But that still doesn't change the fact that PHP can be a tad pokey on the server. Well, when I said this to the Zend folks, their immediate reaction was similar to that of a gestapo officer looking for a spy: "What? Who said that? Tell us their name!"

Clearly, Zend does not think there is a problem. But Facebook did. Not enough of a problem to support more than one paycheck, but then, considering how many users they have, even a 1 percent performance gain would be a massive help.

Sudoku is a number-based  puzzle game. The object is to fill in the remaining numbers on a 9x9 grid in such a way that no number in a row, column or cube is the same. The game has become increasingly popular and games can be found on every computer platform. I noticed that many of the implementations of this game had a limited number of puzzles.  This struck me as strange, why not create a board randomly.  So I decided to create an algorithm that would generate random boards.

I decided to create a brute force algorithm that tries to randomly create the board and detect whether it fails or not. This is not elegant but it seems to work amazingly well.  If the algorithm fails it starts over from the beginning and does it all again. I was concerned about speed with this approach but surprisingly it finds a board in a split second.

Here is the code. It should be simple from here to put a GUI on to the front-end and create a Sudoku game.

Module Module1

    Dim a(9, 9) As Integer

    Function checkrow(ByVal iRow As Integer, ByVal icol As Integer) As Boolean
        Dim i As Integer

        For i = 1 To icol - 1
            If a(iRow, i) = a(iRow, icol) Then
                Return False
            End If
        Next

        Return True
    End Function


    Function checkcol(ByVal iRow As Integer, ByVal icol As Integer) As Boolean
        Dim i As Integer

        For i = 1 To iRow - 1
            If a(i, icol) = a(iRow, icol) Then
                Return False
            End If
        Next

        Return True
    End Function


    Function checkcube(ByVal irow As Integer, ByVal icol As Integer) As Boolean
        Dim trow As Integer
        Dim tcol As Integer
        Dim i As Integer
        Dim j As Integer

        If irow < 4 Then trow = 1
        If irow > 3 And irow < 7 Then trow = 4
        If irow > 6 Then trow = 7
        If icol < 4 Then tcol = 1
        If icol > 3 And icol < 7 Then tcol = 4
        If icol > 6 Then tcol = 7

        For i = trow To trow + 2
            For j = tcol To tcol + 2

                If a(i, j) = a(irow, icol) And Not (i = irow And j = icol) Then

                    Return False
                End If
            Next
        Next

        Return True
    End Function
    Sub initGrid()
        Dim i As Integer
        Dim j As Integer
        For i = 1 To 9
            For j = 1 To 9
                a(i, j) = 0
            Next
        Next
    End Sub

    Sub Main()
        Dim r As New Random(Second(Now()) * Minute(Now()) * Hour(Now))
        Dim cRow As Integer
        Dim cCol As Integer
        Dim StartOverRow As Integer
        Dim sCheckedNumbers As String
        For cRow = 1 To 9
            For cCol = 1 To 9
                startoverrow = 0
                sCheckedNumbers = " "
                Do While (startoverrow <= 46) And (Not checkrow(cRow, cCol) Or Not checkcube(cRow, cCol) Or Not checkcol(cRow, cCol) Or a(cRow, cCol) = 0)
                    a(cRow, cCol) = r.Next(1, 10)
                    If startoverrow >= 45 Then startoverrow = startoverrow + 1
                    If InStr(sCheckedNumbers, a(cRow, cCol)) < 1 Then
                        StartOverRow = StartOverRow + a(cRow, cCol)
                        sCheckedNumbers = sCheckedNumbers & a(cRow, cCol)
                    End If
                Loop
                If startoverrow > 45 And sCheckedNumbers.Length = 10 Then ' we checked all numbers so we are at a deadend, lets start over
                    cCol = 0
                    cRow = 1
                    initGrid()
                End If
            Next
        Next
        FileOpen(1, "c:\temp\grid.txt", OpenMode.Output)
        Dim s As String
        For cRow = 1 To 9
            s = ""
            For cCol = 1 To 9
                s = s & a(cRow, cCol)


            Next
            PrintLine(1, s)
        Next

        FileClose(1)
    End Sub

End Module

This year, 395 million dollars has been invested by Venture Capital funds into web 3D.  How does it affect the small to medium size business owner?  Is 3D important?  It really depends on the type of business.  The immediate payoff with 3D will be with product demonstration and collobaration.  As a small business owner you have to look at your type of business and demographic to determine if 3D is critical to you.  The good thing is that if it is important, development costs for a 3D application are now in reach. 

Adobe has released Actionscript 3 and performance is good enough to allow easy web 3d development.  Open source has stepped up to the challenge and there are now 3 popular  and robust 3d engines developed in actionscript3:  Away3d, PaperEngine3d, and Sandy 3d.  I am currently working on a project using Away3d and will post my findings about the Away3d engine after the project is completed. 

The way businesses collaborate is changing all of the time. One of the new technologies on the radar to aid collaboration are virtual worlds. There are many virtual worlds in existence and this year will see many of the larger technology providers entering the arena. Sony is going to finally release @Home on the PS3. Sun is showing off it's open source virtual world to select people and should be rolling it out shortly. IBM has invested a lot of effort in Linden Labs Second Life and even created a private version of the virtual world.

Second Life is interesting because it has been around for five years, celebrating it's 5th birthday yesterday. Should a small business establish a presence in Second Life? The answer is not at this time. Only a few established businesses have benefited from a marketing stand point. The potential for business collaboration is evident but not realizable with current technology. Second Life is too hard to be of any use to the average business user. It requires a downloadable client that takes a state of the art computer to run. Easier to use alternatives with better features are coming out and unfortunately Second Life at this time is more hype than a tangible product. I think you will see changes in the near future to keep Second Life relevant and if that happens then businesses should look at it again, but at this time it is not worth the effort needed to put in to it.

I have had to create Wikis for clients and my own personal projects.  There are many open source software choices, with the most popular being MediaWiki.  MediaWiki is a great piece of software and it is best know for powering Wikipedia.  I like MediaWiki alot and I am very impressed with it.  But I usually use another Wiki for projects, DokuWiki. The reason is simple, it has excellent integration with my two favorite bulletin boards, vBulletin and punBB.

I have been working on a new wiki. Several Word documents are being used for the initial content. Cutting and Pasting from Word to most wikis does not give desired results and can lead to a lot of reformatting and fixing footnotes. Open Office includes an option to convert a file to MediaWiki but the format does not translate well to dokuWiki. So a quick search of the internet turned up two macros, one for Microsoft Word and one for Open Office allowing easy conversion to dokuWiki format. I thought I would go ahead and share the links on this blog.

Open Office - DokuWiki Macro

Word2DokuWiki

The code snippet uses Snoopy. Snoopy is a class for retrieving web pages.   At the end of the script I just shelled out to wget to retrieve the file.  Wget is included with Linux and MacOS.  Windows users can retrieve it here.

        include "Snoopy.class.php";  // http://sourceforge.net/projects/snoopy/
        $snoopy = new Snoopy;  // instantiate the object
       // retrieve the URL from Youtube
        $snoopy->fetch("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHRq80QNnJM%22%29;  


// Lets pull the parameters from the returned result and build the 

//URL that retrieves the flash video
        $lposVideoID = strpos($snoopy->results,"\"video_id\":");  
        $sVideoID = substr($snoopy->results,$lposVideoID+13,11);
        $sUrl = "http://youtube.com/get_video.php?video_id=%22 . $sVideoID;
        $sUrl = $sUrl . "&l=";
        $lpos = strpos($snoopy->results,"\"l\":");
        $sl = substr($snoopy->results,$lpos+5,3);
        $sUrl = $sUrl . $sl;
        $lpos = strpos($snoopy->results,"\"sk\":");
        $sl = substr($snoopy->results,$lpos+7,33);

        $sUrl = $sUrl . "&sk=" . $sl;

        $sUrl = $sUrl . "&fmt_map=";

        $lpos = strpos($snoopy->results,"\"t\":");
        $sl = substr($snoopy->results,$lpos+6,32);

        $sUrl = $sUrl . "&t=" . $sl;


        $lpos = strpos($snoopy->results,"\"hl\":");
        $sl = substr($snoopy->results,$lpos+7,2);

        $lpos = strpos($snoopy->results,"\"plid\":");
        $sl = substr($snoopy->results,$lpos+9,27);

        $sUrl = $sUrl . "&hl=" . $sl;

        $lpos = strpos($snoopy->results,"",$lpos);
        $sl = substr($snoopy->results,$lpos+16,$lend - ($lpos+16));
        $titre = $sl;

        $sUrl = $sUrl . "&title=" ;
        $sUrl = $sUrl. $sl ;

        $id = time();
        //  Probably better to use Snoopy here but for variety shell 

        //out and use the wget command
        echo exec("wget \"" . $sUrl . "\" -O /tmp/" . $id . ".flv"); 
?> 

Here is the source code

Imports System.Drawing
Imports System
Imports System.Net
Imports System.IO
Imports System.windows.forms
Imports System.Threading ' we actually don't need this import for this version  

Public Class WebToPicture
  Private bmp As New Bitmap(1024, 768)
  Private timeout As Integer = 5  ' not used in this version
  Private doccomplete As Boolean = False ' set to true when Document is downloaded   
  Private sOut As String  ' holds the name of the JPEG

 Public Sub getpicture(ByVal url As String)
    private rend As New WebBrowser
    doccomplete = False
    'since this is a console app need to set up the handler 

    AddHandler rend.DocumentCompleted, AddressOf Me.WebBrowser_DocumentCompleted  

    rend.Navigate(url)

    Do While Not doccomplete
               Application.DoEvents()  ' inefficient
    Loop


 End Sub

 Sub WebBrowser_DocumentCompleted(ByVal sender As Object, _
         ByVal e As WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs) ' fires when url request done
   private rend As WebBrowser
   private r As New Rectangle(1, 1, 1024, 768)
   rend = sender 'web request is passed as parameter
   rend.ClientSize = New Size(1024, 768)

   rend.DrawToBitmap(bmp, r)
   bmp.Save(sout, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Jpeg)
   rend.Dispose()
   doccomplete = True
 End Sub

 Public Sub New(ByVal out As String)
   sout = out  ' constructor - lets set the jpeg file name
 End Sub


End Class

 

Module MainModule

 Sub Main()
    Dim sCmdArray() As String 
    Dim sURL As String
    Dim sOut As String
' call from commandline "programname  URL   FILENAME"
    sCmdArray = Split(Command(), " ")
    sURL = sCmdArray(0)
    sOut = sCmdArray(1)
    Dim cWebToPicture As New webtopicture(sOut)  ' instantiate object

    cWebToPicture.getpicture(sURL)  ' call url and save file

 End Sub


End Module
 

I have tried to make the code as simple as possible to make it easy to understand. Please feel free to comment or e-mail with questions.

http://www.slbdevelopment.com/index.php?page=Web-Hosting