Category Archives: Technical

Web page redirection and output buffering

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Why cannot all web servers by default buffer there output and only send the output to the client when the page is finish created? I developed an PHP driven website and used the header function often to redirect to a different page. Those that know PHP also know that HTML headers cannot be change when some output has already gone to the client.

To make a long story short the server I was developing on (PHP 5.0.4) was buffering PHP output by default due to a setting in the php.ini file so the call to the header function was working perfectly. When this application was put on another server that was running an older version of PHP (4.3.0), everything just broke.

What a slept to change all the pages by including ob_start() and ob_end_flush() on all the pages that used the header function.

Well I suppose things will get better in the future!!

Telkom and its shenanigans

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Unfortunately I am not one of the fortunate ones that have ADSL so I have to depend on my dial-up ISDN connection. I also have InfinityCall. For those that does not know, InfinityCall allow for calls to be capped at a maximum of R7.00 during callmore time.

Until about a month ago I had no problems about it. It was commons to go from Friday, 7pm until Monday, 7am with one call. No disconnect. Since a month or so ago the calls suddenly started to disconnect around midnight. The connection will stay up all day, but come midnight or just after it the call get disconnected. Imagine my iritation when getting up in the morning and finding the line disconnected after starting a big download the previous evening.

To put this in perspective. Assume that there is 10 000 InfinityCall users which now suddenly gets disconnected twice over a weekend. Now we have an extra R14.00 income per user which is R140 000.00 per weekend, bringing to a cool half a million rand extra income per month for Telkom.

My line does not have any problems on it. If it had it would have disconnected during the day also. This looks just too fishy for me. Telkom is trying to generate extra income while they can. If any other people have the same experience then please leave a comment here.

To read more about what Telkom is up too visit Hellkom or MyADSL.