₦airaland Forum

guysophi,

Either the igbo i smoked this morning never clear me for eye or nigerian sites really hate me. The URL u posted doesn't work. Perhaps you meant http://www.businesseyeng.com/ ?

I was able to find the above link thanks to google. If the site I gave above is the right one, then in the future, please verify links to make sure they work before posting.

What say you?

sounds like a case of either:

1) Bobo is still living in the pre-NIPOST era, or

2) It is his "take style" way of saying either he can't afford one or he doesn't want you to do the site, for whatever reason.

Be that as it may, if and when you get a chance to chat with the guy again, present to him, "exhibits A and B": http://www.nigerianbar.org/ and http://www.banwo-ighodalo.com/

See what he says after showing him the 2 aforementioned sites. Then charge him with contempt of a webmaster

As it the case with all things Nigeria(n), there is probably no law against discriminating people on the grounds of sex, religion, age, race, etc unlike in other parts of the world. As weird and odd as asking for age may sound, they are probably within the limits of Nigerian law, so as hard as it is for me to say, I personally see nothing wrong with that qualification.

Personally, I don't see how a 20 year old, who probably just graduated from university could qualify as a lead. Being a lead/senior developer comes from years of experience (and I am not talking 2 or 3) and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how smart you are or your CGPA. So unless Nigerians are graduating at the age of 15, that is the only part where I disagree with respect to the age qualification. Having said that, being 30 doesn't imply that one is an adult, coding-wise. For some, their "coding eyes" jus dey open at that age.

Okay, I am off my soap box now

leoleo,

YIM me at udotot25. Even if I am online, leave an IM nonetheless. I will give you all the information you need from there.

Thanks,

In addition to what Kobo has said:

It is possible that you didn't purposely intend to divide by zero. There is probably a condition you haven't accounted for in your code which raised this flag at this particular time. I would modify the code to include a try-catch block. That way, if the condition ever arises again, your code can crash gracefully. Depending on what version of PHP you are using, this should be available to you.

Also look at the "@" (error supressor) symbol. WARNING: This only suppresses error messages but not error detection. Only use this if you are 100% certain that your program can proceed as usual even if a divide-by-zero does occur.


I hope this helps.

This is not about being paranoid Ok,This is Nigeria !If only you know the Millions of Naira NECO,WAEC and JAMB makes from their scratch cards i guess you would have a different opinion

tundewoods:
Probably not. Read the 2 mottos up top again. Also, I am not saying those who would need 3rd-party access would be getting the data for free. They still pay per transaction. I once worked on a project that enables Georgia drivers to renew their licenses online (https://services.georgia.gov/dmvs/splash.jsp). The company I worked for at the time charged 25 cents per transaction. Pretty small amount. However, multiply that by the millions of drivers and it adds up. NECO/WAEC could so same. Then the site that wants access could pay WAEC/NECO, say, 50kobo per transaction then turn around, transfer the cost to the user and charge the user N1 per transaction.

Why would anyone be willing to go through that school's website as opposed to NECO/WAEC's directly? For the same reason some choose to go to Mr. Biggs (more expensive) over cooking at home (cheaper) - convenience.

THIS IS NIGERIA and am saying it again that WAEC & NECO will not let a second or third party access its database based on the simple fact that a great percentage of Nigerians will edit the result of his/her grandmother's-nephew's aunt's junior brother's result to allow him get admission easily

broadcode:
based on your argument above, one could also argue that by allowing my former employer to access the georgia driver database, that nefarious individuals could have ceased the opportunity to alter adverse drivers records. This hasn't happened to-date, since 1999. Besides, I state again, you don't know what you are saying for a fact. Could you be right? Sure. But you could also be wrong. It's 50-50. Similarly, I haven't heard anything bad happen with respect to flashcash, etc.

Let's not let the "This is Nigeria" bug bite and infect us. Again, there are many things which people said couldn't be done in Nigeria but which are thriving now. Let's think positively please.

tundewoods (and all others with a similar viewpoint on this issue),

The current Adidas motto is "Impossible is Nothing". Diaspora or not, just because it may (I stress, "may" because, you do not categorically know for a fact that NECO/WAEC will say no. You are merely speculating. Again, I stress, you don't know this for a fact. Until you go speak to someone there and they indeed say no, making assumptions/statements based on a past experience you may have had with someone else is not the right way to go) not be done doesn't mean it can't be done.

Every organization has the right to be paranoid about who they let access their system. Having said that, if you use the right words, explain things in a way that even a lay man will understand and if you just so happen to speak to the right person and/or someone at NECO/WAEC who is able to see light at the end of the tunnel, you never know what one might accomplish.

Think about it this way - I wasn't in Nigeria when the web dev boom began. However, I am willing to bet that there were those who said it would never succeed because of lack of light, training materials, etc.

Remember, Adidas says, "Impossible is Nothing". Nike says, "Just Do It"

As always, my 2 cents.

naijaking,

and to drill your sabon gari analogy close to home, let me chip in with this proverb, "na only man wey no dey live inside bush dey complain say mosquito dey bite am"

y not finish at least 80% b4 asking us for a review?

Anyways, based on the pages you have (and I use FF):

1) The contact us page is "jumping". I noticed you have a "z" at the top of the page. Take a look at that.

2) When I click "submit", MS outlook opens. Y? It doesn't even appear that you are doing any kind of form validation either.

Fix the above, put up at least 80% more stuff then get back to us

What does landing/not landing on the moon have to do with anything? How will this debate (other than generating massive ad revenue ) help solve our unemployment? how will this debate help install a better house speaker? How will this debate contribute to development of infrastructure back home?

Conspiracy theory or not, I personally believe that if it was indeed a hoax, the Russians (as per the 2 countries were in a cold war at the time) would have been the first to call the US on it, in addition to landing their own man on the moon to disprove/humiliate the US). After all, they did disagree with the US when it came to the existence of WMD in Iraq.

If you visit YouTube, there is also a pretty captivating conspiracy theory about the collapse of the towers on 9/11. I happen not to believe what the film says but must confess that if you are weak-minded, you will fall for it hook, line and sinker. Like the debate of Evolution vs Creation, I believe in creation, by faith, and whatever else I read, I do so with an open mind such that it doesn't shake my belief system.

Since, we are all hung up on landing on the moon, here is another conspiracy theory for you - are you your parents' child? Sure their name is on your birth certificate and you have pictures to prove it. But, can you verify for a 1000% fact that your parents are indeed your parents?

Afam,

I could argue that by allowing access to their DBs, NECO would actually make money in the process:

While I was still at AutoTrader, a similar situation arose where it was argued that by allowing users access to our API via a gadget, we would lose the money we would have made by the user coming directly to the search form (ads-wise). So we came up with a way to monetize the gadget - we logged each call to our data and charged the person accessing our data a nominal fee (I don't know what it was, but it was very small, from what I gathered). Now, per transaction, this amount is small, but when you add, in the case of AutoTrader, millions of hits, it adds up.

Back to NECO, perhaps they could try a similar approach. To me, it all depends on who is saying what to whom. I have discovered that if you can convince a business person they can make money from a venture, they will most likely go for it. I do understand/respect the fact that doing this in the Nigerian context may be the difficult hurdle to overcome though, especially if for instance, NECO doesn't maintain accurate records of their log files.

As always, my 2 cents.

All the issues stated above have passed, but again, using FF, I see the following:

1) contact us page has the "send" button sitting outside a blue border. Why the blue border, out of curiosity?

2) on home page, I would probably center the orange text inside the bubbles. Also consider making the length of the text shorter and put a cap on it. That way, especially if you aren't the one responsible for future updates, it is known up front that the text should not exceed a certain limit and the text is centered.

3) In general, I still suggest that you consider using text where you have images (nav menus for instance) and also make use of CSS rollovers, as opposed to image rollovers

Thanks for keeping us posted. Many of us here on this forum, including yours truly are guilty of not doing so

shamass,

I just visited your site. I must confess, "the site" is quite "impressive". I found "the piece" on your cgi-bin directory to be the best feature. Now tell me, which newspaper appears to be in, "serious crisis"? Which newspaper appears to engage in "moonlighting"?

I didn't say it is not possible to design something like that, but it requires advanced scripting programming efforts on the part of the developer and it wouldn't be cost effective for the school.

broadcode:
At the risk of starting world war 3, I just wanted to say that these issues don't arise. I am not here to argue with you or to show you, "who I am". I, like you (I assume) am here to learn. Please observe:

If WAEC/NECO provide you with an API, including (as is the case with google) sample code on how to use the API, all you have to do is use it. There is nothing advanced there. Also, if you choose the iframe route, you are not doing any programming at all. You are basically providing the URL as the iframe source. All the bandwidth resides on WAEC's/NECO's side. All the code in this case, has already been written by someone else and all you are doing at this point is referencing it via a URL.

Pertaining to it being cost-effective, I dare say that it is cost-effective, especially in the long-run. What would the alternative be for such students? Sure, it may cost millions up front but they would have to look at the long-term benefits, not the short-term costs - students accessing their results via a site they are already familiar with (instead of having to memorize WAEC's/NECO's), potential for making money via ads as there will be more traffic going to that particular page and less overhead costs in terms of hiring staff that would have to answer questions such as, "how do I check my results?" or "what is the web address for WAEC/NECO?" to mention but a few.

Akin:
No need for apologizing. You are the client. Not all clients are IT-savvy. That is where we come in Anyone who blames you for not being IT-savvy deserves a slap from you Again, this is why I said before that requirements-gathering is a must, no matter how small the project. It is our job to get better definitions for what you want. Example: Some time ago, someone approached me and asked me to build them, "a highly interactive" website. Naturally, I thought he meant flash. When I asked him to define what he meant, it turns out all he wanted was a 5-page site with a contact form where potential customers could send him emails, as opposed to copying-and-pasting his email address into an email client

As always, my 2 cents

yep,

I am a very lazy person myself and believe strictly in the dictum of working smart and not hard. I also believe in maintaining libraries of code after each project, from which I copy and paste (as opposed to reinventing the wheel). cPanel gives you the ability to back up your DB. As new as I am to MYSQL/PHP, I have done this before and so know it is possible.

Try that out and get back to us.

Thanks,

Is there a website I can access for this? Will this newspaper be circulated worlwide? Do I have to wait till I get to Nigeria to buy physical copies? I personally would love to see a paper like this as the sites (nigeria stock exchange in particular) that I frequent for stock info crash like almost every other day.

As robby has said, please shed more light.

Thanks,

Yep,

It is indeed VERY[/b]possible folks. Has anyone here heard of [b]WEB SERVICES (SOAP, CORBA, etc)? Of course, WAEC et al would have to provide a way for developers to get at the data. In other words, it is akin to you walking up to Aso Rock and expecting to go straight to the President's toilet. Can it be done? Sure. You might get shot though You need the necessary permissions/to follow protocol. You could also obtain WAEC's API (sort of like the way you can access paypal's system via their API or accessing google Maps via their API).

Another method, though crude, is to use an IFrame. The IFrame source would be the NECO/WAEC website. In other words, though the students in question are on www.xyz.com, the iframe src is actually WAEC/NECO.com. Of course, this whole process is transparent to the user. I have also used this approach before. It was for a real estate site. When you visit the client's site, you see his look-and-feel. However, when you want to search for a house, I inserted an Iframe that points at the Georgia Realtor website. To the user, they are searching for and screening results from my client's site, or so they think To think of it, when you do a map search on google, don't they also provide an iframe for you to include on your website, the source of which is the URL pointing to the mapped results? Hmmm, check it out

Yet another technique, which is where phishing/scraping come in (WARNING: I am not endorsing this particular technique. If you mention my name, I will deny you ). Here, you can view source of the page, see the file that is in the form's action tag, copy that and pass in information via the URL, then spit back results, again, via an iframe. Craigslist used to do this before for their auto section. I know because I was once on a team tasked with finding out sites using up AutoTrader.com's bandwidth by scraping results from their site. I don't know how this would work with pin numbers though. Nonetheless, I am sure that if I put my brain to it, I could figure out a way.

Folks, this is why requirements gathering is paramount. If Akin came to me, my first question would be (like the rhyming ), "Sir, you say a sch wants someone to design pins for her students to access their results at home instead of coming to the schl esp 4 WAEC & NECO". My questions:

1) Are you aware that WAEC/NECO already provide a way to do this via scratch cards? Wouldn't it be a better idea to gain access to their site and/or databases and have the students enter their scratch card pins on our site? Speaking of which:

2) Are you aware that in order to access the WAEC/NECO DB, that you will need permission to do so as these entities need to keep their data secure in order to maintain their integrity? Do you have the necessary permissions/ways (as in code) that I would implement in order to get to their DB? If not, may I suggest we use an iframe?

I know this is kind of long (sorry niyyie ), but nonetheless, I hope this helps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxfEC6RfueE

fash,

and u cdnt even add nairaland to your list. How dare you?

I haven't used SQL Server or Access in a looong time but I would expect them to have some sort of a design window which will enable you to validate your queries. Be that as it may, what I typically do, if this is a web app, is print out the actual query with the values being sent on my pages for verification. Try this.

Also, post the query here. One thing I have learnt in DB design is it pays to design your DBs and queries without a computer. Once it makes sense, you then port it into your RDBMS.

Keep us posted.

I think your best bet is to take advantage of what (at least in JAVA) is called Resource Bundles. There are 2 approaches to this:

1) You create the properties file for each language (in JAVA, named, for example, english_US.properties, or something like that). In the file you have something like this: copy.hello_text:What is that?. In your german properties file, you could then have: copy.hello_text:Vas is Das?. When you define your bundle, one of the parameters is the locale. The server automatically detects this parameter and substitutes the appropriate language.

2) The crude way. You define various files (german.php, yoruba.php, etc). In it, you assign text to variables
(example: hello = hello (in english.php), hello = hola (in spanish.php), etc. Of course you make sure you define the variable, for strongly-typed languages once. Then, you have icons somewhere on your page for each language. You would then link back to the page you are on, tacking on a language name-value pair.

So, let's say you are on the english home page and the user clicks on the german icon. The URL could look like so: http://www.site.com/?lang=german. Then in your code, you could have code like so (I will use pseudo code here):
if(lang == "german" {
include german.php
}

Let's further say on your home page, you have the following snippet: <h1><% print hello %></h1>

Irrespective of language selected, the word(s) get changed out automatically.

There may be other (and better) ways to do this, but the above 2 are the ways I have typically done it. #1 is more optimal although (detection is done automatically). I generally prefer #2 as not all people who live in say, Germany, understand german. In other words, I would like to be able to select another language if I wanted to.

I hope this helps.

did you for a fact check it to make sure it was working before you parted with your money? If you did, next question: how are you removing the flash drive after saving stuff? Typically, you want to go to the right hand side of your task bar, right-click on the drive (F in my case) and left-click on "remove hardware". It should bring up a window which will enable you to select the Flash drive. You select the drive and click the "safely remove hardware (or whatever it says)" button. You should then get a popup window that says, "you can now safely remove (or whatever it says)".

From experience, I have found that removing the drive without going through the process above can atimes result in corrupt files.

Let us know if this helps.

I will actually be honest and say I became a web developer for the money 

In Nigeria, I was attending school to become an Agric. Economist.  I even had a small farm raising crops and poultry/rabbits that I would turn around and sell to neighbors and friends.  The plan was for me and 4 other classmates (in 4 other areas of study within the college of agriculture - Animal Sc, Crop Sc, etc) to pool our resources after graduation and open a farm rivalling Otta Farms.  This all changed because I left for the US.

When I got to the US, I wanted to continue in that area of study but my Uncle advised me against it saying that the agric industry in America was run by families and powerful corporations.  At best, I would have to study to Master's level (something I didn't want to do) and become a teacher/lecturur/researcher.  Instead, he advised that I become part of the booming dot com era and study to be a software engineer.  I am happy I did, granted Agric. is still in my blood.

A wise man once said, do a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life. I am living proof that doing the opposite also has the opposite effect.  Agric. is in my blood.  Even as a kid, my parents told me that I had told them as early as 5 years of age, after visiting a goat farm, that I wanted to be a goat farmer.  However, I have mouths to feed and so have to go where the money is.  Hmm, this probably explains why I find coding boring atimes and am always looking for a way to get out of it and go for something else

Did I hear someone say, "go back to school and get a degree in something you actually like"?  I don't believe in the concept of being a perpetual student.  I think I am passed that stage in life and need to start thinking of retirement.  I would rather stay where I am, save up the money, then use that money to pursue what it is I actually have in mind 

google is not going to tell you when because if they did, it would be like Jesus telling you when he will come back. Consequently, you would do everything to keep your house in order. It is based on an algorithm that they can tweak whenever they want.

Bottomline: Get your house in order, so to speak, and you won't ever have to worry about when the next dance is.

I hope this helps.

rufai,

what do you want me to say? No offense, but it is a blog, like millions of others out there, with google ads. Okay, so it has a "stop global warming" look-and-feel to it, courtesy of the green color. I personally don't comment on blogs cos for the most part, they are based on a ready-made template and are opinionated. Perhaps others feel the same way, I dunno.

What else do you want to hear?

Apparently, there is something in your regex, otherwise you wouldn't be getting this error. I would do an alert of the value of the (assuming) text field and go from there. Perhaps you should apply trim() to the $name field first b4 stripslashes(), to remove any trailing spaces?

In general, I don't like mixing javascript with code, at least the way you are doing it. I would clean this up by doing a regex check on the javascript side, moving that code into a .js file, then of course having the php code do a 2ble-check in case the user has javascript turned off. The way you have it here, the implication is that you will have "<script>" tags printed out for each form field you have. If this is the case, not good.

Try what I have suggested in the first paragraph above and let us know if that works or not.

Thanks,

In layman's terms, it's just a catch phrase like AJAX and LAMP. Cool name to describe "the new web interface" as in, making web apps richer (as in more closely mimic a desktop app).

I hope this helps.

a

broadcode,

It's a publicity stunt. I bet you he also has some google ads embedded somewhere which he hopes can generate him some money every time we visit his site

smart,

Is the criteria for "best website" that it must have flash?

steepe,

considering OOP is the coding practice du jour, I would advise you spend some time to study/understand what you have, then, if you have questions, let us know.

good luck either way!

I hate to change topics but I feel obligated to. Why? Because of the "If it was. Google would not be the best." comment.

I hear the above all the time from some of us back home in response to how their sites may look. It seems like an instant justification for why their site looks the way it does. Has it occurred to anyone that:

1) Every site has its niche?

2) Google is popular not because of its simplicity but because of its search algorithm?

3) Though popular, if Google were indeed the best, that it would be the only search engine out there (in other words, there are those who will swear that Yahoo! is the best)?

4) Some people are arts-inclined, which implies they need to be visually stimulated to stay on a site?

5) By their very argument, they should be worth billions of dollars like google?

Some sites need to be visually appealing. That's just the way it is. By the way, I tried to open NigeriaOne twice but each time, it crashed my computer (and I have a pretty fast connection).

biko, let's get off this "google is best" thing and start letting our sites speak for themselves. If they need to be simple, let it be, for its own sake and not because "google is simple too".

As always, my 2 cents