Imagine a situation: you accidentally “svn removed” an entire directory tree from SVN. If the tree contained uncommitted code you can restore it from the backup, but you also need to restore things that were in the SVN. You can approach it multiple ways, but arguably the cleanest way is to simply revert to the...

People who know me know that I am the last person on earth to be a Microsoft fan. I have my reasons to be a tough critic of the Redmond company, but something that I did not expect to happen, has happened recently and giving well-deserved credit to them is due. The name is Bing...

PHP error messages are quite helpful, most of the time. Sometimes they do fall short of telling us what went wrong, however. It’s especially common when and if you use a development framework (e.g. Drupal). Frameworks often do output buffering and/or code eval()-ing, making debugger output incomprehensible. In such cases PHP’s debug_backtrace() function is a...

OS-X Leopard comes pre-installed with a Postfix version. No need to install it via darwin ports or other such mess (actually uninstall it if you have previously manually installed it via ports or something similar). Postfix just needs to be enabled and following sequence of several easy steps explains how to do it: sudo vi...

If you have misfortune of having to upgrade Drupal5 website to Drupal6, there’s a very good chance that at some point you will run into a fatal error: Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in... Fatal errors are never fun, but this one is particularly annoying and hard to hunt down. It helps to understand the...

UPDATE: instructions for Espresso 2.0 at: http://freshblurbs.com/espresso-and-syntax-highlight-custom-file-formats Espresso From MacRabbit (you may remember them for their splendid CSSEdit eidtor) is a new Web editor, for Macs, worth paying attention to. It handles the usual suspects: PHP, CSS, HTML, servers over SFTP, Amazon S3 etc with style out of the box and has numerous extensions for...

Blog post about the new World Bank API, how we designed it, why we are excited about it and why you could be, too: http://www.agileapproach.com/blog-entry/world-bank-api-20-launch

Drupal requires its source documentation to be compatible with DoxyGen. If you are working on a large project, you want to install DoxyGen and run it on cron to have nice, up-to-date API docs. Unfortunatley, if you install Doxygen via yum (or any other auto-updater, I assume) it installs a fairly old 1.4.x branch that...

A really nice extension to Drupal Forms API has been released over the weekend: Selector Element module introduces the hip awesomeness of jQueryUI Sortable widget to Drupal’s Forms API in a very easy way. If you are using Drupal and wanted to quickly implement one of those drag-n-drop-n-sort selectors - you found a perfect module...

# yum install openssl # yum install openssl-devel # yum install perl # yum install perl-Net-SSLeay perl-Crypt-SSLeay # rpm --import http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc Create the /etc/yum.repos.d/webmin.repo file containing : [webmin] name=Webmin Distribution Neutral baseurl=http://download.webmin.com/download/yum enabled=0 Then run: # yum --enablerepo=webmin install webmin Check installation success with: /etc/init.d/webmin status If everything is good and webmin is running access...

Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech

This has happened couple times, already, so I may as well blog about it. If you use Views in Drupal, you already know that it shows you the final SQL generated. Very useful feature, but there’s a rare edge condition when the SQL returns results (if you run it from an SQL client), but Views...

If you are on a Wifi and both your mac and iPhone can access it, you can get free ride with controlling Keynote from your iPhone by using: Keymote, which in part uses Telekinesis iPhoneRemote. Telekinesis actually uses iPhone Safari and Ajax so you need to point iPhone Safari to a specific address (https://192.168.74.104:5010/ by...

Thinking about Semantic Web, crowdsourcing and mostly after reading a recent blog post from Andy I came to believe that we need a ‘Tagipedia’ (Wikipedia for tags): a place where anybody can tag any uniquely identified web resource (URL) and thus gradually, collaboratively describe the entire Web in more semantically sensible way. Ironically, large social-bookmarking...

I’ve been saying this off the record for a long time and finally I am frustrated enough to go on the record and say it out loud and without a shred of fear: professional certification, in software, is lame, means nothing at all and is a waste of everybody’s time except companies that make money...