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Archive for June, 2010

What to expect from the Gautrain service

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

I needed to go to Sandton today (Saturday) to drop something off with a friend who lives directly across the road from Sandton City. I decided, having heard so many positive reviews of the gautrain, that I would take the train to see for myself.

I arrived at the Rhodesfield station in Kempton Park at about 08H00. The first thing which struck me was how helpful everybody was, from the moment I arrived at the boom gate to enter the parking lot. I asked the guard about the payment method etc, and he was friendly and helpful.

Once I got into the building I was greeted by more friendly staff who help you with the purchase process. I have no doubt they are not permanent fixtures, being there only to aid and assist in the initial periods. But they were so friendly and very helpful.

I got my card and went to wait on the platform for the train. Either through sheer luck, or efficiency of the service, the train arrived within about 2 minutes of me having arrived on the platform (the same was true on my return journey).

The stations as a whole are very clean and neat. The trains even more so. Carpeted isles and padded seats. The only problem is that it does not have overhead hand rails if you want to stand. I guess they don’t want people to stand, but if you’ve been on other undergrounds during peak times you’ll know that that’s not really practical.

The view is certainly different. Its not exactly a beautiful view, we’re still just in Johannesburg, but its a view that you wouldn’t normally get to see, particularly at the Marlboro Station, being raised as high as it is.

Having arrived at Sandton a few minutes later I got off the train and headed to the exit. I try to stay fit, so I try to avoid escalators and lifts. I didn’t however realise just how deep the station was. Its not that deep that I’d discourage you from taking the stairs, its just that you shouldn’t start at the bottom of the stairwell in a sprint like I did. By the time I got the the last level I was just about dragging myself up by the hand rail.

From the station its a 5 minute walk into Sandton City.

On the trip back, the driver announced that we were traveling at a speed of 160Kms/hours (100 Miles / hour if my conversion is anything to go by). It honestly felt more like 80kms / hour. The ride is just that smooth. When I arrived back at Rhodesfield just after 10H00, the queue for tickets was really long,  going right out of the door. Good thing I’m an early riser!

The trip was really amazing. I’ll certainly be using the service more, particularly when the Pretoria lines open. Also, with SANRAL now tolling just about every piece of highway the can lay claim to, I’m sure it will be far more economical than road travel. Of course, the 5 or 10 minute walks to and from stations will do your health the world of good too.

Gautrain Improvements I’d Like to See

In spite of it being an already great service, I think there are one or two small thing they can do to drastically improve the service.

1) Allow users to register online. If we could register online, and enter the gautrain card number on our profile, we could view our account balances, add funds online etc. This would be a great feature. When I got back to Rhodesfield at about 10H00, they queues for people loading funds were out the door. If I could add funds myself online, I could avoid the queues and walk straight to the platform

2) Better signage. The signs at Gautrain are a little lacking. Its not obvious when you get onto the platform where you need to stand for which line. Its also not very clear which cars you need to get into (some cars are reserved for airport use). There are loads of gautrain employees to assist at the moment, but in peak times they can’t help everyone.

3)The Sandton station should have clear signs to get to Sandton City. It would in fact be much better if they could add an entrance directly opposite to the current one as I suspect (without having done any investigation), that that would put you onto the road running directly past Sandton City.

4) Better travel plans. Their weekly pass is not really cheaper than their daily rate. The reason I say that is because their weekly pass gives you 14 trips. I know that that is 7 days return, which is a weekly pass, but they should consider having a weekday weekly pass. Its quite conceivable that people would want to travel to work, Monday to Friday, but not over the weekends.

Quotes Overheard on the Train

I overheard one or two comments on the train (not that I was trying to listen in…. ok, maybe a little).

  • One person was taking his family (mother, father, uncles, whatever) to Sandton. He works in Sandton and now uses the train to work. He was so proud of the service that he was bragging about it like it was all his idea. At one point he said, “dit maak my so trots op Suid Afrika” (“It makes me so proud of South Africa”). Ditto!
  • Another lady was there with her husband and the two cutest little girls. The one girl was so excited when we went “under the tunnel”, and even when we were “over the tunnel” (the ramp up to the Marlboro Station). At the Marlboro Station, there was a train next to us on the other line. This lady looked at some of the people in the next train and said, “Oh, look, they’ve already got the London Underground look on their faces!”. I guess the novelty has worn off for some, or, perhaps they just express their excitement in a different way. (PS, her husband had a decent looking camera and had taken a fair number of pics. I asked him to mail me some which he said he would do, so I’ll post them here once I get them).

Advice for First Timers

The best advice I guess is just go and see it for yourselves. As I mentioned, at about 10H00, the ticket queues are long, so get there early, before 08H30 if you can. Even if you don’t use the service then, just load money onto your card so when you do use it, you just walk in.

Listen to the comments on the train. I know, I know, its kind of rude to listen to people’s conversations, but this is not exactly a private environment, and I think the positive vibe is well worth getting involved in!

If you have any pics, stories or comments / improvement suggestions, please feel free to post here.

See you on the train!

Gautrain Arrival

Gautrain Arrival

Rhodesfield Gautrain Station

Rhodesfield Gautrain Station

Gautrain Rhodesfield Station Platform

Gautrain Rhodesfield Station Platform

Kempton Park Power Station

Kempton Power Station

Rhodesfield Station

Rhodesfield Station

 


 

Protect your PHP code by obfuscating it!

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

The ionCube PHP Encoder makes it easy to protect your PHP files from easy observation, theft and change. With optional licensing features built in, licensing your scripts to control which server your code runs on is easy too, and you can even give your files a time expiry!

Available in three versions, Basic, Pro and Cerberus, all versions offer bytecode PHP encoding plus optional encryption of non-PHP files. Pro and Cerberus also include the optional PHP licensing features for time expiry and restricting where code can be used, allowing licensing models to be effectively and easily implemented.

The PHP Encoder is available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Intel OS X. All versions offer command line access for encoding and creating license files (Pro and Cerberus), which is ideal if you wish to automate processing. The Windows Encoder also includes an easy to use GUI, and the Windows Pro and Cerberus version includes a Linux based license generator for PHP scripts for FREE, which is great if you wish to encode on Windows and create license files from a Linux based web server for example.

Encoded files run on a wide range of operating systems such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and more.

Encoding BenefitsAs PHP scripts can be easily read, changed and run on any PHP enabled system, encoding PHP offers important benefits:

Product Developers: protect and license your code before distribution. Ideal for protecting evaluation copies, the low once only purchase cost can quickly deliver a significant return on investment from increased sales.

Website Designers: protect your creative work and a revenue stream from future script updates.

Enterprise Customers: successfully enforce internal change control policies by avoiding untracked software tweaks that may get lost on a site reinstall or server move.

Website Owners: hide sensitive data and protect scripts from unauthorised changes that may go unnoticed indefinitely and be a serious security and data protection risk.

Example of code

Here is a section of code from an index.php file

=========================================================================================================

START OF PHP CODE

=========================================================================================================

<?php
session_start();
include(“./includes/Functions.inc”);
include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"].”/includes/Variables.inc”);
?>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head><title><?php print GetTitleTag(“1″); ?></title>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<meta name=”description” content=”<?php print GetMetaDescription(“1″); ?>”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”<?php print GetMetaKeywords(“1″); ?>”>

=========================================================================================================

END OF PHP CODE

=========================================================================================================

and here is the encoded code segment

=========================================================================================================

START OF PHP CODE

=========================================================================================================

<?php //003ac
if(!extension_loaded(‘ionCube Loader’)){$__oc=strtolower(substr(php_uname(),0,3));$__ln=’ioncube_loader_’.$__oc.’_’.substr(phpversion(),0,3).(($__oc==’win’)?’.dll’:’.so’);@dl($__ln);if(function_exists(‘_il_exec’)){return _il_exec();}$__ln=’/ioncube/’.$__ln;$__oid=$__id=realpath(ini_get(‘extension_dir’));$__here=dirname(__FILE__);if(strlen($__id)>1&&$__id[1]==’:'){$__id=str_replace(‘\\’,'/’,substr($__id,2));$__here=str_replace(‘\\’,'/’,substr($__here,2));}$__rd=str_repeat(‘/..’,substr_count($__id,’/')).$__here.’/';$__i=strlen($__rd);while($__i–){if($__rd[$__i]==’/'){$__lp=substr($__rd,0,$__i).$__ln;if(file_exists($__oid.$__lp)){$__ln=$__lp;break;}}}@dl($__ln);}else{die(‘The file ‘.__FILE__.” is corrupted.\n”);}if(function_exists(‘_il_exec’)){return _il_exec();}echo(‘Site error: the file <b>’.__FILE__.’</b> requires the ionCube PHP Loader ‘.basename($__ln).’ to be installed by the site administrator.’);exit(199);

?>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=========================================================================================================

END OF PHP CODE

=========================================================================================================

Best of all, if someone tries to change your code, even the comments sections, the code won’t run. We use it on our freeware easyCMSlite, free, east content management project

To find out more about PHP code encryption click the link. There is a demo version that you can download!

ionCube PHP  Encoder

 


 

Make Money From Your Blog or Website

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Many people wonder how they can make money from their website or blog. If you’ve ever asked the question how to make money then here is a proposal to monetize your website.

We at PHP-Web-Host.com have an affiliate program which allows you to place a link on your website to us, and, if someone purchases a web hosting package through that link, you will earn a commission. To see how much commissions you may earn, take a look at our Affiliate Program page.

How does it work?

You sign up at the link above as an affiliate. This will generate a unique affiliate id for you. You then use this link as either a plain text link in your website, or you use the code with an image which we provide.

We also write a cookie to the web surfers browser which will track any sales up to a year after they clicked through from your site. In other words, if someone clicks on a banner on your site today, but they only make a purchase next 10 months later, you will still earn a commission, EVEN though they don’t go through your link when they actually make the purchase.

Some examples of the banner links are below. You are welcome to request more colors or sizes, or just check back at the affiliate’s page as we do add new image links from time to time:

Affiliate Program Link 1

Affiliate Program Link 2

Affiliate Program Link 3

You will notice that we have a variety of banners. For instance, if you are targetting UK based traffic, you can use the versions which point to www.php-web-host.co.uk and show prices in pounds. You can also show international banners with $ and the .com domain name, as well as choose different colours and sizes.

Joining the affiliate program is absolutely free, and its instant. You sign up and are immediately able to start earning commissions.

Go ahead, Sign Up Now!

 


 

Your own fully editable website using WordPress

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Do you need a website that’s good looking, quick to set up, fully editable by you, the non-technical web user, and, a site that is as cheap as our cheapest hosting package?

Try WordPress (this blog is a WordPress blog). So, in our opening paragraph we promised you it was for non technical users. Here’s how:

Register for your hosting account with us. You can see on the web hosting pages that this is very cheap if you register for the 500mb package. Once you have registered, you will receive an email with all of your hosting details, including your cpanel user name and password.

Log into cpanel and select fantastico. From the fantastico page, you can select to install a WordPress blog. This will automatically install your wordpress blog, ready for you to use. But, if you want to make it look a little nicer, log into your WordPress admin panel. Click on Appearance –> Add New Themes.

From that menu, you can select a theme of your choice. There are hundreds, if not thousands of templates to choose from. Click on the install link in your chosen theme, and that’s it!

To see what a blog with a theme looks like, take a look at http://www.getfitloseweight.info. This website was setup and “themed” within about 1 hour. The discussion boards there were also set up within about an hour, also using the fantastico installer in cpanel.

Should you wish to do something like this, but you are not sure how, please contact us using the links in the navigation menu above…

 


 

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