Month: June 2008 (page 4 of 7)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This one came to me as real-world spam, and it has a cloying kind of plausibility to it:

Hmm… That’s almost kindasorta a good idea, isn’t it? Laptop in the car? Maybe not so much. Wi-Fi-enabled PDF? They’re out there, but the iPhone.2 is going to EDGE every other hand-held device to the sidelines. In fact, both types of iPhones are Wi-Fi-enabled, but we know that Wi-Fi is going to be Wi-ped out within a few years.

Even so… Let’s go to the videotape:

I don’t actually hate this idea, but the pitch to the consumer boils down to this: “Your Realtor is too lazy to service your flyer box, so let’s sell him a high-tech gimmick so he can express his laziness in a different way.” I like the idea of doing more to sell listings, but I hate every variety of the brains-not-included plug-n-chug solution.

But that’s as may be. How much does it cost for an effectioNet.com eLapTopTour web site?

Holy cow! They might be plug-n-chug, but they’re cheap: $65, $85 or $95.

But wait. As Tom Waits says, “The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” Witness:

effectioNet’s pricing schedule is very simple: we lease the device for a fee of $50 per month.[…]

We do require a $150 deposit, fully refundable on return of the device intact, and, we offer a 6 month minimum lease.

The program works on a first month’s lease of $50 + $150 deposit. Then an auto deduction will be taken each month for the balance of the term. We take PayPal and/or all major credit cards.

Townes Van Zandt said, “If you want good friends, they’re gonna cost you,” and effectioNet’s affections are going to run you $365 minimum. Per listing. What will you have at the end of your six month minimum lease? Fond memories.

So let’s say this is demi-semi-sorta plausible. The idea behind the product is kind of half-baked, especially since we already know how to do much better single-property websites than this plug-and-chug upchuck. If we’re committed to the idea but not the execution, what might work better instead?

You can buy new-in-box Mac Minis for $600 Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is not ProjectBloodhound material, at least not first semester stuff. But if you find yourself running into highly structured data — such as the reports from a spreadsheet or a database application — you have the ability to easily manipulate that data in PHP.

This is a simple example, but you don’t have to limit yourself to doing simple things. Imagine a data structure like this:

Name[tab]Phone Number
Cathleen Collins[tab]602-369-9275
Greg Swann[tab]602-740-7531

In the file the code shown here as “[tab]” would be an actual tab character, and this kind of data goes by the arcane name of: A tab-delimited file.

Most programming languages were written by exacting people with abstract and elegant reasons for everything they did. PHP was written by overbooked programmers who needed to pound out new web pages as quickly as possible.

In consequence, PHP is optimized for dealing with highly structured data. Here is a short program that will take a tab-delimited phone number file as input and output reformatted phone numbers into the HTML stream. In other words, this code could produce a dynamically-updated phone list in what what might otherwise be a static web page:

<?PHP
auto_detect_line_endings;

$fi = fopen("PhoneNums.txt","r");
$line = fgets ($fi, 4096); // throw away fieldDef line

echo ("<b>Phone Numbers</b><br>");

while (!feof($fi))
    {
    $line = fgets ($fi, 4096);

    list ($Name, $Phone_Number) = explode ("\t", $line);

    if ($Name)
        {
        echo ("$Phone_Number <i>($Name)</i><br>");
        }
    }

fclose ($fi);
?>

There is one line that makes all the difference for this kind of work:

    list ($Name, $Phone_Number) = explode ("\t", $line);

The stuff between the parenthesis are our known field names, and we’re using them as variable names for clarity’s sake. The explode function will create an array of separate fields from the text stored in the $line variable, splitting the fields on the tab character. The list function then inherits the array just created by explode and assigns each field to the appropriate field name variables. We only have two fields Read more