Introduction
When drawing a path on a map (for instance, the directions from point A to point B) it is important to consider the limitations of the device you're drawing the path on.
In this article, I will show you how to reduce the number of points in a path so the path can be displayed with Read More →

Introduction
Elliptic integrals of the first and second type is given in code, with some example of their implementation. I had recently a need for these types of integrals, both complete and incomplete, and such implementations was not easy to find (I couldn't find anything in C# or VB, as usual, and the C++ versions I Read More →

References in PHP are a means to access the same variable content by different names.They are not like C pointers; for instance, you cannot perform pointer arithmetic using them, they are not actual memory addresses, and so on. Instead, they are symbol table aliases. Note that in PHP, variable name and variable content
are different, so Read More →

Self installing .NET service using the Win32 API

Introduction
The Windows service code that ships with the .NET framework and Visual Studio works just fine usually. However, sometimes it's just annoying to have to create an installer project just for a simple service you're writing. Furthermore, Microsoft tends to hide away the Read More →

The Model-View-Control (MVC) pattern, originally formulated in the late 1970s, is a software architecture pattern built on the basis of keeping the presentation of data separate from the methods that interact with the data. In theory, a well-developed MVC system should allow a front-end developer and a back-end developer to work on the same system Read More →

Sam handed Peter a computer printout and asked, “If the yields are so high, why is my efficiency so low?”
Peter studied the report for a moment and then nodded. “Let me show you what’s going on,” he said as he picked up a marker and drew a diagram (see Figure 1).
“This process has 10 separate Read More →

I have to admit the first time I peeked at the academic definition of the Open/Closed Principle, its predicate was surprisingly clear to me. Leaving all of the technical jargon out of the picture, of course, its dictate was pretty much the mantra that we’ve heard so many times before: “Don’t hack the core”.

PHP Dependency Management with Composer
In this article I will introduce you to another great project, Composer. Maybe you’ve experienced the pain of working on a PHP application which uses third-party libraries and then trying to keep them and their dependencies up to date. If so, Composer can soothe your pain.
Composer gets you the libraries you Read More →

Boxing is the process of converting a value type to the type object or to any interface type implemented by this value type. When the CLR boxes a value type, it wraps the value inside a System.Object and stores it on the managed heap. Unboxing extracts the value type from the object. Boxing is implicit; Read More →

Introduction
Heapsort is one of the general sorting algorithms that performs in O(n.log(n)) in the worst-case, just like merge sort and quicksort, but sorts in place – as quicksort. Although quicksort’s worst-case sorting time is O(n2) it’s often considered that it beats other sorting algorithms in practice. Thus in practice quicksort is “faster” than heapsort. In Read More →

Overview of the WAV Format
The Waveform Audio File Format, also known as WAVE or WAV, is a Microsoft file format standard for storing digital audio data. A WAV file is composed of a set of chunks of different types representing different sections of the audio file. You can envision the format as an HTML page: Read More →

In today’s world with so many third-party integrations and content-sharing, it’s important to understand and make use of protocols like SCP and SFTP. PHP’s SSH2 extension, a wrapper for libssh2 which implements the SSH2 protocol, provides several functions you can use to securely transfer files.
To begin leveraging these functions, it’s obvious the SSH2 package needs Read More →

Introduction
In software engineering, a design patterns are general reusable solutions to a software design problems you find again and again in a real life software development. Patterns are not a finished design that can be transformed directly into your code. They are only formal description or template how to solve specific problem. Patterns are best Read More →

MySQL implements UNION, but does not directly implement INTERSECTION or DIFFERENCE.
INTERSECTION is just an INNER JOIN on all columns:
drop table if exists a,b;
create table a(i int,j int);
create table b like a;
insert into a values(1,1),(2,2);
insert into b values(1,1),(3,3);
select * from a join b using(i,j);
+------+------+
| i    |    j |
+------+------+
| 1    |    1  Read More →

I've had a couple of emails recently about the excellent Stanford Machine Learning and AI online classes, so I thought I'd put up the odd post or two on some of the techniques they cover, and what they might look like in PHP.
The second lecture of the ML class jumps into a simple, but often Read More →

We’re told that foreign key constraints are the best way to enforce logical referential integrity (RI) in SQL, preventing rows from becoming orphaned.  But then we learn that the enforcement of foreign keys incurs a significant performance overhead.1,2
MySQL allows us to set FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 to disable enforcement of RI when the overhead is too high.  But if Read More →

I have used pivot query for monthly report..
My table is like this:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS attendance (
empID int(11) NOT NULL,
date date NOT NULL,
deptID int(11) NOT NULL,
attStatus varchar(3) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (empID,date)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
For monthly attendance report, I have used this query:
SELECT empID,

I have a very simple table with three data columns: Date1, Report_#, Name. I would like to pivot it around Date and the various names as the header tab, and have all the report numbers appear below.

So it would LOOK like this:
Report | Date | Name Read More →

From table tbl( class, member ), you want to cross-tabulate all classes with their members. In SQL terms, you aggregate members over classes. In MySQL:

SELECT class,GROUP_CONCAT(member)
FROM tbl
GROUP BY class;

With that simple query, you're halfway toward cross-tabulation, halfway to implementing a simple CUBE, and halfway to basic entity-attribute-value (EAV) logic. This is easier to see if we have two columns, Read More →