I want it to resolve to my local server, for an example

I have my app in

c://xampp/htdocs/myapp

and I want to see myapp whenever I visit

http://example.com/myapp

instead of visiting http://localhost/myapp or http://127.0.0.1/myapp

You can accomplish this easily and have any domain resolves to your localhost on xampp, open the following file

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

and at the very end of the hosts file just type local server ip 127.0.0.1 and hit TAB once and type example.com or any other domain you want, this can be any domain really

127.0.0.1		example.com

save and close the file and now if you open your browser and visit example.com/myapp you should see your application and if you visit example.com you will see what you used to see whenever you visit http://localhost or 127.0.0.1, the default xampp page.

I have Googled a bit and I found Google reCaptcha implemented as a CodeIgniter library but that was not very cool, very bad documentation and unclear demo, too many files to upload and configure, actually it was a very bad library and so I gave up and decided to look again at codeignirer captcha helper.

after reading all its documentation I got better ideas on how to use it and so implemented it in my app in 5 minutes and it was working exactly as I wanted and without a database!

see the example below of how I have my controller and view files and you will know how easy it is to get Codeginiter captcha working with session and without a database

IMPORTANT:
codeigniter captcha helper needs GD library installed on your server and you must create a folder and name it captcha in your Codeigniter root and change its permission to 777 or 666

My controller

<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
 
class HomeController extends CI_Controller {
 
/********************************************************
* This is the index page for this controller 
********************************************************/
 
	public function index()
	{
 
 
           // load the session library
	    $this->load->library('session');
 
            // if form was submitted and given captcha word matches one in session
               if ($this->input->post() && ($this->input->post('word') == $this->session->userdata('word'))) {
 
                       $this->load->view('success_view.php');
                }
 
else {
               // load codeigniter captcha helper
                $this->load->helper('captcha');
 
                $vals = array(
                'img_path'	 => './captcha/',
                'img_url'	 => 'http://domain.com/captcha/',
                'img_width'	 => '200',
                'img_height' => 30,
                'border' => 0, 
                'expiration' => 7200
                );
 
                 // create captcha image
                $cap = create_captcha($vals);
 
                // store image html code in a variable
                $data['image'] = $cap['image'];
 
               // store the captcha word in a session
                $this->session->set_userdata('word', $cap['word']);
 
                $this->load->view('captcha_view.php', $data);
 
        } 
 
}

My View (captcha_view.php)

<?php echo $image;  // this will show the captcha image?>
<form action="" method="post">
<input type="text" name="word"  />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit"  />
</form>

function my_func() {
echo  '<div id="testimonials">';
include(ABSPATH . '/wp-content/plugins/wp-content-slider/content-slider.php');
echo ''</div>;
}

and the short code

add_shortcode('show_func', 'my_func');

and while using the shortcode within WordPress page the output is being displayed on top of the page just before the page contents and this is very weird as the shortcode output should display wherever you have placed the shortcode within your page or post!

If you ever want to make a shortcode for a file include, sometimes you may need that for you own functions or just customizing a plugin that requires file include, you will need to add ob_start(); at the begining of the function’s code and then add the rest of the function code/include or anything it has and once done from your code Just create a variable with value of ob_get_clean(); and then return that variable.

See the example below on how a function would look like to have it display WordPress shortcode output exactly where you place it on a page or post.

function my_func() {
ob_start();
echo  '<div id="testimonials">';
include(ABSPATH . '/wp-content/plugins/content-slider/content-slider.php');
echo '</div>';
$myvariable = ob_get_clean();
return $myvariable;
}

killall skype

and that didn’t kill the process! tried xkill and also didn’t work! and finally the following command killed skype and everything back to normal!

killall -9 skype

openvpn --config profile.ovpn

Today for some reason I was not able to connect to my openVPN and I was getting the following errors:

Sat Mar 10 23:31:34 2012 Note: Cannot ioctl TUNSETIFF tun: Operation not permitted (errno=1)
Sat Mar 10 23:31:34 2012 Note: Attempting fallback to kernel 2.2 TUN/TAP interface
Sat Mar 10 23:31:34 2012 Cannot allocate TUN/TAP dev dynamically
Sat Mar 10 23:31:34 2012 Exiting

Googled a bit but no luck, until I decided to try to connect with sudo at the beginning so I ran:

sudo openvpn --config profile.ovpn

and that fixed the problem

If you have a VPS or Dedicated server and have access to SSH, then ssh to your server and cd to the public_html directory of the user who’s having the problem

cd /home/username/public_html

then run the following command to fix the permission problem

chown username.username * -R

replace username with the actual cPanel username

and if you are on a shared hosting and don’t have SSH access, you might want to refer your hosting company to this page

You will need:
Python installed
Sqlite3 Library

Sqlite comes with a Command Line Shell for creating and managing databases

Create an empty sqlite database
If you are on windows go to Start > run , type CMD ad the command line window will appear, make sure you have an empty folder created wherever you want to build the program, in my case I created a folder on desktop called “program”, if you did like me then in windows command line windows type

cd Desktop/program

At a shell or DOS prompt, enter

sqlite3 mydb

that creates an empty sqlite3 database, now lets create a table to store notes

create table mynotes(note varchar(50) );

the above line creates an empty table inside the database “mydb”

Python file
Create an empty file inside the same dir and name it prog.py
and paste the following inside it (don’t worry I will try to explain most of it):

from Tkinter import *
import sqlite3
 
class Program:
    def __init__(self, master):
        frame = Frame(master, width=80, height=50)
        frame.pack()
 
        self.text = Label(frame, text="")
        self.text.pack()
        self.text.grid(row=0, sticky=W, pady=10, padx=10)
 
        self.TextField = Entry(frame, width=45)
        self.TextField.pack()
        self.TextField.grid(row=1, rowspan=2, sticky=W,  pady=5, padx=10)
 
        self.btn = Button(frame, text="Add note", command=self.add_note)
        self.btn.pack()
        self.btn.grid(row=3, rowspan=2, sticky=W, pady=10, padx=10)
 
        self.showbtn = Button(frame, text="Show Notes", command = self.show_notes)
        self.showbtn.pack()
        self.showbtn.grid(row=3, rowspan=2,  pady=10, padx=80)
 
 
        # create an empty Tkinter listbox
        self.content = Listbox(master, width=50)
        self.content.pack()
 
 
    def add_note(self):
 
        # if texfield is empty
        if self.TextField.get() == "":
            # then set text label text
            self.text["text"] = "Please type a note"
        else:
 
            # everything is ok lets get the typed note
            item = self.TextField.get()
 
            # create sqlite connection            
            conn = sqlite3.connect('mynotes')
            c = conn.cursor()
 
            # insert a row
            c.execute("insert into notes (mynote) values (?)", (item,))
            conn.commit()                  
 
            # close connection
            c.close()
 
            # clear input
            self.TextField.delete(0, END)
 
    def show_notes(self):
            conn = sqlite3.connect('mynotes')
            c = conn.cursor()
 
            # select all entries from database
            list = c.execute("SELECT * FROM notes")
            conn.commit()
 
            # list has an array so lets loop the array and insert each item to
            # our listbox
 
            for row in list:
                    self.content.insert(END, row)                    
            c.close()
 
 
 
root = Tk()
application = Program(root)
root.mainloop()

Lets explain the code above

def __init__(self, master):

function for initialization.

Creates the main frame

it creates a label where we can put any text we want, we created a label to show a message if field left empty
row , sticky, pady, padx control the position of the label

Creates a text field, you may note there is "frame" as first argument, that's the name of Tkinter frame we want the text field in

Creates a button, text argument is the text displayed on the button, command is the function to run when you click that button

Creates an empty Tkinter listbox (thats where we will display sqlite3 contents)

where item = self.TextField.get() we are getting the text typed into Textfield.
where self.TextField.delete(0, END) we are reseting the field.
sqlite3.connect('mynotes') creates a sqlite connection to mynotes (the database).

view this in action Demo

If you don’t know what is Json, a Json string looks like this

{
"name": "John Smith",
"Age": "30",
"username": "Jsith",
"location": "Chicago"
}

Our search engine will be 2 pages

index.html
search.php

index.html content

<form action="search.php" method="post">
<input type="text" name="keyword">
<input type="submit" value="search">
</form>

in the above step we build a basic html page with a form that contains text field and submit button to submit the form to our search.php, then once a user type a keyword and hit submit we want to take that keyword and search facebook public posts suing their graph API.

Now in search.php We need to catch the submitted keyword from index.html

$keyword = $_POST['keyword'];

The graph url which will return a JSON string is https://graph.facebook.com/search
the url accepts many parameters but we will use the basic ones such as type and q (query)
you can see what the JSON results would look like before we parse them with PHP here:
https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=hello&type=post
Now lets set the graph url we will be opening with php

// set graph url
$graph_url = "https://graph.facebook.com/search?";
// add parameters to graph url
$graph_url .= "&type=posts";
$graph_url .= "&q=$keyword";

in the above step we have a prepared graph url with type parameter and q parameter, the q parameter is the keyword we want to search for and type is the kind of contents we need, we are going to search for posts, aren’t we?
Now that facebook graph url is ready with the keyword we want to search for, lets have php open it so it returns the JSON results

$results = file_get_contents( $graph_url );

$result will be the variable holding the JSON data returned by Facebook Graph, We now need to parse JSON and display it as readable text or HTML content, We will parse it using php function – json_decode() -

$json = json_decode($results);

the json_decode() function in the way used above converts the JSON string into accessible objects, We will need to do a foreach loop to access those objects and print them, lets do that now

foreach( $json->data as $show ) {
echo $show->from->name . "\n";
echo $show->message . "\n";
echo $show->created_time . "\n"
echo "<hr>";
}

Now you might be wondering why used $json->data and not $json alone, the answer is because all the returned results in JSON are inside an array called “data” and also you may have noticed to show the name of poster I’m doing $json->from->name is because “from” is an array and name is an object inside that array you can see how it looks like here https://graph.facebook.com/?q=hello&type=post, In this tutorial I’m only showing name of person who made the post, message which is post content, created time is the timestamp of the post date you can access many more such as Facebook user ID , description, comments count etc. By simple doing $show->xx where xx is the object name! I hope this helps you in your next Facebook app project! you can what we have created in action here

search.php all together will look like this

$keyword = $_POST['keyword'];
$graph_url = "https://graph.facebook.com/search?";
$graph_url .= "&type=posts";
$graph_url .= "&q=$keyword";
$results = file_get_contents( $graph_url );
$json = json_decode($results);
foreach( $json->data as $show ) {
echo $show->from->name . "\n";
echo $show->message . "\n";
echo $show->created_time . "\n"
echo "<hr>";
}

First you will need to load the date helper

Now lets use the function in any of our controllers

That will outputs something like

Note that 1326927423 is a UNIX date format, see this page to learn about date formats and how to convert them.

The first thing you should do if you are on a openVZ VPS is asking your vps provider to enable TUN/TAP device for you or just give them the following commands to run on their hardware node
to enable TUN/TAP

to enable IP tables if necessary

where 101 is your vps CID.

Now ssh to your server, if you are on Linux (Ctrl + t) to open terminal and type inside

Where xxx.xx.. is your server IP address, it will then ask for root password just type it and hit enter to login to your server.

If you are on windows then use putty to connect to your server.
now that you’re logged in, run the following command to download openvpn access server installation script
for centOS 32bit do this

for centOS 64bit do this

run Openvpn Access Server installer for (32bit)

run Openvpn Access Server installer for (64bit)

it will take anywhere between 4 minutes and 10 minutes, it will create the master username(openvpn) so once done lets change the user “openvpn” password by running this

choose a password, type and confirm it and that is it! you got openvpn access server installed and ready, to login to openvpn access server admin, the url would be something like this

where xxx.xxx.xxx is your server IP address, and make sure the url is starting with https, the user name would be openvpn and password would be the one you have chosen in last step.

and to login as a client the url would be

the first time a client connect to openvpn access server, he may be asked to download openvpn connect client.