Yum is a standard installation utility for CentOS 5.2. One of the reasons I favor CentOS over other Linux distros is actually because it comes with yum. It is that good! Unfortunately, CentOS 5.2 does not generally include the latest versions of libraries, because it follows conservative path of the RedHat Enterprise. Which is not...

Fantastic news for OpenID: “This is a historic week for OpenID. Google and Microsoft announced the release of code to support OpenID 2.0 across their most important properties. On Monday, Microsoft, announced OpenID 2.0 support for their 460 million users on the LiveID platform. On Wednesday Google said it will be supporting OpenID 2.0 for...

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I finally got around developing a little, nifty Drupal module I’ve been craving for, for a really long while now. The “Edit Block” module adds inline block editing capability to any theme. It’s entirely jQuery-based, hence - no dirty intrusive theming hacks are necessary and is compatible with most properly built Drupal themes. Some nice...

Designing professional reports in Drupal is not trivial. At the same time, Drupal has one of the most advanced query builder tools (Views) that any CMS (open-source or not) has ever dreamed of. There’s clearly a gap. I’ve been cooking some stuff up for a while now and will be putting a presentation together for...

Nice trick: add “&fmt=18” to a YouTube URL and you can enjoy stereo audio and better-quality picture (requires more bandwidth, of course). Have fun

DrupalCon DC was announced today on Drupal.org. We’ve known it for a while, to be honest, but now it’s official! DrupalCon DC will be held March 4-7, 2009 and registration will be opening next week. The importance of DrupalCon DC is hard to overestimate. Washington, DC is home to many non-profits and PR Agencies, the...

A popular joke of the 21st century has been that the Web is “ruled” by teenagers. That saying may be a joke, but the truth is: we live in an era in which a self-organized group of college students, without any funding can take on global organizations like HSBC. How come? Because large organizations are...

Software engineering has introduced the paradigm of the separation of the View (visual representation) from the Model (business logic) long time ago. In the realm of the Web, this principle was re-emphasized. In the late ’90s and early 2000s the separation was used to accommodate for differences between physical mediums that a web-page could be...

I woke up feeling a little prophet-ish this morning. I would bet you money, but it is illegal, so I am just going to say: I know what the next big service thing from Google should will be! Ready? It’s a free SMS gateway that allows sending SMS messages through an open API. Now think...

Interesting choice of graphics from Joomla: Check this: And then look at the striking similarity of the World Bank logo: Could have come up with something more original.

Cooliris is one of these new gadgets that sound cool in somebody’s blog review, but do not live up to an expectation when actually used. Let alone that it is not nearly as useful as it claims to be, Cooliris has been reported to significantly slow down Safari on Macs. Specifically - when viewing FLASH...

If you work in a noisy office (or home) environment and can’t concentrate, this is a must-have Mac app: http://www.blackholemedia.com/noise/

Quick Note: the Administration Menu module in Drupal seems to have some weird bug in ver. 5.2.5 which causes menu items listing to disappear on admin/build/menu configuration page. Solution: disable and remove Administration Menu module, download 5.2.6 or later version, install that one. If the problem persists run “menu_rebuild();” from hook_init() of any module or...

Google released to open-source its “language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols, data storage, and more”: Protocol Buffers. Google claims it’s like XML, but better mostly because: “[Protocol Buffers] are 3 to 10 times smaller, and 20 to 100 times faster”. My feelings about this news are mixed. Like...