Pierre today needed a Drupal hack to limit the set of roles, members of which would be displayed on a Drupal users listing page. This is the listing that comes up when you access a URI like: http://example.com/profile. Of course, it took us less than 5 minutes to figure-out how to do it, since Drupal...

Last week, the major news on the Web was the launch of OpenSocial. Google did an excellent job documenting APIs and publishing quick-start tutorials and videos, as well as signing-up an impressive group of early adopters. All that is left to us, the blogger by-standers, is to review, envy and criticize. That is exactly what...

On numerous LAMP servers we run, we repeatedly experienced an odd and disturbing problem. Users were fed some “random” ASCII text, instead of a rendered page, leaving them in complete frustration. After rigorous investigation, we came to a conclusion that the problem lies in a combination of PHP’s zlib compression and eAccelerator. The odd part...

Web these days is full of spam-bots, malicious crawlers and other “e-pests” that post junk-advertising all over the Net. These parasites give the most headache to blogs and social sites, where moderators want to free-up comments to general audience (“Two-Way Communication”, eh?), but have no desire to promote illegal Viagra sales. Captcha, or Completely Automated...

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...