TCPHP

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. Demonstration
of Mapserver  

Tim McGuire demonstrated Mapserver, an open source mapping tool
that can be scripted with PHP 
(as well as PERL, C, Java and TCL).  Mapserver is a CGI program written
in C that works on multiple platforms and web servers.  The program basically takes
information from files in Geographical Information System (GIS)
format  (called shapefiles) and converts them
into image maps for the browser. 
Each point or feature we can see on the image map (cities, forests,
lakes, roads, city blocks, etc) corresponds to a record in a database
associated with the shapefile.   So, you can
script it with PHP to run queries on locations ("Tell me census data for
this city block when
I click on it") or render the map differently based on user specifications ("Turn all
the lakes with high mercury  levels green").  We spent a lot of
time testing out http://maps.dnr.state.mn.us/landview/ 
which is a mapserver based application where you can look at air photos,
land use, roadmaps, etc of Minnesota. 

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