Abbas’ Blog

The other day i was chatting with my team mate Shk.Aziz Poonawalla and he inspired me to do a plugin for coppermine which should convert the uploaded documents (txt, pdf, doc, ppt etc..) to Scribd iPaper format and then display them using the Scribd document viewer.

So i went ahead and created such a plugin for coppermine. The plugin requires PHP 5 and CURL on the server and you should register an account on Scribd Platform to get an API key and secret phrase. After installing the plugin whenever a document is uploaded to cpg - it is copied (uploaded) to scribd server as well (behind the scenes). Scribd converts the document to iPaper format on its server and assigns a document id to it. Now when the document is viewed in cpg, we display the Scribd document viewer and supply it the document id. This displays the document in a nice flash viewer.

For further instructions and to download the plugin please see the forum thread.

The other day i had some free time and thought why not try my hand at converting a wordpress theme to coppermine one. I chose Fieldofsand which is a free wordpress them designed by Smarter Templates and started the conversion. Fortunately i did quite well and published the theme for coppermine community.

You may find quite a few HTML/CSS issues with the theme as i am primarily not a designer but developer. If you are a coppermine user then you might want to check the demo of the theme here. You can download the theme from sourceforge download page.

I am excited to announce the launch of Starting 11 | Free Fantasy Football, my latest work at SANIsoft. The project was done for a client based in UK who happens to be a football fanatic. Starting 11 is a fantasy game based on English Premier League where users can create their fantasy (virtual) team consisting of real life players playing in the EPL. The players (and fantasy teams) are awarded points based on real life performances in the matches. Users can create their own leagues and compete with their friends.

It took us around 4 months of hard work to create the application. The project is entirely built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) technologies. We have also used jQuery at few places.We have used a popular php framework in the backend. We have tried to optimized the application as much as possible and hope that it will handle high loads at peak time (which will be the weekly deadline to select one’s team).

S11 got around 1300 members on the first day of the launch and more will be registering in the coming days as the word spreads. Many of the Yahoo Fantasy Football’s top players (user’s) have already registered on s11. If you are a football fanatic then don’t wait…get going and register on starting11.

So finally Bill Gates has retired from his active role in Microsoft. It is unbelievable that he used to handle three positions which will now (rather from quite some time) be headed by :

CEO - Steve Ballmer
Chief Software Architect - Ray Ozzie
Chief of Research and Strategy - Craig Mundie

I am a Linux guy and don’t use/like Windows but i respect Bill Gates and like him a lot. No matter how much you criticize his products, company and policies but you cannot deny his role in brining a desktop computer to so many homes in the world. Without Windows personal computing would not have initiated at all.

Bye bye Mr.Bill Gates and all the best for your charity foundation.

Coppermine Photo Gallery is again taking part as a mentoring organization in GSoC and i will be mentoring for coppermine organization for the second year straight in a row. It took us around a month to decide on project ideas and students.

Finally on April 21st 2008 the final student allocation list was published by google. I will be mentoring the project called AJAX functionality for core of Coppermine which will be done by Nuwan Sameera Hettiarachchi from Sri Lanka. After the completion of this project coppermine will be an Ajax rich application. Ofcourse every ajax functionality will gracefully degrade if javascript is not supported by the client browser. We intend to put following main features :

• Filmstrip carousel
• Ajax slideshow with transition effects
• New upload form to reduce the number of steps required to upload files
• Ajax sorting of pictures/albums/categories
• And many more cool small features…

The coding period will start on May 26th and will last till August 18th 2008. I am really looking forward for a great summer of code ahead and hope that coppermine interface gets better with student contributions.

Recently i installed Fedora 8 on my machine. All went smoothly and i was able to login to the improved KDE for the first time. But to my disappointment the display was all messed up. Poor colors, fonts etc.. This is what i did to fix it.

First i downloaded the display driver for my motherboard. My configuration was Linux x_86 (Fedora 8), Integrated/Motherboard and ATI Radeon Xpress 200 and i downloaded the driver from here.

The driver installation went on fine and i rebooted the system. But to my surprise that didn’t fixed the problem. After searching and browsing few forums i got the solution. You need to run following command after installing the driver

aticonfig –initial -f

And after restarting X, display got fixed.

On many banking sites you will find that when back or refresh button is pressed the session expires and it shows you a custom page. Well below is a simple PHP code which will do the same. The code is very basic and illustrates just the logic.

Include the below given code in all your scripts.

$next_key should be passed in the URL to all scripts.

Today i upgraded this blog to wordpress version 2.3. I had a few difficulties in doing so but in the end i was able to do it.

Everybody - enjoy this wonderful open source application.

Yes, you heard it right, i will be getting married on 14th Nov 2007. My would be wife's name is Tasneem and she is from the wonderful city of Hyderabad.

We first met in my cousin's wedding way back in Dec 2004. I am really excited and looking forward to spend the rest of my life with her. I will be busy for the next couple of months in preparations and other things.

Its been very long since i wrote last time and yes i know it is too late to mention this (as GSoC is over) but i was damn busy with work and other things.

Anyways the news is that Coppermine Photo Gallery was one of the open source projects which participated in Google Summer of Code 2007 (GSoC). Four students were chosen to work on different aspects (enhancements) of cpg. I was mentoring one of the students, Sander Weyens. Being a mentor was a wonderful first time experience. I really liked the work done by Sander and other students. Thu Tu did a wonderful job in coordinating the whole program for coppermine. She is in the dev team and was also a mentor.

Google is organizing a mentor summit in Mountain View, California on 6th Oct-07 and Coppermine has been invited. Any three mentors from coppermine can attend the summit and Google will be giving $1200 as travel expenses (for non U.S mentors). I am being told by other Dev Team members (specially Thu) to attend the summit but because of work load and visa problems i cannot. Though i would have loved to go there and represent coppermine. Better luck next time ;).