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.

Webdesign, chapter ten: CMS part 2

So basically we now have a table which could hold content if we wanted it to. Obviously that doesn't get us all that far. Now we have the hard parts, first we need to get data into said table, then we need to get it back out.
I'm going to use php to do all of the data stuff, you could obviously also use ASP (which makes things very easy, considering the visual studio is free and an excellent tool, not just for ASP development (can write neat little programs with it pretty quickly, too), or you could use ruby, which has a nice framework for web development with ruby on rails, or even a number of other languages. I use php because it's free, fast, and supported by damn near any web server out there.
So for now we're going to make a page that has nothing but a form on it, a very simple one at that, with only a few text inputs, where one could just enter all the data we need to make a whole new website.
First we need to connect to the database (the following code is all php code, so i'm omitting the php tags):

$connection = mysql_pconnect('localhost', 'xyious', 'password');

with that we're making a new variable called $connection, to which we're saving the result of the function mysql_pconnect. That function makes a persistent connection to the database, which I use in favor of mysql_connect for several reasons. mysql_connect should be used in most cases, though. The parameters for that function are server, user, password. Now we need to select the Database we're using:

mysql_select_db("WebsiteDB", $connection) or die(mysql_error());

That function obviously selects our db, if no connection can be made to the database, the whole script will just stop functioning right there and then, and give out an error (that's what that or die is for, which calls the function mysql_error() which gets the error that occurred.
Now we're going to evaluate the input we get from our form (yes this seems weird, since we don't even have that form yet.... but we're getting there in a minute).
We're going to make a variable named error that we increment every time there is an error, and then we check the variable after validating all the input to see if everything worked correctly:

$error = 0;
if (!$_POST['Author']) $error++;

and we check URL, Headline and Content the same way. We don't check tags or description because those don't need to have a value. Next we're going to build our query string, which will insert the values we get into our database:

if (!$error) {
$query = "INSERT INTO xyious_content (Author, URL, Headline, Content";
if ($_POST['Tags']) { $query .= ", Tags";}
if ($_POST['Description']) { $query .= ", Description";}
$query .= ") VALUES ('" . $_POST['Author'] . "', '" . $_POST['URL'] . "', '" . $_POST['Headline'] . "', '" . $_POST['Content'];
if ($_POST['Tags']) { $query .= "', '" . $_POST['Tags'];}
if ($_POST['Description']) { $query .= "', '" . $_POST['Description'];}
$query .= "')";

That is quite a bit of code for someone just starting, but mainly we're just making a new variable named query that holds the query string, and then just appends strings to the end of it, like tags if we entered any. The syntax (we use) to put our data into our database is:

INSERT INTO <tablename> (<column1>, <column2>, ...) VALUES ("<value1>", <value2>, ...)

The columns do not have to be in the same order as they are in the database, but you don't need to specify which columns you're putting which values into if you put a value into every column you have. I need to specify the columns because I'm leaving out 2 columns (ID and Timestamp) which are automatically filled if no value is provided.
Now we just need to execute the query and our content will be in the database:

if (mysql_query($query, $connection)) {
echo "<h2>Content Added</h2>";
} else {
echo "<h2>" . mysql_error() . "</h2>";
}

We're just giving out a short message if content was added successfully, and the error if it wasn't.
Next we just display the form so we can actually get some data and then we're done:

<form action='<?php echo $PHP_SELF;?>' method='post'>
<table frame="void" rules="none">
<tr><td><label for="Author">Author</label></td>
<td><input type="text" id="Author" name="Author" size="100"></td></tr>

This is mainly just html. <form> will make a new form, action tells the web page what to do with the data it gets, in this case we're just putting a php variable there that will put the address of itself (hence the evaluation code on top there, the form and the evaluation are the same page, it doesn't have to be and in many cases you have one page for the form and another page that just does the evaluation, but it's fairly straightforward to have it all together in one page, especially if it doesn't get outrageously long), method is the method of submitting the data, get and post are the 2 options we could use. get doesn't allow for values over 255 characters, so we have to use post here. Then we make a table just to align things right, and then we have the inputs. The label just puts a label on the input so we know what we have to enter, and then we just have input type text so we have a text field that we can enter data into. We do the same (label and input) for url, tags, headline, description. We use a textarea for the content, since it potentially gets very long, and then we just have a submit button that sends our values to the database:

<td><textarea id="Content" name="Content" Cols="100" rows="25"></textarea></td></tr>
<tr><td></td><td><input type="submit" name="submit" value="add"></td></tr>

And that's it. Now we can put stuff into our database, with no way of getting it back out. It's also not very comfortable.