Extremely large data bulk via php

Hello,

after a long time without posting anything here, I come with a post that might result usefull to some people.

The thing is that I found myself with a xls sheet with about 50,000 registers, that my client needed uploaded to his personal server, he gave extra-restricted access to a ftp server and phpMyAdmin, and he just wont understand how hard is to upload that amount of registers without seeing a "fatal error" about memory limits or timeouts.

Maiking it quick and to the point, if you have a large execution php script, and by large I mean by size and time, this two codelines can save your life:

ini_set('memory_limit', '-1');
set_time_limit(0);

yes, you gussed it, the first line is to override and set no memory limit, and the second one is to override the time limit.

you need to be responsable using this, because depending on the power of your server your site can slow down significantly while processing the bulk load.

the other option is to get navicat pro this little badass will transform your xls sheets to a MySQL valid file, oh yeah!, then you can use phpMyAdmin, to upload it, for this I recomend to zip the generated script, and use the import option, of course you will get a timeout, memory exausted and shit, BUT the cool thing about phpMyAdmin is that it will automatically continue where it left if you upload the file again without navigating to other page.

Well, I hope you can migrate your data succesfully :)

Happy Coding!

[C#] Simple Slpash Screen

What I'm doing here is a very simple splash screen, must clients wnats their applications to have a splash screen, even when there is really nothing that worth preloading, so if this is the case keep reading, if not go and find another post.

So basically what we do is, create a new Thread that will wrap a method called wait();
in the form_load, like this:

private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
ThreadStart ts = new ThreadStart(wait);
Thread t = new Thread(ts);
t.Start();
}

and then we create a method that will trigger the main form or application after a little wait, this gives the idea of "preloading" but without actually preloading anything.

public void wait()
{
Thread.Sleep(5000); //time to wait in milliseconds
MessageBox.Show("done loading"); // actions to take when the wait is done
}

and that's it.

Happy Coding!

Printing Rich TextBox Without PrintDialog [C#]

So I was in need to print the contents of a rich TextBox, but scince the PrintDialog buttons are so small, and I'm working on a touchscreen application I needed to make it automatic, so I spent like 4 hours fooling around msdn with gigantic ass complex tutorials, but I insist on keeping things Simple. So after tons of googling I finally found this awesome code snipet that saved the day :)

23.51.1.Basic Printing

Dont know who is the author but thanks man! :)

so I've added a few lines to print the images in the text box, notice I saved the images in data structures first and then print out. So my version of this wonderfull codesnipet is:

/*the button to do the magic no-PrintDialog thing*/
private void button12_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {
    PrintDocument pd = new PrintDocument();
    pd.PrintPage += new PrintPageEventHandler(PrintPageEvent);
    pd.Print();
}

/*and the PrintPage Event Handler where the magic happens.*/
private void PrintPageEvent(object sender, PrintPageEventArgs ev) {
    string contents = "Date: " + DateTime.Now.ToShortDateString() + Environment.NewLine;
    contents += txtTicket.Text;
    contents = contents.Normalize();
    Font oFont = new Font("Arial", 10);

    /*the next two lines are commented because they add a margin to the page (I dont want that)
    Rectangle marginRect = ev.MarginBounds;
    ev.Graphics.DrawRectangle(new Pen(System.Drawing.Color.Black), marginRect);*/

    /*Here I print the Image(s) with the DrawImage Method of the handler*/
    ev.Graphics.DrawImage(global::MyProgram.Properties.Resources.Header3, 10, 10);

    /*and now the string.  */
    ev.Graphics.DrawString(contents, oFont, new SolidBrush(System.Drawing.Color.Black), 10, 90);
}

this is it :)
Happy Coding!
P.S:
Remember folks:

Download Youtube Videos With C#

All right since youtube changed around its layout and user terms
it seems to be that so many unattended, yet good apps to download
videos from youtube just stoped working. This is because now youtube
makes the final user completely responsable for the content he/she uploads
and visits.

Basically what we do is get the "movie_player" element in the video page
then scrap a little this element, to find the "fmt_url_map", which is kind
of complex as its provides up to 4 video formats, in this code snippet
I show how to get the mp4 file, but you can hop between the options
to have the other formats, flv, mp3 or whatever...

in order to do this you will need the Html agility pack found here:
http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/
download it and add it as a reference in your project.

then you need this two methods:

  /*this methods get's the download link for youtube videos in mp4 format.*/
  public string url(string url)
        {
            string html = getYoutubeHtml(url);
            HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument hDoc = new HtmlDocument();
            hDoc.LoadHtml(html);
            HtmlNode node = hDoc.GetElementbyId("movie_player");
            string flashvars = node.Attributes[5].Value;
            string _url = Uri.UnescapeDataString(flashvars);
            string[] w = _url.Split('&');
            string link = "";
            bool foundUrlMap = false;
            for (int i = 0; i < w.Length; i++)
            {
                if (w[i].Contains("fmt_url_map="))
                {
                    foundUrlMap = true;
                    link += w[i].Split('|')[1];
                }
                if (foundUrlMap)
                {
                    /*add the parameters to the url*/
                    link += "&" + w[i];
                    if (w[i].Contains("id="))
                    {
                        link = link.Split(',')[0]; /*change the array index for different formats*/
                        break;
                    }
                }
            }
            link = link.Split('|')[1] + "&title=out";
            return link;
        }
  
  /*this method downloads the html code from the youtube page.*/
        private string getYoutubeHtml(string url)
        {
            string html = "";
            WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
            WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
            TextReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
            string line = "";
            while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)
            {
                html += line;
            }
            return html;
        }

then you can use a webclient to get the video to your coumputer simple use this code lines:

 WebClient wc = new WebClient();
    location = YoutubeSaveDialog.FileName;
    wc.DownloadFile(download_url, location);

Thanks again youtube for making our lifes a little more complicated :) (just kidding this was easy!)

HAPPY CODING!

[ActionScript 2.0] making your character jump

Making your character jump when programming a game in Action Script 2.0 might sound like an easy task, yet I found it really tricky and decided to post the procedure here. I will be assuming that you are familiar to Adobe Flash in any of its versions, but not expert enouhg to get your character jumping. (maybe I'll make a detailed Flash game programming tutorial someday)

All rigth first of all we need our character designed, go and draw something nice, and convert it to movie clip and then press F9 to edit its actions.

first of all we need some variables set, in the load event.

onClipEvent (load) {
 var isJumping = false;
 var hgt = 0;
}

isJumping will tell us wherever the character is jumping or not.

hgt will tell us what I like to call jump-units (different to height. you will se why).

now lets say we want it to jump when the UP key is pressed, so we need to add the keyboard listener in the enterFrame event to get a smooth movement.

all right we code:

onClipEvent (enterFrame) {
 if (Key.isDown(Key.UP)) {
  //this only in case you got some frames within the character
  //special to reproduce when jumping.
  this.gotoAndStop("jump_frame");
  //now we set the jumping variable to true
  //because we are jumping :D
  jumping = true;
 }
 if (jumping) {
  //now we catch that it is performing a jump
  //and increase the jump-units variable by 1
  hgt++;
  //now let's say the jump capacity is three-jump-units
  //this means that max height will be 3*40, because in this case
  //I'm setting 40 height-units for every 3 jump-units
  //you can set any variables you like here, maybe if your game
  //has upgrades
  if (hgt<3 hgt="">0) {
   //this means our character is going up
   this._y -= 40;
  }
  //now the max height is reached, we want it to go down 
  //the same jump-units it went up this means 3*2 = 6
  //so when our jump-unit counter reach 6 means that our
  //character is in the floor (you can also set the floor
  //to a variable) and we should stop doing jumping stuff
  if (hgt>3 && hgt<6 br="">   this._y += 40;
  }
  //here we get hgt == 6 so floor is reached and we 
  //need to reset all variables and do stop-jumping stuff 
  if (hgt == 6) {
   //reset the jump-units, ready for the next jump 
   hgt = 0;
   this.gotoAndStop("normal_position");
   //we are not jumping any more 
   jumping = false;
  }
 }
}

This looks like a huge method!! but actually there are a few lines of code, but I wanted to make sure it was well explained. so Adding this code to your character hopefully will get it to jump. If you combine this with other keys, you will get the movement job done and start focusing in creating a great game :D


Happy Coding!

[C#] get the time duration of an audio file

There is a lot fo tutorials explaining how to do this, showing how thousands of codelines

will finally show you how many time will your song least, using lots of references and stuff.

I wonder why in the internet sometimes, people show us how to invent the wheel but not how to use it, of course knowing how is invented is very intresting and you should read it every time, but when you have milestones to acomplish, deliverables to finish and time is against you, you can't reinvent the wheel every time.

So the other day I came with this problem, I needed to know the audio duration of some "x" audio format, and I found tutorials on how to get it from wav files, using math formulas based on the bitrate and file size, importing windows media player, low level programming, but nothing as portable as I wanted.

Finally after lots of research, I found this amazing library:

TagLib-Sharp For Windows

it is openSource which is great, and also gave me the solution to my problem in 3 code lines, suporting a lot of audio formats or at least the most used/important/comercial.

if you ever want to use this codesnipet to get the audio file duration, here it is:

private static string AudioDuration(string FileFullPath) {
   TagLib.File file = TagLib.File.Create(FileFullPath);
   int s_time = (int)file.Properties.Duration.TotalSeconds;
   int s_minutes = s_time / 60;
   int s_seconds = s_time % 60;
   return s_minutes.ToString() + ":" + s_seconds.ToString() + " minutes";
}


this will get you the duration of your audio file in the format of "mm:ss minutes " of course you have to reference the library above mentioned, and use the using TagLib; reference at the top of your class.

if you dont know how to reference a library in visual studio, simply click "porject->Add reference..." in the dialog select browse and find the TagLib.dll, double click it and then click OK, and you are good to go :)

Happy coding.

[C#] Get Alexa Page Rank Programmatically

So basically we if we want to get the Alexa Page Rank for

a certain url, we have to access their xml API, (I'm sure there's

JSON outhere) and pass the url via querystring, and then just parse

the response.

Here is how:

public static int getAlexa(String URL) {
    int AlexaRank = 0;
    WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("http://data.alexa.com/data? cli=10&dat=snbamz&url=" + URL);
    WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
    StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
    string line = "";
    while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null) {
        Regex rankRegex = new Regex("");
        Match match = rankRegex.Match(line);
        if (match.Success) {
            AlexaRank = int.Parse(match.Groups[1].Value);
        }
    }
    sr.Close();
    return AlexaRank;
}

and there you go, you can also convert this int, to string

or whatever, nothing complex.

Hope you find this code snippet usefull :)

[Java] 7 days in a string array

Here you have a code snippet to have an String array
with the last 7 dates or the las week, it is wrriten
in java, it can be usefull somehow. The format is yyyy-MM-dd

I hope you find this usefull.


public static String[] SevenDaysFromNow(){
        String[] days = new String[7];
        Date today = new Date();
        long times = today.getTime();
        long oneday = (24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
        for(int i=0; i<7; i++){
            times -= oneday;
            Date tmp = new Date(times);
            String DATE_FORMAT_NOW = "yyyy-MM-dd";
            SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_FORMAT_NOW);
            String MyDate = sdf.format(tmp);
            days[i] = MyDate;
        }
        return days;
    }


Also you want to import the following to make it work.

import java.util.Date;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;