2. Select ”Services”’ on the left hand side.

3. Under Services, click on the ”Add Custom Service” button.

4. Fill in the details as depicted below, click ”Apply” and then ”Select”.

5. Under the Inbound Services, click the ”Add” button.

6. Complete the form as below. The Send to Lan Server is the interal IP of the machine you wish to remote control. Click ”Apply”.

7. Select Dynamic DNS and fill in your DynDNS details (or similar provider).

You can now connect via Windows Remote Desktop to the selected machine by using Dynamic DNS host name.

Please ensure that you have enabled Remote Desktop on the workstation / server.

Please note that this these functions only validate the structure of email address or URL strings, they don’t check if the associated domains actually exist. To obtain a list of all available filters on your system, use the results from the filter_list() function:

<?php
 
  foreach (filter_list() as $filter)
  {
    echo $filter . "\n";
  }
 
?>

The code above will result in output similar to:

int
boolean
float
validate_regexp
validate_url
validate_email
validate_ip
string
stripped
encoded
special_chars
unsafe_raw
email
url
number_int
number_float
magic_quotes
callback

PHP‘s filter_* functions provide three basic filtering methods:

Validate – Check that data is in the exact format that it should be (e.g. FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL).

Sanitize – Clean the data by removing, escaping or encoding invalid characters (e.g. FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL).

Flags – Set options for all or specific filters (e.g. FILTER_FLAG_ALLOW_HEX and / or min_range, max_range, etc).

Usage examples:

To validate an email address:

<?php
 
  $email_address = 'willem@geekology..co....za';
 
  (filter_var($email_address, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL))
    ? $result = "Valid email address"
    : $result = "Invalid email address";
 
  echo $result;
 
?>

To sanitize an email address:

<?php
 
  $email_address = 'willem@geekology.co. za';
 
  echo filter_var($email_address, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
 
?>

To validate a URL:

<?php
 
  $url = 'http://www.geekology..co....za';
 
  (filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL))
    ? $result = "Valid URL"
    : $result = "Invalid URL";
 
  echo $result;
 
?>

To sanitize a URL:

<?php
 
  $url = 'http://www.geekology.co. za';
 
  echo filter_var($url, FILTER_SANITIZE_URL);
 
?>

To sanitize a string:

<?php
 
  $string = "hfgsd" . chr(9) . chr(128) . "535";
 
  echo filter_var($string, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
 
?>

To validate an integer within a specified range:

<?php
 
  $integer = 132;
 
  (filter_var($integer, FILTER_VALIDATE_INT,
    array('options'=>
      array('min_range'=>1,
            'max_range'=>10)
      )
    ))
    ? $result = "Valid integer"
    : $result = "Invalid integer";
 
  echo $result;
 
?>

To validate an array of values:

<?php
 
  $values = array('name'=>'willem van zyl',
                  'age'=>25,
                  'email'=>'willem@geekology.co. za');
 
  $filters = array('name'=>array('filter'=>FILTER_CALLBACK,
                                 'options'=>'ucwords'),
                   'age'=>array('filter'=>FILTER_VALIDATE_INT,
                                'options'=>array('min_range'=>1, 'max_range'=>120)),
                   'email'=>FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
 
  print_r(filter_var_array($values, $filters));
 
?>

More information on PHP‘s filter_* functions and their filters / flags can be found here.

Follow the steps below to setup ”Blacklisting” or ”Whitelisting” in Cpanel:

1.  Open your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome).

2.  In your address bar type: http://www.(yourdomain).co.za/cpanel

3.  Enter your username and password.

4.  On the home page, under the ”Mail” tab, select the ”SpamAssasin” icon.

5.  Click on the ”Enable SpamAssassin” icon.

6.  Click on the ”Configure SpamAssassin” icon.

7.  You may now ”Blacklist” or ”Whitelist” specific email addresses.

8.  Enter all email addresses that you are wanting to ”Blacklist” or ”Whitelist”.

9.  Click on ”save”.

“phpThumb() uses the GD library to create thumbnails from images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, etc) on the fly. The output size is configurable (can be larger or smaller than the source), and the source may be the entire image or only a portion of the original image. True color and resampling is used if GD v2.0+ is available, otherwise paletted-color and nearest-neighbour resizing is used. ImageMagick is used wherever possible for speed. Basic functionality is available even if GD functions are not installed (as long as ImageMagick is installed).” – http://phpthumb.sourceforge.net

phpThumb allows for the following functionality:

• A watermark image or text can be applied over the thumbnail in one of 10 positions or tiled.
• A border or frame can be applied.
• Thumbnails can be a fixed dimension regardless of source aspect ratio and background filled with configurable color. Border corners can optionally be rounded (independant horizontal & vertical radius).
• Unsharp Mask sharpening.
• Alpha channel mask from mask file.
• Auto Contrast / Levels.
• Bevel edge.
• Add Blur.
• Change Brightness.
• Colorize.
• Alter Contrast.
• Drop shadow.
• Edge Detect
• Flip Horizontal / Vertical.
• Change Gamma
• Grayscale Images.
• Mean Removal
• Negative Color
• Reduce Color Depth
• Rounded Corners
• Saturation
• Sepia
• Smooth
• Threshold
• White Balance

There is a nice demo site where you can see what can be done with phpThumb here.

Using phpThumb to create dynamic thumbnail images

Lets say we are building a portfolio website for a photographer and our client wants the ability for new uploaded photos to be automatically displayed on the front page. The client wants visitors to be able to click on the image thumbnail and view the original image in high quality, but he does not want to create seperate thumbnail images for every photo he uploads.

Step 1: Installing phpThumb

Installing is a bit of a strong word, pretty much all you need is to do is go to http://phpthumb.sourceforge.net/, download the phpThumb library, extract it, and move it to a “phpThumb” folder in your site’s root folder.

Step 2: Setting up the htaccess file

Create a sub folder in the images directory, for this exercise the folder we will be creating is called “gallery”.

We now have a www.yoursite.com/phpthumb and a www.yoursite.com/images/gallery folder on the server; the “/phpthumb” directory contains your phpThumb library and the “/images/gallery” folder contains a bunch of images we want to have thumbnails generated for.

Next, we update the htaccess file to allow for “clean” URLs. Open the .htaccess file in your site root in an editor and add the following lines:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  # turn mod_rewrite on:
  RewriteEngine On
  # create an url path for thumbnails with a width of 200 pixels
  RewriteRule ^images/gallery/thumbs/(.*)$ /phpthumb/phpThumb.php?src=images/gallery/$1&w=200&aoe=1
</IfModule>

What this will do is cause Apache to “rewrite” URL requests from www.yoursite.com/images/gallery/thumbs/[some_image_file] to the phpThumb library at www.yoursite.com/phpthumb/phpThumb.php with the actual image path attached as a GET variable.

Once you have made the neccessary changes to the htaccess file, you can upload an image to your /images/gallery folder. For testing purposes we will upload a file named “test.jpg”, a 2000px by 2000px photo.

Open your browser and go to www.yoursite.com/images/gallery/thumb/test.jpg, you should see a thumbnail of test.jpg with a width of 200 pixels.

This means that we can now just use the thumbnail URL (images/gallery/thumb) for the thumbnails and the normal URL (images/gallery) for viewing the original images.

Final Thoughts

You can do a lot more than just resize images using phpThumb, take a look at the Parameter List at http://phpthumb.sourceforge.net/demo/docs/phpthumb.readme.txt and see for yourself.

phpThumb has the ability to overlay other images, crop images, add borders, add shadows, change color tones, and even change the image format between JPEG, GIF, PNG, and (if you have ImageMagick enabled on your server) BMP.

1.  Open the PDF file in Adobe Pro

2.  Click on Advanced in the top menu

3.  Select PDF Optimizer

4.  Set all the DPI fields to 100dpi as shown below

5.  You can also select additional options under ‘Discard User Data’ to safely reduce the file size

6.  Click OK

7.  Save the file under a new file name when prompted

This method will safely reduce a PDF file size without noticeably reducing the quality. One can reduce the file size further by lowering quality settings or further reducing the DPI but a drop in quality will be noticed