoms that improve, but then come back with worsening fever or cough

Keep in mind that your doctor will not be able to determine whether you have swine flu, but he or she may take a sample from you and send it to a state health department lab for testing to see if it’s swine flu. If your doctor suspects swine flu, he or she would be able to write you a prescription for Tamiflu or Relenza.These antiviral medications aren’t a question of life or death for the vast majority of people.

How severe is swine flu?
Severity of cases in the current swine flu outbreak has varied widely, from mild cases to fatalities. Most cases have been mild, but there have been a number of deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations — mostly in young people aged 5 to 24. Like seasonal flu, children who get swine flu can have serious neurological complications such as seizures and Reye’s syndrome. But as with seasonal flu, these complications fortunately are rare. Studies of the swine flu virus show that it is more infectious to lung cells than are seasonal flu viruses. But studies also suggest that the swine flu virus is less well adapted to humans and may be harder to inhale deep into the lungs.
Flu viruses change all the time, and the way the pandemic swine flu virus evolved suggests that it is particularly liable to swap gene segments with other flu viruses. But so far the swine flu virus hasn’t changed much. That’s good news, as the vast majority of swine flu cases have been mild. It’s impossible to know whether the virus will become more deadly. Scientists are watching closely to see which way the new swine flu virus is heading — but health experts warn that flu viruses are notoriously hard to predict.
Important Note : If you have any flu-like symptoms contact or see a doctor for treatment and STAY HOME for your own well being and the well being of others.

*The information provided herein is generic and persons intending to use this information should do so only under appropriate medical advice.

Background and History

• C not for Web
  Contrary to what people believe, there was a lot of activity on the web development front before PHP was invented. Code to parse form input was generally written in C. While it certainly executed quickly it was very clunky to program. A simple parsing script would easily take around fifty lines of code. The main reason being that C was not designed for the web and there was no pre-written code to take advantage of for common tasks like getting the inputs from a form and processing it. You had to do everything by yourself.

• PERL - Practical Extraction and Report Language
  This problem was solved by PERL. PERL was originally invented as a generic text-processing language that enabled HTML form parsing and other fancy tricks which made coding a simple task for even a novice programmer. Perl provided a very large number of built-in functions that were designed to do any task you could dream of, which made it very popular with developers.

• PERL being PERL-centric
  Even though Perl was a big leap in web development, it was still far from perfect. The largest drawback for Perl was that it was Perl-centric. i.e. in order to output HTML content, you had to embed HTML inside the Perl script.

Introducing PHP

• PHP - Personal Home Page
  PHP which initially stood for Personal Home Page began in 1994 as a set of CGI binaries written in C by a Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. Lerdorf created these Personal Home Page tools to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. The tools were used to perform tasks such as displaying his resume and how much traffic his page was receiving. Lerdorf released PHP in 1995 to accelerate bug reporting and improve the code.

• PHP 3 - PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor
  Two Israeli developers Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans took keen interest in the development of PHP. They rewrote the PHP parser from ground up using standard “compiler compiler” tools like Flex and Bison changing the languages name to the recursive initialism PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP 3 also made the language extensible allowing keen developers to add their own module for the language, adding functionality at the core level.

• PHP 4 - The Zend Relationship and Web Server Abstraction
  The most important change made for PHP 4 was the switch to what is called the Zend Engine. The Zend Engine, created by Zend, a company founded by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans to promote PHP in the corporate environment, allowed much more flexibility than had ever been seen in PHP before. Also introduced with PHP 4 was complete web server abstraction, which meant that PHP could now not only run on Apache but also Microsoft’s IIS, Zeus, AOLServer and more.

  Performance took a gigantic leap due to 2 main factors. Firstly, PHP 3 and before used the “execute while interpreting” paradigm. Whereas PHP 4 adopted the “compile first, execute later” paradigm, reading your entire script and compiling it to byte code before execution.

• PHP 5 - Language Maturity
  PHP 5, which is the current stable release of PHP focused on language maturity and offers a lot of new functionality to support larger projects. PHP5 brought with it huge steps forward for object oriented scripts and also a new error checking in the form of try/catch. The biggest improvements though were in the extensions like SimpleXML which is a fast and easy way to interact with XML documents, and there’s also the flat-file database API SQLite, a new SOAP extension and lot more

More info @ php.net & Practical PHP Programming

Part 2 of this series where i have summarized PHP and its extensions & frameworks is now available. Kindly Patronize