MozTips Reloaded!

PhpEd 5.0 released

NuSphere, the company behind PhpEd, an excellent PHP IDE, has released version 5.0 of this product.

It has many new features, such as a spiffed-up interface, an integrated Mozilla-based browser, code folding, integration with their Nu-Coder product, and an updated version of their code generation tool, which creates code that automatically inserts, updates, or deletes database records.

Luckily, I'd bought a copy of an older version last fall, so I got a free upgrade!

Read more about it here.

I'll post more information once I've tried out all the new features.

Cool Book on PHP + Flash applications

I'm a big Apress fan, and stumbled across their sister designer imprint, Friends of Ed. I then came across a book on building applications with PHP 5 and Flash. I'm on chapter 2, and have already built my first "hello, world" application, with Flash displaying a date generated by a PHP script.

The book is called Foundation PHP 5 for Flash, and is intended as introduction to PHP for Flash designers who don't have that much programming experience. Nevertheless, it's perfect for an experienced PHP programmer who wants to learn about one can build data-driven applications using Flash. In my case, I had to play around with the Flash interface and help to figure out how to do things, but the book took things step-by-step, thus making each step easy to follow.

I'm excited to see what else I discover! I'll keep you posted!

HP Pavilion DV6105us - Tip on Getting Built-in Broadcom Wireless Card to Work

Update 3:
Well, the solution I tried in Update 2 did not work. But, I have some good news. I bought a USB wirless adapter by D-Link from NewEgg.com. It's the D-Link Wireless G DWL-G122 USB Adapter. (It was $20 after a $10 rebate. And it arrived very quickly - NewEgg.com is just great!)
I deactivated the old (and somewhat useless) Broadcom Wireless G device in the Device Manager. I then installed the D-Link driver from the CD, and restarted the computer. I eagerly inserted the tiny D-Link device into the USB port, and waited. It was discovered successfully as a new hardware device. It then asked me for a "WEP key". In my wireless G home network configuration, I have two keys, a shorter "WEP phrase" and a longer (28 character) key. At first I entered the shorter "WEP phrase". It then tried to connect to my home network, but got stuck at the "acquiring network address phase". I knew something was wrong. So I went into the properties for the wireless connection, and re-entered the longer key. I then disconnected from the network, and re-connected. Finally, it worked!

It seems that the built-in Broadcom device with the HP Pavilion 6105 laptop does not work some 60% of the time. Now I know why this laptop was so severely discounted. People must've been returning it in droves. Besides this rather serious flaw, it seems otherwise fine (knock on wood). I was close to returning this laptop, but it seems D-Link has saved the day!

Update 2:

With a bit more investigation, I found out the specfic error that occured when the Windows Device Manager showed a yellow exclamation point icon next to the Broadcom Wireless entry. If you right click on the entry and choose "Properties", you get this error: This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)

If in the Device Manager you choose "View | Devices By Connection", then choose "PCI bus", you'll see that the Broadcom Wirless device is listed under the "PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge" section.

With a bit of googling, I came up with a somewhat older article that described problems eerily similar to mine:

The problems occur when the motherboard manufacturer has added a PCI-to-PCI bridge to extend the PCI bus further, or a daughter board or backplane with PCI bus slots has a additional PCI bridge incorporated. These are usually 'positive decode' PCI-to-PCI bridges. The standard Windows PCI drivers do not support enumeration of 'positive decode' PCI bridges. This means that on these systems you are likely to have problems with allocation of resources. These problems usually show up as failures of the PCMCIA controller in Windows 9x/Me/2000 and XP as 'Code 10' or 'Code 12' failures and a 'No PCMCIA controller found' message in Windows NT4.

It goes on to add:

This motherboard contains the nVIDIA® nForce 420D Chipset, and the offending PCI-to-PCI bridge is the nVIDIA-nForce PCI Bridge made by nVIDIA Corporation. Other motherboards with this chipset (like the Asus A7N266-E) may also not be supported in Windows, but we have no test results for these.

So, it seems an older version of nVidia was involved in the situation described above, with a similar "Code 12" error occuring with a PCI-to-PCI bridge. I'm no hardware expert, and I don't really understand how PCI-to-PCI bridges work, but I thought I'd give upgrading the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 to the latest driver available through Windows Update (Date last published: 10/18/2006, Download size: 52.6 MB). I installed it, and it asked me to reboot.

This time the wireless connection did work! Let's see if this was just a one-time success, or if this fix lasts. I'll keep you posted.

Update: after a couple of days of hassle-free working, the new driver played the same trick on me: it stopped working. Rebooting Windows a couple of times, the second time with the switch off while it was booting did the trick. I'm beginning to think that there is no logic that can predict when this device will stop or start working. The best solution may be to get another ExpressCard 54 / 34 card to put in the laptop. My old PCMCIA cards sadly won't work!

I recently bought a new HP Pavilion DV6105us laptop from Staples. It was a good buy, and had everything I was looking for: a 64 bit Windows Vista chip (an AMD Turion), enough memory, a decent hard drive, built-in wireless, and even a CD and DVD burner! The screen is really bright and glossy - it's the best looking laptop screen that I've seen or owned.

As I began using the laptop, I noticed a serious problem: every time I put the laptop into sleep mode, and then re-awakened it, it was not able to find any wireless networks. (As mentioned before, the laptop came with a built-in Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN wireless "card".) Sometimes, even more strangely, it brought up the Windows "found new hardware" wizard. Ironically, this wizard did not know what kind of hardware it had just detected, and was of no use.

I searched HP's laptop support site, and downloaded what seemed to be a new driver. It in fact was the same driver that came with my laptop. The driver version that came with laptop had the following information (from the Windows Device Manager):

Version: 4.40.19.0
Date: 3/23/2006

The actual driver's name was BCMWL5.SYS.

Since HP's "updated" driver was of no use, I tried Broadcom's site next. Their site was not at all useful - their search engine was unable to find anything related to my card, and their product page had no links to any drivers. It's a shame that Broadcom, unlike other vendors, does not make drivers available from their site.

I then searched Google, and found a lot of pages on getting this card to work under Linux. I love Linux as much as the next geek, but this time around I was running Windows XP (shame on me, I know), and I needed it to work with XP, not Linux.

Finally, I came across a message on Dell's support forums. Dell evidently uses the same wireless card in their laptops. The forum mentioned that I could get an updated version of the driver from Microsoft's Windows Update site.

That version of the driver fixed the issues I had with the card.

Here's how you can get it:
On Windows Update, one has to first choose "Custom". Then, one has to go to "Hardware, Optional Items". Uncheck the fifty or so non-hardware choices, leaving the just update for the Broadcom card (listed at the bottom).

Then install it. Your Internet connection may stop working after you install it. Just restart your computer, and it should now work correctly.

Adding Basic HTTP Authentication to XML-RPC Class From Zend Framework

Ever since Zend came out with their PHP 5 framework a year or so ago (or was it further back than that?), I've been wanting to try it out. I've been stuck in PHP-4-land for so long. PHP 4 had been oodles of fun, and an extremely useful tool - yet I kept doing things like buying Adam Trachtenberg's Upgrading to PHP 5 book, or reading articles on Sitepoint about new features in PHP 5. I think back now, and Adam's book was published in July of 2004 - 2004! Where did the last two years go?
While 2006 is mostly a blur, the excitement of PHP 5 is still fresh and crisp in my mind.

After hearing Nate Abele trash the Zend Framework at last week's NYPHP meeting, I felt a strange urge to go out and try it for myself. It reminded me of the School of Visual Arts's recent Subway campaign: "How bad do you want to be good?", except it was more like "How bad do you want to be bad?". "Very baaad!" was my answer. After hearing how it was "the Windows Vista of the PHP world" (I know I got that quote wrong, but it was something to that effect) I wanted to see what this bad-boy framework was all about.

I read through the online documentation, and came across the XML-RPC package. I wanted to try it out with an XML-RPC app I'd build more than a year ago, but it did not have any methods to support basic HTTP Authentication, which this app needed.

I did a bit of research, and a bit of coding, and here's my result:
http://www.moztips.com/code/zendfw/xmlrpc/Client_src.php

In case you're wondering what I changed:
I added the _username and _password class variables, I added the setCredentials() method, and I modified the _sendRequest function to supply the right 'Authorization' header in case a username was set.

I did a basic test, and it worked. Hooray! Let me know if it works for you too.

PS: If I keep up the rate I'm updating this site, you can expect another entry next March! (Just kidding - I plan to update it more often.)

Visitor Submitted: Absent Toolbar

Submitted By: Greg (szeyko [ [at] ] aol.com)

When I start the latest version of Mozilla Suite,the toolbar is absent:
the menus (File,Edit,View,etc.) are not seen.

I only see "Back","Forward,"Reload",etc;below that bar is "Home"& "Bookmark" only. My OS is WinXP pro. How could I correct this problem? Thanx