Contract Opportunity: Web Application Developer / PHP Programmer

Mergenta is seeking contract programming assistance. Location: Orléans / your location.

See Job Posting.

Mergenta Mashboard Software Shows: Canadian Foreign Policy Observers Indicate Government Has Failed to Advance a Green Economy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Canadian Foreign Policy Observers:
Government Has Failed to Advance a Green Economy

Mashboard Software Amongst Solutions to Visualize Foreign Policy Camp Resolutions
for Improved Action across Environmental and Sustainability Portfolios

Ottawa, Canada – December 31, 2009 – Canadians are disappointed with their government’s leadership in advancing a green economy but somewhat satisfied with its progress in promoting gender equality and embracing diversity. These findings are gleaned from a online survey comparing the activities of both government and non-government actors and conducted during the course of the Foreign Policy Camp workshops held on 30 November 2009 in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal.

Camp participants received results from the survey throughout the conference using Mergenta’s Mashboard technology which presented responses in real time along with important camp information including the conference’s two live video feeds and conversations from Twitter and the blogosphere.

Participants using the Mashboard were able to immediately comment on the information and add to the conversation using the software’s built-in Twitter application. Channeling the many streams of information, a team of graphic facilitators created five murals representing a collective vision for ways Canada can better lead by example.

The Foreign Policy Camp Results to date are posted at the following address: http://www.mashboard.ca/rethinkforeignpolicy/results

Canada’s World < http://www.canadasworld.ca/ > organized Foreign Policy Camp and Mergenta participated as a technology partner.

Mergenta’s Mashboard for ForeignPolicyCamp remains online at http://www.mashboard.ca/rethinkforeignpolicy, serving as both a record of the Foreign Policy Camp itself – in addition to the Camp’s official website at: http://rethinkforeignpolicy.ca/ – as well as being a look back at the thoughts, feelings and predictions of a dynamic group of thinkers in the lead-up to December’s failed negotiations in Copenhagen.

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Mergenta is a consulting firm advancing communications technology solutions across an array of sectors including new media monitoring and engagement, surveys and polling technologies, electronic commerce, and custom application software programming.

For more information about Mashboard or the Foreign Policy Camp survey results, please contact:
Mark Leahy, President
Mergenta Consulting Inc.
(613) 841-8484
info(at)mergenta.com

FILLED: Career Opportunity: Web Application Developer / .NET Programmer

UPDATE: This position has been filled. Thank you for your interest.

Mergenta is hiring. Location: Orléans. Full-time.

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PHP Browser Detection

One of our clients – a large retailer – has been seeing an uptick in customer service requests stemming from problems in Apple’s Safari browsers. Back in December 2008 Apple released patch 10.5.6 which broke the way Webkit handles cookies, causing Safari to randomly log out of sites like Facebook and “forget” user baskets. Interestingly, the problem only affects Intel Mac Users.

While we work on the problem enabling our client’s Safari-based customers to place their orders online, we decided on the interim step of warning visitors when they may run into trouble. In order to reach the narrowest target audience and exclude unaffected customers (we don’t want to scare them off) we decided on the following:

1. Show the message only to Safari users
2. Show the message only to Safari users of the Mac OS
3. Show the message only to Safari users running on Intel hardware

I didn’t want to narrow the specific OS version to 10.5.6, because 10.5.7 may not necessary correct the issue (I hope it does).

Checking for the Operating System and Web Browser is dead easy in PHP. At Mergenta, we always use the $_SERVER array to access the server variables superglobal [http://ca2.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.superglobals.php]. Since the contents of the array aren’t guaranteed it is important to check for the existance of the “HTTP_USER_AGENT” member:


$userAgent = ( isset( $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] ) ? $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] : "" );


The user agent gives us a string similar to: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1

Once we have the userAgent, it’s very simple to check for Mac, Intel and Safari using strpos:


if ( strpos( $userAgent, "Intel Mac" ) !== false
&& strpos( $userAgent, "Safari" ) !== false )
{
// Display message to Intel Mac Safari users here
}


Note that we use the “===” operator (3 equal signs) to figure out whether or not the “needle” was found in the “haystack”. This is because while strpos returns integers to indicate where in the haystack it finds the needle, it also returns the boolean FALSE when no match is found. “===” checks for the boolean result FALSE, not to be confused with “0″ which strpos might return to indicate a match was found at the beginning of the haystack.