As web applications become increasingly smarter and powerful, we start to spend more time in a browser window than in any other desktop application. MS Office-replacement suites like Google Apps, are first to come to mind, but there are many other cool apps. Web-based collaboration is especially web-centric. Wikis, blogs and community sites are all...

I have slowed down on blogging lately. It’s not because there is nothing to write about anymore, but because things have been very busy for the past couple of months. One of the projects that has kept us entertained and excited at work went live yesterday. geo.worldbank.org is a new, free web product of the...

MediaTemple is a remarkable virtual-dedicated and dedicated hosting provider for numerous reasons. It is well-known for legendary reliability, quality of service and the level of expertise of the support staff. MediaTemple solutions like grid-deployed MySQL hosting are at the very frontier of industry innovation. Recently, though, MediaTemple pleasantly surprised its clientele (including yours truly) with...

Open-source, as a concept and a phenomenon, is quite special. What fascinates me in the Free/Open Source model is how efficiently it addresses several concerns at the same time: social, business and technological/innovative. Not to forget that it’s been proven to actually work. What is the major driving force behind the Open-Source model? A lot...

In college, our civil engineering professor opened his first class with an anecdote. According to the story, a bunch of engineers were planning trail paths at a newly built campus in city X. There was a large set of lawns on campus. Instead of building sophisticated simulation models to find optimal trails, the engineers did...

Character encodings are always “fun” to deal with. The fortunate and naive ones amongst you, who believe that utf-8 solved all pains in the multilingual encoding arena, let me tell you: “you are lucky to be in your surreal world”. I was trying to hook up a PHP application with a web-service wrapped around a...

UPDATE [April 14, 2012] : This blog post is quite old, but it still gets a decent amount of traffic, so I think it’s important to update the information, since obviously “the best” IDE 5 years ago is not the same as now. These days (judging by the same criteria as the ones outlined further...

Since I was one of the roughly 1 million fanatics, that against all rational arguments, bought iPhone early, I became eligible for the $100 Apple credit. I got it back today from Apple website (look in the footer). It took me about 40 seconds. Now the big question is - what to buy with it,...

… or his campaign team does. Either way, when I logged into my Linkedin account yesterday and saw a banner spotlighting Barack Obama’s participation in one of my interest groups, I could not help a “wow” reaction. We have already blogged that 2008 Presidential campaign is being run in an unprecedentedly Web-savvy manner. Pretty much...

If you followed Steve Jobs’ latest keynote (the one where he dropped iPhone price by $200 and pissed lots of folks off), you may remember that he announced iTunes Store would have ringtones, soon. Not only it would just have ringtones that users would be able to edit/create them themselves. Well, looks like it is...

The subject of real.com is a broad one. You can talk about it for hours, touching the matters of outdated technology and lousy business model or falsely admiring their desperate attempts of come-back, but then - is it worth it? I find it much more amusing to bust their balls for petty archaic spellings, like...

Anybody who has ever applied to a US university has at least heard the name of the US News & World Report. Their website of the US educational institutions’ rankings is the most comprehensive and authoritative one. To give you a flavor, the US News ranking for business schools is equally, or maybe even more...

Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond are truly the founding fathers and patriarchs of the Free/Open Source movement. The fruits of this movement are well-known even for the non-geek audience. They include the Linux operating system, Firefox browser, OpenOffice suite, MySQL database, plus a plethora of PHP-based content-management systems like WordPress and Drupal which...

When Google first launched GMail, it fundamentally changed the free, web-based email service arena. The “big” players back then, Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail were only allowing up to 5MB of storage, forcing users to spend more time on cleaning up their inboxes than actually using the e-mail service. Then there came Google with unimaginable...

The much awaited first software update of iPhone is out! One of many novel things about iPhone, setting it aside from the CellPhones 1.0, is that it is supposed to be frequently and significantly improved through a series of software updates. This first update is not that exciting - just a collection of bug-fixes, but...