Straight from the mind

What is swine flu?

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.

This is my first post in the series of posts that i would be writing on my experiences and findings in PHP. The post will tell you why PHP exists and how it has now come to be known as a mature language.

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

A few hours from now more than 1 billion people from accross 2000 cities in the world will participate in the one of the the biggest elections in the world between Earth and Global Warming and the only way to vote is by turning of the switch in your homes and offices.  A global extravaganza that will last for one hour where we will stand up and stand together for one and only one cause i.e. to save our planet.

Its time for the common man to stand up against global warming and climate change.

Its time that we tell world leaders that climate change is real and its not something that is going to happen in the future, it is happening today and we want them to do something about it. We tell them that theres a  disaster that is knocking at our doors and its high time we do something about it before its too late.

For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.

This meeting will determine official government policies to take action against global warming, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol. It is the chance for the people of the world to make their voice heard.

The main point of Earth Hour is to unite people, companies and governments around the world through the symbolic flip of a switch. Earth Hour in itself will not lower our carbon footprint, rather, it sends a signal to those in positions of power that we as individuals and communities demand action. It is a symbolic act. Symbols are quite powerful. From the Boston Tea Party all the way to the sit-ins in the 60s, symbols have a way of sparking change that sweeps around the planet. Flipping the switch for Earth Hour is a way for people to get involved and demand action wherever they are. It’s easy, so everyone can participate no matter their location, age or income level.

We all have a vote, and every single vote counts. Together we can take control of the future of our planet, for future generations. VOTE EARTH by simply switching off your lights for one hour on March 28, 8:30PM to 9:30PM local time , and join the world for Earth Hour.

Join the movement now @ http://www.earthhour.in