Author Archives: Tech Admin

How Do You Interpret “Learning Curve”?

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I was stumbled on a product description page when I read this phrase:

The learning curve is short.

If above phrase seems normal for you, it’s not for me. I’m a bit puzzled when reading different usages of “learning curve” with different adjectives prefixing it. I think people must have gone with their own definitions and no single consensus of “learning curve” interpretation exists.

Since there is a word “curve” in the term, I think the interpretation is mathematical and there is correlation with math functions. We also have the word “learning”, hence it implies a process. Everbody knows that a process will yield output based on input taken. Continue reading →

Free PHP Open Source Ecommerce Shopping Carts – Reviews and Prospects

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Being a store owner or company that sell goods or products to customers will usually make you think how to maintain or even increase the sales. One viable solution is by selling online. By putting products on the internet, products will be exposed to larger audience and there will be bigger chance to improve the sales. There is traditional merchants that help people selling products like eBay. Using eBay service, after registering you can simply put your homepage and start selling. However, with more various products and goods you offer and more control you need over your sales, hosting and operating your own shopping cart can be a better solution.

This article will provide comparisons among different popular shopping carts software available on the internet. As every businessman tends to minimize operational cost, only free open source ecommerce shopping carts will be compared and reviewed. The scope is also narrowed to PHP based shopping carts as most budget-wise hostings support PHP.

There are some free carts offered on the net but not so many are popular. Here, we’ll discuss 4 free shopping carts worth considering. The list includes osCommerce, ZenCart, VirtueMart, and Magento. To give you some idea about the popularity of these carts, let’s use data from Google Trends:

Google trends for some php open source shopping carts
Recent Google trends for some PHP Shopping Carts

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Will Joomla 1.5 Attract Joomla 1.0 Users To Migrate? (Joomla 1.5 May Fail)

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Joomla 1.5 RC4

Last week, PC World named Windows Vista as the Biggest Tech Disappointment of 2007. On Wednesday, December 19th, 2007, Joomla 1.5 RC4 which is supposed to be the latest RC before the first stable released was announced to public. These two events may not be related but I’d like to write some concern regarding how Joomla 1.5, just like Windows Vista, might become the anticlimax despite its nice features.

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PHP 4.4.8 Release: PHP 4 End of Life and PHP 5 Future Forecast

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PHP logoFinally PHP 4 is approaching its end of life. With the upcoming PHP 4.4.8 release, development on PHP 4 will be officially stopped. No more release will be shipped to end user. This is not very fresh news since this has been announced on php.net since July 2007.

Conquering Reluctancy To Upgrade

As open source project, PHP has enjoyed its growth through the support of its enthusiasts, name them web hosts and application developers, not to mention the wide use from end-users. Referring to Google Trends, PHP scores the second lagging behind java as the most queried programming languages. This comparison is taken as simple as possible, neglecting the most appropriate functional environment of each language.

Programming language queries on Google Trends

Although the trend can’t lead us into final conclusion on the future of PHP, it’s interesting that just like other programming languages, PHP trend is negative. This may lead to additional question whether PHP still keeps or expands its audience or starts losing its grip.

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Comprehensive Solution For Joomla Admin Session Problem After Upgrading To Joomla 1.0.13

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Joomla logoJoomla 1.0.12 was known to have security problem so that Joomla users were urged to upgrade their Joomla to Joomla 1.0.13. For some users, upgrading went smoothly. However, others reported that there was problem with Joomla administrator login. It forced them to logout immediately after entering Joomla admin panel. Message found was either “Invalid Login”, “Admin Session Expired”, or “You need to login”. Did you also experience this issue? This article may help you explaining why it occured and alternative solutions available.

Active Session Id Verification in Joomla 1.0.13

If you follow Joomla development and compare how Joomla admin authentication works, you will notice that Joomla 1.0.13 implements internal active session id verification for the administrator login. This change prevents session fixation attempt and add more security to joomla authentication by ensuring current session id used is still active and uses Joomla’s session namespace.

However, Joomla 1.0.13 was shipped with broken session handler for administrator authentication. A new session namespace and id were generated when somebody pressed buttons other than “save” and “task” even if the session was not expired yet. Consequently, user experienced forced logout.

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