Author Archives: Tech Admin

Quick Notes On Google Adsense Sidebar Widget for WordPress

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Adsense on WordPressIn my earlier post, I contributed my updated version to Google Adsense Sidebar Widget on WordPress based on  previous work by Mike Smullin. I received some comments about errors in implementing the widget. This weekend, as I mentioned earlier, I decided to take further investigation to know the root cause of the malfunction.

I compared two references i could find. The first is right from the dashboard of my Google Adsense publisher account and the later is Google’s documentation for Adsense API. There should be another reference from Mike Smullin’s own work but since he’s now charging for the plugin, I’d better have someone send me the plugin to be analyzed and synchronized with my update.

After reading the documentation and  toying with my account, I’d like to provide some notes regarding google adsense implementation:

1. Google Adsense API

This API provides programmatical way to modify and manage the ads. It uses SOAP web service with available callbacks listed in its published WSDL. The API will enable a user to manage his adsense account without logging in into his Google Adsense account. Instead, the third party application communicates with Google server to update the modification executed by user while utilizing the application.

However, WordPress widget expects simple configuration values for each of the widget. Rearchitecting existing widget to support SOAP communication is a bit out-of-boundary and redundant. I’ll explain this in the subsequent point. Continue reading →

Querying XML Documents, Revisiting Existing Languages and Methodologies

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XMLThese days in the web 2.0 era, we are using XML extensively. We use xml on our browser, to represent the hypertext. We use xml in our most recent MS Word documents. We use XML in web services. We use XML in our AJAX applications. To the bigger scale, the enterprise, we also use XML in the service oriented architecture implementation.We fall onto XML as our first choice for universal data format. And also databases?

As a plain text data representation, XML should incur extra overhead for the size and processing time. Indexing XML documents is also another issue, not to mention providing relational data on top of XML documents. Building pure XML database is non-trivial, hence we hardly find implementation for such. However, given all the disadvantages of utilizing XML as the database, is it still possible to do basic database functionality for XML documents?

Fortunately, the answer is yes.

I provide a paper containing my survey to existing approaches to querying XML documents and achieving database functionality over XML documents. Although the structure of the paper may be inclined to academic domain, i think it will still be useful for developer who is looking for quick hindsight for such matter.

You can download the paper from the link below:

XML Query Processing and Query Languages: A Survey (3947 downloads )

How Deep Will The Global Economy In Turmoil Bring Impact To IT Sector?

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Stock falling deeply - photo by ReutersLast week was a global disaster for stock market. As you might have seen in the news broadcast, it was totally red for worldwide stock markets. Not only Wallstreet, European and Asian indexes also plunged deeply until the final day of transaction last weekend. Only gloom and fear (and maybe some tantrum and mutter) occupied the trade floor.

Nobody can assure when the trend will turn around to the positive track and stock markets make their comeback. Although the stocks have showed the rebound today, I’ll stay skeptical and be very prudent to say it’s the end of the negative slope.

One thing for sure, continuous stock decline brings harm to the industries. It’s easily explainable that falling stock price is associated with less bright future of a company and it makes sense that investors are unlikely to invest the capital in a business that gives nothing in return. However, the fallacy of a single company in many cases will only bring impact to a smaller scale. When the decline is massive and global, the issue will be shifted to the impact to national economy and when it involves the big-giant nations, turbulence in their economies will also affect world’s future economy prospect. It’s pretty understandable to see how this issue has forced global leaders to march up and set up the paces, reinforce together and discuss viable solution to this crisis. Continue reading →

Installing MS Office 2003/XP On Windows Vista – Tips and Tricks

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Office 2007 to 2003This might be an old trick but i hope it will still help some people who failed their effort installing MS Office 2003 on Windows Vista.

For some reasons, MS Office 2007 might not suit you so that you decide to downgrade, uninstall MS Office 2007 and revert back to MS Office 2003. If you’re Windows XP user, the downgrade process should go smoothly without staggering problem. However some Vista users may experience difficulties during the installation and need to resort for solution that works on their operating system.

There are some occasions for the installation to take place. First is if you want to install several versions of MS Office on the same system. For example, you want to install MS Office 2003 along with the newer Windows 2007. Microsoft have already written  technical explanation on how to achieve this.  You can read the whole article here. The gist of the article is to install MS Office in subsequent order from the oldest to the newer one. In case you want to install MS Office XP, 2003, and 2007 on the same machine, you should install MS Office XP first followed by Office 2003 and Office Suite 2007 respectively.

Continue reading →