Within most photos from digital cameras besides the actual image, there’s a little ”information block” call EXIF data. If you have the correct PHP extension installed on your server – the one called ”exif” – it’s pretty easy to read the EXIF data and display them, as you like.

First, let’s check if the extension is available?

$load\_ext = get\_loaded\_extensions();
if (!in\_array(exif, $load\_ext)) {
echo "Exif is NOT available";
} else {
echo "Exif extension is available.";
};

If you’re doing some basic profiling of your PHP scripts, the build-in microtime function can help you make some simple benchmarking fast. Here’s a rough example to show you how it could be used. The doSomething function is the function we want to benchmark.

$time = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $time);
$time = $time\[1\] + $time\[0\];
$start = $time;

doSomething();

$time = microtime();
$time = explode(' ', $time);
$time = $time\[1\] + $time\[0\];
$finish = $time;
$total\_time = round(($finish - $start), 6);
if ($debug) print ("<p>Processing took approximately $total\_time seconds</p>");

Some websites require access control, and sometimes you may need to generate a password for a user. Here’s a simple function that can do just that.

The $base-variable contains the characters allowed in the password. The supplied string may be changed, but the selected charaters should exist on all keyboards (as far as I know). When calling the function, you can specify the lenght of the password you want. Simple, right?

function makePassword($desiredLenght = 8) {
    $password = '';
    $base = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789';

    for($i=0;$i<$desiredLenght;$i++) {
        $password .= $base\[(rand(0, (strlen($base)-1)))\];
    }
    return $password;
}

In the book “the Davinci Code” there was a fun little device called a cryptex.. A Cryptex has 6 dials with 6  letters on each, and only one combination producing a word will open it. The most straight forward way to crack it would be to try every combination one by one, but there’s a substantial number of combinations and we know only those which a valid words is a candidate.

There are some odd functions hidden in PHP. One of them is the decbin function, which makes it easy to convert between decimal and binary numbers.

If you’re bore don a rain day, you could use this function to make a simple binary clock, here’s a few lines to get you started:

echo "Hours: ".decbin(date("H"))."  
";
echo " Minutes:".decbin(date("i"))."  
";
echo " Seconds:".decbin(date("s"));

See the binary clock output (and the source of the page).