In other news, I have taken a job in Winnipeg working on a shopping cart to accounting system integration package for a company called Terracor Business Solutions (www.terracor.ca).  So far things are going great there.  Although this job does keep me busy during the day, I do have 8 hours at night to work on our internal projects and mild side-work.

Another noteworthy change is our recent migration from our standalone website framework to using CodeIgniters framework as a base and loading in all of our custom site functionality (form processing, account/session management, and even our MySQLi database connection class – as that class is awesome!).

Moving on from this technical mumbo-jumbo, we are planning on migrating our framework into Ruby on Rails (RoR) next. We are really excited to see how well RoR will work and if it does indeed live up to our expectations — although we know full well to stay away from expectations, we do value 37signals (creators of RoR) as a company and respect all that they have done and accomplished.  More to come…

This hosting server has 5times the storage of our last one, better support, faster processor, more ram and is still located in Canada, so it will remain under our privacy laws. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us through our website: http://www.iaps.ca/contact-us. The move should be fully complete by the end of this week at which time we will point our nameservers to the new IPs and make everyone’s site live. High priority sites will be moved over first while high traffic sites will be moved over last so any file changes will remain recent. Thank you all for your patience and understanding.

Regarding our last hosting company: bcwebnet.com, we regret to say that they have been a nightmare.  The initial setup and service was fine at first, but for the last 5-6 months we have not been able to contact them in any way shape or form.  Phone calls are directed to voicemail right away and emails do not receive replies.  I’m not even sure if bcwebnet is even a company anymore, but if they are they shouldn’t be considering their shady client support services.

The current Wamp Server will install Apache 2.2.11, PHP 5.2.9-2 + PECL, MySQL 5.1.33, SQLitemanager and PhpMyadmin.

Step2:
Now you have to download ActivePerl (currently 5.10.0) from www.activestate.com and install it. The default installation directory is “C:\Perl“, but for simplicity and ease of use I use different directory. I create a new folder name “perl” inside “C:\wamp\bin“. So I install Active Perl in “C:\wamp\bin\perl” directory. The next thing you need to do is configure the Apache web server to execute Perl and CGI script.

Step3:
This is the most important part here. You need to edit the Apache configuration file. Now go to “C:\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\conf” directory and open “httpd.conf” file. Edit the httpd.conf file as below.

1. Inside httpd.conf, look for the line that says “<Directory “c:/wamp/www/”>“, just a few lines below this you’ll find the line that says “Options Indexes FollowSymLinks“. Add “Includes ExecCGI” in the line just next to FollowSymLinks, thus it look like this:

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI

This will enable CGI script inside your www folder.

2. Now look for the line “AddHandler cgi-script .cgi“, this line is commented out. You need to enable this by un-comment this line, to do that remove the # character at the beginning of this line. This will add handler for files with .cgi extension. If you want to use .pl file extension in your server add “AddHandler cgi-script .pl” just below the above line. Now you will be able to execute CGI and Perl script with .cgi and .pl, extension.

Lines to add:

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler cgi-script .pl

3. To add directory index file, look for the line “DirectoryIndex index.php index.php3 index.html index.htm“. Add index.cgi and index.pl in this line.

Lines to add:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.php3 index.html index.htm index.cgi index.pl

Step4:
Your server is now configured and ready to run perl and cgi script. Next thing you might need to do is to configure perl to use mysql database. You need to download and install mysql driver to enable database connection through your perl script. You have to grab the driver from the ActivePerl package repository. However, mysql driver module is not available in the default ActivePerl Package Repository. So, you need to add additional repository and install from that repository. Follow the steps below:

1. Open command prompt [type cmd in run], navigate to your perl/bin folder (“cd c:\wamp\bin\perl\bin”), then type “ppm repo add uwinnipeg” and press enter.

2. After the “uwinnipeg” repository is added successfully, you can install DBD-mysql by typing this command “ppm install DBD-mysql” and hit enter.

Note: The ActivePerl default package repository contains DBD-mysqlPP module. If you install that one, you will get an error in your SQL SELECT query and especially when you use the WHERE clause. Your localhost will hang if you run this kind of query with the WHERE clause, so to get it work you need to install the package that I mentioned above only.

Step5:
At the top of every file you wish to run (.pl or .cgi), ensure you add this line:
#!c:/wamp/bin/perl/bin/perl

—–
This article is a repeat from: http://www.wampserver.com/phorum/read.php?2,52757,52757, Posted by: venkat437 on August 12, 2009 09:19AM
It was recreated here for archiving…

1. When you have your project finished and are ready to add a setup utility, click File > Add > New Project.  (A description of the types of Setup Utilities can be found in the MSDN doc linked above.)
2. For our implementation, we used “Setup Project” option under Other Project Types > Setup and Deployment to create a .msi install file.  So select your project setup type, enter a name for it at the bottom and click OK.
3. The new project will be added to your current project.  To add files to this Setup Utility, right-click on the Setup Project, go to Add, then choose either Project Output (if you already have the application projec ready) or choose File to add miscellaneous files.  In this tutorial we are going to continue with the Project Output option.
4. In the Add Project Output Group select all components (by CTRL+clicking on each) then click OK.  (You may want to select everything except for the Source Files.)
5. While the Setup Project is selected, you can change the properties of it in the Properties window.  You may want to change the Author, Manufacturer, Product Name and Title.
6. Now that the setup utility is configured, you want to rebuild your entire solution, but before that we should add this utility to the build.  Click Build > Configuration Manager and then put a check under Build for the Setup Utility record.  Click OK.
7. At the top of the Solution Explorer, right-click your Solution (that encompasses your projects) and then click Rebuild Solution to build it and create the .msi installer file.
8. After a successful build, you can now test the install by right-clicking on the Setup Utility project and clicking Install/Uninstall.
9. The .msi file will be placed under the Setup Project’s data folder in a directory with the same name as the Build Configuration chosen.  ie: if you chose to build the Debug version of your program, the .msi file will be in {Setup Project name} > Debug.

It works both ways:

img {height: 100px; width: *%;}
img {width: 100px; height: *%; }

This has only been tested in FireFox.  It may distort the image a little bit, but not nearly as much as it would if you used defined values for both width and height: img {width: 100px; height: 125px;}