546When I was ten years old, my world fell apart in 73 seconds. It was the first time I witnessed the death of another human being, and the raw pain of that day still has not left me.The year was 1986, and I was in third grade. My family had just moved to New Hampshire two months earlier, and I was amazed to see another New Hampshire resident, Christa McAuliffe, all over the evening news, in addition to Channel 9, the local news station. It was the dream of a little boy to reach for the stars, to go to space and look down upon the earth. I dreamed about it. I watched the shuttle launches. My grandfather lived in Florida, and would often tell me about being able to the see the shuttle soaring over his house.Because McAuliffe was a teacher from New Hampshire, my elementary school was very much involved in the entire process, and the students did projects and wrote letters to our New Hampshire astronaut. On the day of the launch, we all sat in front of a television in class to watch the teacher bring space right to our very classroom. I was so excited, and remember staring at the television, completely transfixed with anticipation. When the engines lit, my heart raced and we all cheered. When the shuttle cleared the launchpad, we all clapped. What happened next hushed the room like a forest covered in thick snow. Nobody spoke. I heard one of the teachers gasp. My heart sank. Someone turned off the television, and we resumed our normal class schedule. I could not focus, though, as all I could think of were white smoke trails across a blue sky.

I sobbed for three days straight. My dream to visit space someday was shattered, and I was acutely aware of the deaths of those astronauts, and that hurt the most. President Reagan's now famous speech made me weep as if my own family had been lost. And to this day, 20 years later, hearing that speech and watching video of Challenger's demise still brings me to tears.

"We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

[tags]Challenger, Christa+McAuliffe, NASA, New+Hampshire, Reagan, Space+Shuttle[/tags]

I do a lot of web design, and I use the Smarty templating engine for all of my PHP websites.  It is a fantastic template system, designed for rapid development, and it succeeds at everything it does.

Well, almost everything.

Smarty has modifiers, which allow you to control data dynamically in your templates.  A lot of people complain that this feature of Smarty puts too much logic in the template system, which by its very nature is supposed to seperate business logic from display logic.  However, some modifiers such as "capitalize" fit under display logic as far as I am concerned.  One limitation of this modifier is that it does not handle contractions very well at all.

Take this for example:

example.tpl:

{assign value="max's horse didn't fall. 'someone' is coming.  they're here!" var="capt"}
{$capt|capitalize}

Output:
Max'S Horse Didn'T Fall. 'Someone' Is Coming. They'Re Here!

As you can see, Smarty treats the apostrophe as a word boundary, resulting in incorrect capitalization.  The way to fix this behavior is to modify [smarty]/libs/plugins/modifier.capitalize.php.

function smarty_modifier_capitalize($string, $uc_digits = false)
{
//replace common contraction endings with placeholders
//that PCRE will not see as a word boundary
$apos = array('n\'t ','\'s ','\'re ');
$tmps = array('n__apos__t ','__apos__s ','__apos__re ');
$string = str_replace($apos,$tmps,$string);
//do the real work
smarty_modifier_capitalize_ucfirst(null, $uc_digits);
$string = preg_replace_callback('!\b\w+\b!', 'smarty_modifier_capitalize_ucfirst', $string);
//restore the contractions and return
return str_replace($tmps,$apos,$string);
}

example.tpl:

{assign value="max's horse didn't fall. 'someone' is coming.  they're here!" var="capt"}
{$capt|capitalize}

Output:
Max's Horse Didn't Fall. 'Someone' Is Coming. They're Here!

[tags]Smarty,PHP,modifier,capitalize,template,display+logic[/tags]

Looks like the clever folks over at GrayHats.com have created a special version of Google for those who speaks the language of gamerz and h4x0rz:

These people have too much time on their hands. It is pretty funny though...

One of my recent projects for a customer of mine, ResortScope, LLC, involved setting up some web services to allow access to data in our database to external consumers.  To provide this functionality, I used the NuSOAP library and PHP.  However, one of the limitations of the NuSOAP library is that it is unable to parse SOAP headers, which typically contain authentication information.  Consider:

<xmp>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope
SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
xmlns:si="http://soapinterop.org/xsd">
 
<soap:Header>
<AuthenticationInfo xmlns="urn:MyService">
<username>test</username>
<password>1a232d4dg35</password>
</AuthenticationInfo>
</soap:Header>
<SOAP:Body>
<ns1:SomeMethod xmlns:ns1="urn:MyService">
<param1>foo</param1>
<param2>bar</param2>
</ns1:SomeMethod>
</SOAP:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>
</xmp>

<xmp>
<?php
class MySoapServer extends soap_server
{
var $_objParser;
 
// Class constructor
function MySoapServer($wsdl=false)
{
// Create a new instance of the XML parser
$this->_objParser = new MyXMLParser();
 
// Call the parent constructor method and pass the WSDL flag to it
parent::soap_server($wsdl);
 
} // End Function
 
function service($data)
{
// Parse the xml message
$this->_objParser->setXMLData($data);
 
// Retrieve the authentication information from the xml message
$arrCredentials = $this->_objParser->getCredentials();
 
// Sanity check - did we get the credentials?
if(is_array($arrCredentials) &&
($arrCredentials['username'] != "") &&
($arrCredentials['password'] != ""))
{
// Authenticate the user
$this->_intWSUserID = $this->_authenticate($arrCredentials);
 
// If authentication was successful, handle the rest of the message
if($this->_intWSUserID > 0)
{
parent::service($data);
}
else
{
// return a SOAP fault
}
}
 
} // End Function
 
function _authenticate($arrCredentials)
{
// Sanity check: did we get a valid array?
if(! is_array($arrCredentials))
{
// return a SOAP fault
}
 
// Handle your authentication code here.  I use a MySQL database for holding user data
 
} // End Function
 
} // End of Class
?>
</xmp>

Thanks to Scott Nichol for a great PHP library!

Technorati Tags: php nusoap SOAP