last post

I have started putting new content on my own website, so I will discontinue writing stuff here.
I will probably start a new webdesign series sometime in the near future.

2011 and the pokers

So I guess I'll start posting some poker on here, since currently I'm not doing anything else with this blog (which is annoying me quite a bit, but there's a bit of stress in my life right now (didn't have this excuse when I stopped blogging my webdesign series) and I definitely need to get some poker in to pay the bills).

So I will go ahead and put my 2011 goals on record for the world to see:
7,500 VPP on stars every month, trying to stay quite a bit ahead of this since I would lose Supernova in September if I don't make 10k on average. Hopefully I will be able to move up in stakes and make it a bit easier for me soon.
100 SNGs every day I work.
Working at least 5 days a week.
10% ROI among everything I play at the end of the year. 2010 I managed the amazing 4% ROI (which considering some of the year is quite an accomplishment imo).
Having enough of a bankroll to play on my own dime by the end of the year. This means about $2.5k because that would allow me to play a variety of games for enough rakeback to pay most of the bills (if i get volume in).
$40k profit.

Exit Conditions (I will stop playing poker if any of these "goals" are met):
under 10k profit on the year.
still being in makeup by April (I'm still about $2k in makeup under my current contract, obviously this should be worked off in a single month but just as obviously no one can make one month guarantees in poker).
not getting my $1k milestone by end of January (unless I spend the FPPs i have on something else I cash out).

Other goals would be to play a lot more cash games where the winrates tend to be higher (I haven't done the math on this, at the higher stakes it's definitely true though) and skill is rewarded more than in SNGs where the play tends to be mostly mechanical (although most of the regulars are hilariously bad).

Zonealarm goes scareware

Users of the free personal firewall Zonealarm now get a popup notification that their computer may be at risk, slightly longer article in english and in german. I'm not known for spending a lot of money on security software, but i'm concerned and surprised by the decision of zonealarm to use scare tactics to get people to buy their software. I do urge everyone to not buy any zonealarm products since that kinda behavior shouldn't be rewarded. And what's next ? Do they give you a warning whenever they make a new product ? Warning you that your computer is now at risk of data loss if they just happen to make a backup program ?

Webdesign, chapter twelve: CMS part 4

This post is titled making things (slightly) more comfortable.
In the last post I showed you how you can get one page out of the database that I've created for this "CMS". I'm using air-quotes here because it's so far away from any freely available CMS that it shouldn't even be called that.... but we're getting there (slowly).
To get a specific page out of our database we need to specify what we actually want to get. In SQL this is done with a WHERE clause in our query. We're going to change our SELECT query to the following, to get the page specified by the URL field in our addcontent page:

$query = "SELECT * FROM xyious_content WHERE URL = '" . $PHP_SELF . "' ORDER BY ID DESC";

The ORDER BY in the end there just tells the DB to sort descending (DESC) by the ID field, so that we could just add a new page with the same URL into our database and that query would get the newer one (first, but we only get 1 row from our result set which would then be the newest entry).
That where clause is the only change we actually need to make to our display content page to make it universal, which means you can just copy and rename the file to get any page out of the database you want without changing a single character inside the file. Now that's way more comfortable than writing a whole page for every web page that you want to show people. However, it's not quite as comfortable as it should be, since you still need to put data into the database, copy and rename the display content php file, and make sure that the URL you entered when putting data into the database matches exactly the filename for the display content file. Luckily php can just do all that for you.
So we change our add content page to just write the file for us, so that the filename matches what we entered, the file is created at the same time as the content arrives at the database, so that it can be served immediately, so that there now is only a single step you need to go through when making a whole new page on your site, entering the content into the form we made. Now in the add content page we need to first check if the file we're trying to write already exists, since we don't really want to just overwrite potentially important files (or have someone else do that, considering so far the file is just out there, unprotected, and everyone could just enter all kinds of stuff into our database, so that everyone could just overwrite every single file on our website if we would just overwrite instead of checking. First we create a variable named filename in which we store the filename, and we get the value from the URL field of our form. We actually skip the first character of the URL field since it must be a slash (since $PHP_SELF has a slash in the beginning). Then we check if the file already exists, and if it does we're just not going to send any data to the db since we need to chose a different filename first:

$filename = substr($_POST['URL'], 1);

if (file_exists($filename)) {

echo "<h2>File already exists</h2>";

} else {

in the else clause we just put all of the code we already had, including the mysql_query() part. Below that we now put some code to actually create the file and copy the contents of a template file, then show us how many bytes were written so we can confirm that it actually worked:

$template = file_get_contents("template.php");

$file = fopen($filename,"w") or exit("Unable to open file!" . $filename);

echo fwrite($file, $template) . " bytes written";

fclose($file);

 The php code is very straightforward, file_get_contents gets the whole contents of a file and puts them into a single string variable, fopen opens a file, the second parameter there is "w" so that we can actually write into said file, the or exit part will prevent further execution of the php script in case we can't open the file, fwrite writes the contents of a string into a file, it returns the number of bytes written which we then echo to the website, and fclose quite obviously closes the file.
Amazingly enough that's already all we need for one step adding of a whole website to our server.

Webdesign, chapter eleven: CMS part 3

I guess that at some point someone might actually want to display the content that they have added to their database, so that's what we're going to do now.
For this we just use the same file that we had used in chapter 6 and take out the content. Now at the very top (before the doctype) we're putting the code to get data out of our database, first we use the same connect that we used to get data into the DB, and we obviously select the same DB:

$connection = mysql_pconnect('localhost', 'xyious', 'password');
mysql_select_db("WebsiteDB", $connection) or die(mysql_error());

then we write a simple query to get the data, execute it, save the result in $result, get a single row from that and save that in $row:

$query = "SELECT * FROM xyious_content ORDER BY ID DESC";
$result = mysql_query($query);
$row = mysql_fetch_row($result);

After that we start writing the actual web page, doctype, head, the links/imports for the css. Then as a title we use:

<title><?php echo $row[5]; ?></title>

then we continue with the closing tags and the opening div, at which point we add the following code:

<?php echo "<h1>" . $row[5] . "</h1>";
if ($row[6] != "") {
echo "<p style='text-align: center'>" . $row[6] . "</p>";
}
echo "<p>" . $row[7] . "</p>";
?>

In case you didn't remember, row 5 is the Headline, 6 is Description, 7 is Content.
Everything else remains the same as it has been in post6.
Right now we would have to make a reasonably specific page for every single web page, although we could already store all of the content in the database. That's obviously not very comfortable or useful, so we're going to change and add a few things soon.