Computer FAQs & Tips

PHP Programming Language

Wondering where to start to learn PHP?

The resources listed here are enough for you to get started. These are not only for beginner, it is suitable for intermediate and advanced developer as well.

Get started

PHP Officeial Website

http://www.php.net

1. First you need to download  latest version of php runtime and install it in your system
2. After installation, create a test file call test.php under your webroot directory and pate code below
3. On your browser, navigate to http://localhost/test.php
4. Get understanding the basic concept of the language with office english documentation guide
5. Get yourself familiar with syntax and structure of the language. Sample tutorial will clear your way to the beginner entrance.

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Reference, Software PHP

I am sure a lot of people have similar question.

What is vsmon.exe?

My computer start to get very slow after I started to download 1.7GB file using DownThemAll (Firefox addon), I was wondering what was happening in the background. So I open up Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) to see what's going on.

Wow! vsmon.exe is taking approximately 40% of my CPU and Firefox 40% and svchost.exe 20%. I knew 2 processes firefox and svchost but what on earth is vsmon.exe?

I did a few google searches and found that vsmon.exe belong to ZoneAlarm personal firewall, it is used to monitor your internet traffic.

So this process sis quite safe, as soon as my download is finished everything came back to normal. But keep in mind that spyware or virus could be named anything, you need to know exactly where is this process located on your computer and who created it.

You can use Process Explorer tool to identify it. The rest of this article is showing you how to do it.

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FAQ & Tip, Software Process-Explorer

Microsoft has released the dark stunning theme for Windows XP Desktop call "Zune" which named after the Zune Media (MP3) Player.

This is my favorite theme so far, it is simple and clean. I could not find a second theme to replace it yet, not even other theme built with commercial tools.

You can get a copy for your desktop with link below

Download Zune Theme

Screenshots of Zune Theme on my Desktop

Zune Theme - Desktop by default

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Software Themes, Windows-XP, Zune-theme

For those who use Internet Explorer 7 you would notice new features which modern web browser has, such as tab browsing, compatibility with modem web pages and technologies, security alert, plug-in support.

IE 8 Beta

Now Internet Explorer 8 has release its beta version and this article will make a showcase and explorer on what's new in the next version.

I download and install IE8 on my Windows XP Professional Desktop.

One thing that I keep waitting for is, I don't have to restart my PC when installing new version of Internet Explorer. In fact, I have to restart my PC or I still see IE7 starting up. But that's ok, it was expected already. Read more...

Showcase, Software Free-Software, Internet-Explorer, Web-Browser

This tutorial is showing you how to setup secured ftp connection from another machine to Linux. In this demonstration purpose, I am going to use Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 Server.

The rest of this post will take you through

• Requirements
• Installation
• Setup connection

Requirements

• SSH Server
• SFTP Client

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FAQ & Tip, Software Secured FTP, SSH

For a basic computer virus protection for your home pc, you don't need to spend a cent on anti-virus software. There are 4 of them to choose from.

1. AVG Free Edition
2. Avast! Home Edition
3. BitDefender Free Edition
4. ClamWin

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Software Antivirus, Free-Software

Are you Software Developer? if yes, you might find this post useful. You could find free apps which I believe they are used most by other developers out there.

This post will take you to list of software under the following categories

• Integration Development Environment (IDE)
• Text Editor and Comparison
• Databases Engine, Client and Server
• File Archive and Transfer
• Virtual Machine
• Graphics and GUIs

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Software Database-Client, Database-Designer, Database-Server, File-Archive, File-Comparison, Free-Software, FTP, Graphic-Tool, IDE, Prototype, Text-Editor, Virtual-Machine

Occasionally I am writing a post about HTML which I need to post the code to illustrate my argument (I guess I am not alone).

By default, WordPress will convert unrecognized uses of < and > into characters which actually look like &lt; and &gt;, which will "look" like a < and a > when posted. Or, if it finds the use of an HTML tag within the post, it will use the tag like it is HTML and you will have funky looking text and a messed up layout. (quoted from codex discussion)

I find this very frustrating when my post doesn't appear to the way I wanted it to.

How to get around it?

You just simply convert your html open and close bracket "< and >" to "&lt; and &gt;". However you are not going to do it one by one or do search-replace in text editor, it will be time consuming.

I wrote a simple Java Swing program which does just what I mention above plus it can convert html character code back to html code in case you need to make any changes.
Read more...

FAQ & Tip, Software Text-Conversion, Wordpress, Wordpress-Tip

First of all, how many popular Web Browser are there at the moment?

As far as I observe there are 5 of them, and they are on the big race at the moment

• Internet Explorer (Windows)
• Firefox (Windows, Linux, Mac)
• Opera (Windows)
• Safari (Mac)
• Google Chrome (Windows)

According to W3Schools Browser Statistics

The result base on November 2008

From table above, you can see Firefox is ruling the market now. Chrome (by Google Inc.) is new and I would describe Google Chrome as young and dangerous to the browser war. It could take over the market in a very short time.

Software Firefox, Google-Chrome, Internet-Explorer, Opera, Safari, Web-Browser

The traditional 7-zip only works in Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista. Now there is a port of the command line version to Linux/Unix call p7zip.

Here's how to install it in Ubuntu. It's fairly easy

First you probably need to updated your repositories list (optional) with the following command

sudo apt-get update

Now install p7zip with the following command

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

FAQ & Tip, Software Ubuntu, Zip-Tool