Blessed with a girl baby

It's been quite long time since I last blogged... and for the sake of blogging/record, Heleena and myself are blessed with a wonderful girl baby on February 21, 2008

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Interview question #1

Since I have been asked to interview experienced PHP programmers, I was preparing few interview questions. I came to know, most of the people ask questions found in the Internet; most of them are like "What is the function used to connect MySQL DB in PHP". Personally, I don't like these types of questions; I'd thought the person must apply ideas what he was taught in colleges--finally I came out with one question: A product vendor has Quantity Vs. Price data like 1 -> Rs. 50 2 -> Rs. 95 3 -> Rs. 140 .... like upto 1 million data. He wants a system, which gives the price when the quantity is provided. For example, if you provide the quantity value as 2, then it should provide Rs. 95. How this system can be designed? As expected, all the people said about using database tables and quering on quantity. I have asked them to find out a system which doesn't use databases--provided the accuracy of the system may not be 100%--it may give at least 90% ac...

Interview question #2

This is related to PHP's array . An array has number of elements. All elements are integers and unique, which means there is no repetitive integers. (e.g.) $foo = array(7, 5, 9, 13, 2, 8); You have to sort the array, provided: You should scan the elements only once. You're not allowed to compare the elements when sorting. (i.e., you're not supposed to use any comparison operators) Sorted resultant array may not be the source array. How will you do that?

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah

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