TCPHP

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Place: Dunn Bros. Coffee, Downtown St. Paul

Attendees: Allie Micka, H.J. Schmidt, Tim McGuire, Eddie Maddox, Franz, Tom Murray, Carl Narvisson, Noah Bratzen, Robert G. Pappas

PHP Users Group Meeting

Attendees

Regulars

• Scot Jenkins
• Allie Micka
• David Pieper
• Tim McGuire
• Noah Bratzel -- Thanks again for the meeting space!
• H.J. Schmidt
• Fred
• Greg

New Blood:

• David

• Matt
• Tami
• Mark
• William

Meeting Notes

Regulars:
• Allie
• David
• HJ
• Scot
• Tim

New Blood:
• Peter K
• Chris S
• Eric H
• Thomas T
• Jonathan T
• Joel
• Fred
• Steve

This month we meet at Dunn Brother's Coffee Shop in downtown Minneapolis. The main topic was PHP and printable documents.

• Tim McGuire gave a demo on using pdflib with PHP. PDFLib generates PDF files on the fly. Pdflib is vector based and not like HTML table cells.
• pdflib is free for personal use. For commercial use, you pay by the number of CPU's your system has: 1 cpu = $500, 2-10 cpu's = $1000, etc.
• PHP generates a pdf file (in memory or on the file system), then the browser renders the file using a local client program like Adobe acrobat reader or xpdf.
• To work with pdf documents in PHP, you must compile PHP using "--with-pdf" and you must have a pdflib library on your system.
• PHPbuilder has a good tutorial on using pdflib with PHP.
• A competing product is Adobe's distiller server. Adobe's pricing info is here.
• Another option is ClibPDF which is "free for private, non-profit use, but a commercial license is required for for-profit applications".
• PHPTriad includes support for pdflib although it might not be the most current version.

Other Misc. topics included:

This months attendees:

Regulars:
• Allie
• David
• HJ
• Scot

New Blood:
• Andy - a familiar face from CFUG
• Bob
• Josh
• Lino
• Noah - provided the meeting space, Thanks Noah!

This months meeting was somewhat of a TCPHP administrative meeting.

• HTML slides
• RA and MP3 files

Tim, our usual note taker, wasn't available this meeting. I (Scot)
thought I'd attempt to fill in and take the notes. Here goes...

The meeting started out at Dunn Brother's Coffee Shop in St. Paul.
Due to lack of working Internet access, we moved to Warren's old office
in the US Bank building a couple blocks down the street. The room had
no furniture, but there was a sole Linux server and working Internet
access.

1. Introductions: We welcomed H.J. Schmidt and Debbie Slee who in their off hours have built a small business using PHP to produce online polls and questionnaires.
   They got a leg up in this business by underbidding another company that used proprietary software to make similar polls.
2. Bugnosis
   Bugnosis is a tool that you can install to work with your browser (IE >= 5.0 on windows) and see web bugs. Web bugs insert a 1 x 1 "image" from another URL on the page you are using. Then, the other URL can use its cookie to say something like, "This also visited a site pertaining to pest control so we can try to sell him extermination services."
   Web bugs have other uses and can be used to figure out where a user clicked an ad,to call a hit counter as (J.'s PHPGEEK.com does), and simply for for internet advertising.

   Bugnosis can't shut these down, but it can alert you with an analysis of each page you visit.
   It is kind of annoying to keep seeing this stuff so I eventually shut the service down.

1. PHP Triad:

PHP Triad is an installation of PHP, Apache and MySQL for Windows that J. Wynia created to make installation easy.  And it is truly easy.  It includes PHP myadmin, a web based database administration tool  and PHP IDE, a web based PHP editor.  It is available from SourceForge or from http://www.phpgeek.com