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Google Apps into NYIT - New York Institute of Technology

dharmavir — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 13:02:27 -0500

Today, New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), in partnership with the New York State Teacher Centers and associated Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), the New York State teacher unions and New York State professional organizations, will offer Google Apps access, training and support to 697 public school districts, as well as all non-public and charter schools, across New York. We're excited that NYIT is committed to providing schools the deployment and professional development resources they need to make Google Apps for Education-including Gmail, Docs, Sites and Calendar-a powerful tool for teachers and students across the state.

1 Vote(s)

10 tips for effective Active Directory design | 10 Things | TechRepublic.com

dharmavir — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:40:00 -0500

Active Directory design is a science, and it's far too complex to cover all the nuances within the confines of one article. But I wanted to share with you 10 quick tips that will help make your AD design more efficient and easier to troubleshoot and manage.

1 Vote(s)

10 Free Web UI Kits and Resources for Designers

dharmavir — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 13:05:21 -0500

As designers, we often recycle the same fundamental elements when wireframing or mocking up a design. However, by utilizing a library of reusable web UI elements, we can make the design process on each project more efficient, and cut down on research and design time.

This post covers 10 of the best free web UI kits, resources and stencils from around the web to kick-start the early stages of your next project.

If you're partial to any particular free web UI kits or resources, let us know about them in the comments below.

1 Vote(s)

AppleInsider | Apple developing Flash alternative named Gianduia

dharmavir — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:58:45 -0500

One of the biggest revelations at WWDC was quietly unveiled in a session on Friday morning entitled "Building Native Look-and-Feel Web Applications Using SproutCore." While Apple maintained high security during the entire NDA-sealed WWDC session, the secret of SproutCore is out because it is an open source project and people can't stop talking about it.

As Apple's public schedule for WWDC explained, "SproutCore is an open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications. Learn how to combine SproutCore with HTML5's standard offline data storage technologies to deliver a first-class user experience and exceptional performance in your web application."

The secrets of SproutCore first tumbled out of the bag last fall, when it was revealed that .Mac Web Gallery had been built using the framework. Originally developed by Charles Jolley of SproutIt for use in his online email manager named Mailroom, the SproutCore framework goes beyond other JavaScript frameworks because it is designed to build entire rich applications on the web rather than just adding some animation or sizzle to web pages.

1 Vote(s)

Common pitfalls of iPhone development

dharmavir — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:56:25 -0500

I haven't written any posts lately. This is because I dug into iPhone application development and this really consumed most of my spare time. As you may remember, I've already mentioned that I would like to start dealing with mobile platforms as a target for my OpenGL related experiments and projects. After Android, this time I got my hands on a Mac mini and took a look at the currently most popular mobile gaming platform. Actually, these initial experiments wouldn't take that long time if I would have to deal with just a new API and not with a brand new world with its own benefits and drawbacks.

I have a long experience in using Windows and Linux as a development platform with tons of different development environment and programming languages. Beside that, I've also done some Mac application development, at least if we can call a cross-platform application so that works on all of these three desktop operating systems. Taking in consideration these facts I thought that starting to develop under Mac OS X targeting the iPhone platform will be piece of cake as I just have to master one another programming language and API, namely Objective-C and Cocoa Touch. Well, it turned out that I was too optimistic and this is not that simple as it looks like (at least for me, who hardly ever used a Macintosh before).

1 Vote(s)

External data not accessible outside a Flash movie's domain

dharmavir — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:40:17 -0500

For security reasons, a Macromedia Flash movie playing in a web browser is not allowed to access data that resides outside the exact web domain from which the SWF originated.

As an enhancement to Macromedia Flash Player 7, domains must be identical for data to be read. With this change a sub-domain can no longer read data from a parent domain and vice versa.

Cross-domain policy files
Another change to the Flash Player 7 framework is the use of cross-domain policy files. A policy file is a simple XML file that gives the Flash Player permission to access data from a given domain without displaying a security dialog. When placed on a server, it tells the Flash Player to allow direct access to data on that server, without prompting the user grant access.

The server can be in any location available to the Flash movie and does not have to be in the same domain. Cross-domain policy files, named crossdomain.xml, are placed at the root level of a server. When using a policy file you can use a wildcard character (*) in a domain name. For more information on policy files see Why Use Policy Files below.

Note: When serving a policy file, you must not use a cross-domain redirect, or the player will ignore the policy file.

Cross-domain file access
This applies to any ActionScript command or object that sends or receives data, including loadVariables, the XMLSocket object methods, and the XML object send andsendAndLoad commands.

Flash Player follows specific guidelines to determine domain compatibility. Refer to Domain Comparison below for details.

Descriptions and ways to address the following issues are outlined below.

You cannot load variables or XML data into a Flash movie from another domain.

Data cannot be returned to Flash from an incompatible domain (Flash Player 6,0,47,0 and above)

Flash movies loaded from incompatible domains cannot access ActionScript objects and variables (Flash 6 and above SWF files)

1 Vote(s)

Symfony Reloaded - 2.0 Preview Release

dharmavir — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:13:22 -0500

Symfony 2.0 leads a new generation of PHP frameworks

Based on an innovative architecture, Symfony 2 is fast, flexible, and easy to learn. It allows developers to build better and more easily maintainable websites with PHP.

- High Performance
- Easy learning
- Advanced Usability
- Extensible
- Flexible
- Built for Developers
- Built on the Shoulders
- of Giants
- Full-Featured
- Open-Source

6 Vote(s)

Zen Coding — a new way of writing HTML and CSS code

dharmavir — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:11:34 -0500

Zen Coding is an editor plugin for high-speed HTML, XML, XSL (or any other structured code format) coding and editing. The core of this plugin is a powerful abbreviation engine which allows you to expand expressions-similar to CSS selectors-into HTML code.

6 Vote(s)

18 Do’s and Don’ts Of Usability On The Web

dharmavir — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:06:05 -0500

Are you a web designer or do you run a website? Good, because this article is for you. If you're designing websites for a living or running your business online, there are 18 tips in this article that you should definitely read and remember. You can have the best visual design skills on the planet, but if you build a website that works like crap and doesn't allow the visitor to feel comfortable going from item to item and page to page, you are missing the very core of a good website design. So in today's article I'm going to go over some of the do's and don'ts of usability on the web.

1 Vote(s)

Crazy Egg - Visualize Your Visitors

dharmavir — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:03:59 -0500

Crazy Egg will help you improve the design of your site by showing you where people are clicking and where they are not.

1 Vote(s)

Practical PHP Patterns: Service Layer

dharmavir — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:00:36 -0500

The last domain logic pattern we will treat in this series is the Service Layer one. In its simplest form, a Service Layer is a set of service classes that deal with application logic, and that are characterized from being used from different front-ends.

Source code, at every level of abstraction, is the representation of data entities and their related behavior, particularly in an object-oriented paradigm. There are different types of logic which this behavior can be partitioned into:

* business logic is encapsulated in a Domain Model, and it is specific to the particular domain the application works in. The added value of an enterprise application ensues primarily from its business logic.
* application logic is in the scope of a Service Layer, and it is not strictly domain-specific, although its implementation may be. For example, translating objects into an XML or Json representation is part of application logic, even if it is executed with application-specific classes which depends on an underlying Domain Model. The task of representing data in a particular format is oblivious to the domain, as it does not belong to forums or social networks platforms only, or to an electronic or chemistry domain.
* presentation logic finds in an user interface its quintessence, and it can be considered as the subset of application logic which governs the end user view of the system. I would not consider a difference of format in the whole representation of an object as presentation logic, though, as it falls into the realm of reusability I would want to keep in a Service Layer.

1 Vote(s)

I say Agile, You say Traditional, Document-Driven

dharmavir — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:59:40 -0500

As a Post-Modern Agilist, Naresh Jain leads Industrial Logic's initiatives in Asia. From Organizational Transformation to enhanced Developer productivity, Naresh helps organizations embrace, scale and sustain essential Agile and Lean thinking - I say Agile, You say Traditional, Document-Driven

6 Vote(s)

some helpful jQuery plugins by Brandon Aaron

dharmavir — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:19:00 -0600

Some handy and helpful commands for jQuery lovers authored by Brandon Aaron which includes following:

batch
Batch is a jQuery plugin that gives you the ability to batch the results of any jQuery method or plugin into an Array.

bgiframe
Docs Support Download Source
A jQuery plugin that helps ease the pain when having to deal with IE z-index issues.

copyevents
A jQuery plugin that provides method for copying events from one element to another.
countable
A jQuery plugin that provides an unobtrusive input and textarea character counter.

each_slice
jQuery plugin that lets you iterate the given function for each slice of elements

expandable
A jQuery plugin that auto-expands textareas to fit the contents as a user types.

getfeed
A jQuery plugin wrapper for using the Google feeds API.
getscrollbarwidth

A jQuery plugin to retrieve the width of a system scrollbar.

gradient
A jQuery plugin that adds a dynamically created configurable gradient to the background of an element without the use of images.

mousewheel
A jQuery plugin that adds cross-browser mouse wheel support.

outerhtml
A jQuery plugin for getting the outerHTML of an element.

overlabel
A jQuery plugin to help implement the over label technique described in Making Compact Forms More Accessible by Mike Brittain on ALA.

scrollwindow
A scroll window plugin for jQuery.

spellcheck
A jQuery plugin that adds spellcheck support to inputs using the Google spell checker API.

swap
A jQuery plugin to swap elements within the DOM.

livequery
Live Query utilizes the power of jQuery selectors by binding events or firing callbacks for matched elements auto-magically, even after the page has been loaded and the DOM updated.

viewable
A jQuery plugin that allows you to know when an element is in view and what percentage of the element is viewable.

Virtual DOM Events
A collection of jQuery special events that provide more precision over normal DOM events. Includes mouserest, mouseremainover, mouseremainup, mouseremaindown, mouseremainout, keyremaindown, keyremainup, remainfocused, and remainblurred.

6 Vote(s)

jQuery UI 1.7.2 not ready for jQuery 1.4?

dharmavir — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:06:26 -0600

jQuery UI 1.7.2 not ready for jQuery 1.4? There seems to be a bug when you use them together.

1 Vote(s)

jQuery 1.4 - jQuery-UI has yet to achieve compatibility

dharmavir — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:07:48 -0600

The fact is jQuery and jQueryUI are not compatible, YES they are not. I tried to upgrade my application with jQuery1.4 but UI components are failed to work.

1 Vote(s)

WordPress 2.9 Enhancements Every Developer Must Know

dharmavir — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 11:50:08 -0600

Enhancements and changes in WordPress 2.9 are focused on making publishing and managing your content more intuitive. This article highlights important enhancements and provide resources that will help you quickly upgrade your themes or plugins to accommodate latest features.

Post Thumbnails
New Excerpt Filters
Sidebar Descriptions
Custom Post Types
Filter User Contact
New Templates Based on Slug
Enhancements For Users
Other Important Enhancements & Features
- Batch Plugin Update
- Comment Metadata
- User Registration via XMLRPC
- Optimize / Repair Database
- Custom Theme Directories

1 Vote(s)

CodeIgniter - Open source PHP web application framework

dharmavir — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:33:40 -0600

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you're a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you're tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks

* You want a framework with a small footprint.
* You need exceptional performance.
* You need broad compatibility with standard hosting accounts that run a variety of PHP versions and configurations.
* You want a framework that requires nearly zero configuration.
* You want a framework that does not require you to use the command line.
* You want a framework that does not require you to adhere to restrictive coding rules.

* You are not interested in large-scale monolithic libraries like PEAR.
* You do not want to be forced to learn a templating language (although a template parser is optionally available if you desire one).
* You eschew complexity, favoring simple solutions.
* You need clear, thorough documentation.

6 Vote(s)

Portable Media Player Reviews 2009 Year-end

dharmavir — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:35:26 -0600

Read before you shop Digits PMP Mega Price online Read before you shop Digits PMP Mega prices and review feature online in india, thinkdigit.com provides online Read before you shop Digits PMP Mega mp3 player n mp4 players, ipod prices n specifications, reviews in india.

I like the fact that iPod rocks all the time.!

1 Vote(s)

CakePHP: the rapid development php framework

dharmavir — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:29:14 -0600

CakePHP enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications.

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

HOT Features
* No Configuration - Set-up the database and let the magic begin
* Extremely Simple - Just look at the name...It's Cake
* Active, Friendly Community - Join us #cakephp on IRC. We'd love to help you get started
* Flexible License - Distributed under the MIT License
* Clean IP - Every line of code was written by the CakePHP development team
* Best Practices - covering security, authentication, and session handling, among the many other features
* OO - Whether you are a seasoned object-oriented programmer or a beginner, you'll feel comfortable

6 Vote(s)

symfony | Web PHP Framework

dharmavir — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:26:48 -0600

Open-Source PHP Web Framework

Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP.

It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.

Symfony is based on experience. It does not reinvent the wheel: it uses most of the best practices of web development and integrates some great third-party libraries.

Thousands of developers already trust symfony for their applications!

New users join the community every day, and that makes of symfony the most popular PHP framework around. A large community means easy-to-find support, user-contributed documentation, plugins, and free applications.

6 Vote(s)

jQuery 1.4 Released – The 14 Days of jQuery

dharmavir — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:13:52 -0600

jQuery 1.4 Released
In celebration of jQuery's 4th birthday, the jQuery team is pleased to release the latest major release of the jQuery JavaScript library! A lot of coding, testing, and documenting has gone into this release, and we're really quite proud of it.

I want to personally thank Brandon Aaron, Ben Alman, Louis-Rémi Babe, Ariel Flesler, Paul Irish, Robert Katić, Yehuda Katz, Dave Methvin, Justin Meyer, Karl Swedberg, and Aaron Quint who put a lot of work into fixing bugs and getting the release out the door.

Download
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js

Performance Overhaul of Popular Methods
Many of the most popular and commonly used jQuery methods have seen a significant rewrite in jQuery 1.4. When analyzing the code base we found that we were able to make some significant performance gains by comparing jQuery against itself: Seeing how many internal function calls were being made and to work to reduce the complexity of the code base.
In jQuery 1.4 we've significantly reduced the complexity of the most popular methods in jQuery.

6 Vote(s)

Post-Avatar Depression Hits Thousands of Fans

dharmavir — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:59:16 -0600

Avatar may be one of the biggest grossing movies of all time, but it's got a lot of fans feeling super blue (pun wholly intended).

CNN just came out with an extremely detailed report on the intense depression that Avatar is causing among a certain segment of fans, fans who psychotherapist Stacy Kaiser describes as "lonely to begin with. They're seeing Avatar, they're lonely people, a lot of them don't have a lot going on in their lives right now… The movie opened up a portal for them to express their depression."

These fans are turning to online forums - some of which have thousands of posts on how to deal with the cinema-induced sadness - to express their distress. Here's a few excerpts from the CNN report:

"Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora (Pandora) and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it.. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.' "
- Mike

"When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning…It just seems so … meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world."
- Ivar Hill, 17, Sweden

In short, people are depressed because their own lives don't measure up to the fantasy, a phenomenon Kaiser likens to the ennui one feels after seeing a romance movie if one happens to be unattached and dissatisfied.

CNN goes on to examine how the 3D technology only served to deepen the depression, as the realistic landscape of the film seems almost within reach, even though it doesn't actually exist.

Well, if that's the case, entertainment buffs better start popping the Prozacs as mainstream TV stations go 3D, and holograms are incorporated into standard award show fare.

Has anyone out there experienced post-Avatar depression?

1 Vote(s)

Google Docs Adds Support for File Storage

dharmavir — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:57:15 -0600

Ever wanted to use your Google account as a storage system? Now you can. Google has announced that it will be rolling out a new feature to Google Docs over the next few weeks: the ability to upload files of any type to store in Google Docs.

For years, services like Box.net (Box.net) and Dropbox (Dropbox) have offered the ability to store files in the cloud that can then be shared with other individuals or accessed easily from other computers. Google (Google) has offered Picasa Web Album users the ability to purchase additional storage space for photos, but now that space can be shared across Google Docs (Google Docs), Gmail (Gmail) and Picasa (Picasa).

Free users will get 1 GB of storage to store non-Google Docs files. Google's pricing is competitive - $0.25 a gigabyte per year (so $5 gets you 20 GB of storage space). The only middling detail is that files can't be larger than 250 MB. That means that Google Docs and the Google cloud will be perfectly fine for most users, but for individuals who need to frequently share or access files above 250 MB, this probably isn't going to be the solution for you.

Google is also going to allow users to search for shared or uploaded files using Google's document search, and common file types will be viewable in the Google Docs viewer.

This is a move that users have been asking for for quite some time - and with a competitive additional storage option, we're sure it will be popular. Even for competing storage and collaboration systems, this offers an opportunity to distinguish features and offerings that Google might not match.

1 Vote(s)

HTTPS Becomes Default for Gmail

dharmavir — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:46:42 -0600

In an effort to increase security for Gmail users, in 2008 Google added the option to always use HTTP Secure (HTTPS) when accessing Gmail. However, this option was disabled by default; Google's reasoning for this was the fact that HTTPS makes your e-mail access slower.

Now, Google (Google) has decided that Internet connections for most of its users are fast and stable enough to turn this option on by default.

If you like, you can still turn the option off; simply choose "Don't always use https" from the Settings menu. Google will still use HTTPS on the login page, but will then switch back to unsecured connection, which could make the service a tiny bit faster. Of course, you should do this only while connected to a network that you fully trust.

1 Vote(s)

Vivu Inc. Better than being there! Web/Video Conferencing

dharmavir — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:39:12 -0600

ViVu is an emerging leader in creating innovative and easy-to-use solutions for live video participation.

ViVu is a cloud-hosted Video (video)-as-a-Service platform that makes it easy for businesses or groups to create events like training sessions and meetings.

Much like competing services WebEx and GoToMeeting, ViVu is designed to make multi-party video conferences or presentations easy and interactive. The system is designed so that if you're giving a presentation, you can take an audio or video question from someone who is tuning in.

ViVu lets you integrate things like Twitter (Twitter) messages into a presentation or event - or you can just monitor these updates on the administrative end and choose to keep them private. ViVu also has built-in analytical information that can be especially useful if you're running a webinar.

A single-license of ViVu is $49.99 a month, but it includes unlimited meetings with up to 25 participants. You can try the service for free for 30 days.

1 Vote(s)

3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology

dharmavir — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:12:42 -0600

The modern American school faces rough challenges. Budget cuts have caused ballooning class sizes, many teachers struggle with poorly motivated students, and in many schools a war is being waged on distracting technologies. In response, innovative educators are embracing social media to fight back against the onslaught of problems. Technologies such as Twitter and Skype offer ideal solutions as inexpensive tools of team-based education.

Pockets of experimentation are emerging all around the world, and I hope to inspire my fellow teachers with some stories of success. From cell phones to social media, below are three schools that have chosen to go with the flow of popular technology to turn the tide for education.

Skype and Language Learning
Mobile Phones
Twitter

Conclusion:
As social media becomes ubiquitous, students prepared for technological collaboration will graduate with a much-needed edge on the competition. Fortunately, in these economically turbulent times, social media is a free and popular alternative to traditional instruction.

1 Vote(s)

Free Nexus One Phones for YouTube Partners?

dharmavir — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:08:37 -0600

Want a free Google Nexus One? You might be outta luck, but YouTube Partners seem to be receiving exactly that gift from their Googley masters.

These YouTube super-users say they're receiving the "superphone" along with this note:
Dear YouTube Partners,
We're pleased to present you with this gift of a Nexus One phone, the new Google (Google)-branded mobile device sold only online at google.com/phone. There are no strings attached, it's just our gift to you for being such an important part of the YouTube Partner Program.

It's not clear whether everyone in the partner program is receiving a phone or just a select few (the note implies everyone, we think). That strategy makes sense: YouTube (YouTube) partners have huge influence on the site and may use their phones to film video clips, spreading the message further.

Below, Val from the popular YouTube channel Val's Art Diary shows off her new Nexus One, courtesy of Google.

1 Vote(s)

Is This KFC Ad Racist?

dharmavir — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:07:03 -0600

Is this ad racist? Your opinion might vary depending on your cultural background … and that's a new reality we're facing in the YouTube era.

The Australian KFC ad in dispute (below) shows an Australian cricket supporter in a crowd of West Indian fans. Supposedly to make himself more comfortable amid the opposition supporters, he offers up a bucket of "crowd-pleaser" fried chicken from KFC.

1 Vote(s)

Facebook Founder on Privacy: Public Is the New "Social Norm"

dharmavir — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:55:04 -0600

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claims that if Facebook was starting out now, sharing with everybody - rather than with a small group of friends - would be the starting point.

Is this more about reflecting social norms or changing them to help Facebook compete with Twitter (Twitter)?

The statement, made during a livestream of the Crunchies awards, hits on a hot button issue for Facebook: It recently notified users of privacy changes via a pop-up notification. While the message claimed that Facebook was displaying the message to give users more privacy controls, blindly clicking "next" was a way to make much of your data public. And in fact, some data like the Friends List has become more public without any settings changes by users.

1 Vote(s)

Twitter Argument Leads to Alleged Murder [REPORT]

dharmavir — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:43:27 -0600

A Twitter argument allegedly resulted in murder last month, and New York police may subpoena Tweets as evidence in the case, according to a newspaper report.

Jameg Blake, 22, is accused of fatally shooting Kwame Dancy (pictured), also 22, with a shotgun blast to the neck. He pleaded not guilty this Wednesday.

The Harlem murder case, which allegedly took place in an apartment building on W. 132nd St. on December 1, may turn out to be the first in which Tweets are used as evidence in a murder trial.

1 Vote(s)

Avatar Catching Up With Titanic: Earnings Hit $1.3 Billion

dharmavir — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:42:01 -0600

When Avatar hit the 1 billion dollar milestone, we asked you whether you believe it has what it takes to surpass Titanic on the all-time biggest earners list. Most of you thought that it has a very good chance of doing so, and judging by its 4th weekend box office results, you were right.

This weekend, Avatar once again shattered the previous record for the best 4th weekend at the box office, earning 48,500,000 dollars. On its fourth weekend in cinemas, Titanic made 20 million dollars less. If the trend continues, Avatar will not only surpass Titanic; it will set new records far above the popular historic love story.

1 Vote(s)

Firefox 3.6 RC1 Now Available

dharmavir — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:29:42 -0600

Feeling adventurous? If so, you can try out the release candidate of the upcoming new version of Firefox, 3.6. The 7.7 MB download will give you a taste of what's to come in this version, and we're talking about some very interesting changes.

Firefox (Firefox) 3.6 runs on the well-tested Gecko 1.9.2 web-rendering platform, bringing support for new web technologies, better speed, stability, faster startup and load times, as well as improved Javascript performance.

See the release notes for Firefox 3.6 RC1 here, and download it here.

1 Vote(s)

WiseStamp Email Signatures that work for you!

dharmavir — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:40:31 -0600

WiseStamp- Email Signatures that work for you!

WiseStamp Firefox extension empowers your email signature on any webmail service
(Gmail ,Yahoo Mail ,AOL, Hotmail, Google Apps…) Easily customize, Include IM & Social profiles, Automatically share your Blog posts, Quotes, News, Bookmarks and more…
Enhance your personal and business email interactions

Excellent Web 2.0 tool to integrate social media and email connectivity...!

1 Vote(s)

Do something, Learn something, Share something, Change something - Meetup.com

dharmavir — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:58:21 -0600

Meetup Do something • Learn something Share something • Change something

Helps groups of people with shared interests plan meetings and form offline clubs in local communities around the world..

1 Vote(s)

Sphinx - Free open-source SQL full-text search engine

dharmavir — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 05:22:27 -0600

Sphinx is a full-text search engine, distributed under GPL version 2. Commercial license is also available for embedded use.

Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data sources support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or using XML pipe mechanism (a pipe to indexer in special XML-based format which Sphinx recognizes).

As for the name, Sphinx is an acronym which is officially decoded as SQL Phrase Index. Yes, I know about CMU's Sphinx project.

Key features

* high indexing speed (upto 10 MB/sec on modern CPUs)
* high search speed (avg query is under 0.1 sec on 2-4 GB text collections)
* high scalability (upto 100 GB of text, upto 100 M documents on a single CPU)
* supports distributed searching (since v.0.9.6)
* supports MySQL natively (MyISAM and InnoDB tables are both supported)
* supports phrase searching
* supports phrase proximity ranking, providing good relevance
* supports English and Russian stemming
* supports any number of document fields (weights can be changed on the fly)
* supports document groups
* supports stopwords
* supports different search modes ("match all", "match phrase" and "match any" as of v.0.9.5)
* generic XML interface which greatly simplifies custom integration
* pure-PHP (ie. NO module compiling etc) search client API

1 Vote(s)

Digg PHP's Scalability and Performance - O'Reilly ONLamp Blog

dharmavir — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 05:05:22 -0600

Several weeks ago there was a notable bit of controversy over some comments made by James Gosling, father of the Java programming language. He has since addressed the flame war that erupted, but the whole ordeal got me thinking seriously about PHP and its scalability and performance abilities compared to Java. I knew that several hugely popular Web 2.0 applications were written in scripting languages like PHP, so I contacted Owen Byrne - Senior Software Engineer at digg.com to learn how he addressed any problems they encountered during their meteoric growth. This article addresses the all-to-common false assumptions about the cost of scalability and performance in PHP applications.

At the time Gosling's comments were made, I was working on tuning and optimizing the source code and server configuration for the launch of Jobby, a Web 2.0 resume tracking application written using the WASP PHP framework. I really hadn't done any substantial research on how to best optimize PHP applications at the time. My background is heavy in the architecture and development of highly scalable applications in Java, but I realized there were enough substantial differences between Java and PHP to cause me concern. In my experience, it was certainly faster to develop web applications in languages like PHP; but I was curious as to how much of that time savings might be lost to performance tuning and scaling costs. What I found was both encouraging and surprising.

What are Performance and Scalability?
Before I go on, I want to make sure the ideas of performance and scalability are understood. Performance is measured by the output behavior of the application. In other words, performance is whether or not the app is fast. A good performing web application is expected to render a page in around or under 1 second (depending on the complexity of the page, of course). Scalability is the ability of the application to maintain good performance under heavy load with the addition of resources. For example, as the popularity of a web application grows, it can be called scalable if you can maintain good performance metrics by simply making small hardware additions. With that in mind, I wondered how PHP would perform under heavy load, and whether it would scale well compared with Java.

Hardware Cost
My first concern was raw horsepower. Executing scripting language code is more hardware intensive because to the code isn't compiled. The hardware we had available for the launch of Jobby was a single hosted Linux server with a 2GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. On this single modest server I was going to have to run both Apache 2 and MySQL. Previous applications I had worked on in Java had been deployed on 10-20 application servers with at least 2 dedicated, massively parallel, ultra expensive database servers. Of course, these applications handled traffic in the millions of hits per month.

To get a better idea of what was in store for a heavily loaded PHP application, I set up an interview with Owen Byrne, cofounder and Senior Software Engineer at digg.com. From talking with Owen I learned digg.com gets on the order of 200 million page views per month, and they're able to handle it with only 3 web servers and 8 small database servers (I'll discuss the reason for so many database servers in the next section). Even better news was that they were able to handle their first year's worth of growth on a single hosted server like the one I was using. My hardware worries were relieved. The hardware requirements to run high-traffic PHP applications didn't seem to be more costly than for Java.

Database Cost
Next I was worried about database costs. The enterprise Java applications I had worked on were powered by expensive database software like Oracle, Informix, and DB2. I had decided early on to use MySQL for my database, which is of course free. I wondered whether the simplicity of MySQL would be a liability when it came to trying to squeeze the last bit of performance out of the database. MySQL has had a reputation for being slow in the past, but most of that seems to have come from sub-optimal configuration and the overuse of MyISAM tables. Owen confirmed that the use of InnoDB for tables for read/write data makes a massive performance difference.

There are some scalability issues with MySQL, one being the need for large amounts of slave databases. However, these issues are decidedly not PHP related, and are being addressed in future versions of MySQL. It could be argued that even with the large amount of slave databases that are needed, the hardware required to support them is less expensive than the 8+ CPU boxes that typically power large Oracle or DB2 databases. The database requirements to run massive PHP applications still weren't more costly than for Java.

PHP Coding Cost
Lastly, and most importantly, I was worried about scalability and performance costs directly attributed to the PHP language itself. During my conversation with Owen I asked him if there were any performance or scalability problems he encountered that were related to having chosen to write the application in PHP. A bit to my surprise, he responded by saying, "none of the scaling challenges we faced had anything to do with PHP," and that "the biggest issues faced were database related." He even added, "in fact, we found that the lightweight nature of PHP allowed us to easily move processing tasks from the database to PHP in order to deal with that problem." Owen mentioned they use the APC PHP accelerator platform as well as MCache to lighten their database load. Still, I was skeptical. I had written Jobby entirely in PHP 5 using a framework which uses a highly object oriented MVC architecture to provide application development scalability. How would this hold up to large amounts of traffic?

My worries were largely related to the PHP engine having to effectively parse and interpret every included class on each page load. I discovered this was just my misunderstanding of the best way to configure a PHP server. After doing some research, I found that by using a combination of Apache 2's worker threads, FastCGI, and a PHP accelerator, this was no longer a problem. Any class or script loading overhead was only encountered on the first page load. Subsequent page loads were of comparative performance to a typical Java application. Making these configuration changes were trivial and generated massive performance gains. With regard to scalability and performance, PHP itself, even PHP 5 with heavy OO, was not more costly than Java.

Conclusion
Jobby was launched successfully on its single modest server and, thanks to links from Ajaxian and TechCrunch, went on to happily survive hundreds of thousands of hits in a single week. Assuming I applied all of my new found PHP tuning knowledge correctly, the application should be able to handle much more load on its current hardware.

Digg is in the process of preparing to scale to 10 times current load. I asked Owen Byrne if that meant an increase in headcount and he said that wasn't necessary. The only real change they identified was a switch to a different database platform. There doesn't seem to be any additional manpower cost to PHP scalability either.

It turns out that it really is fast and cheap to develop applications in PHP. Most scaling and performance challenges are almost always related to the data layer, and are common across all language platforms. Even as a self-proclaimed PHP evangelist, I was very startled to find out that all of the theories I was subscribing to were true. There is simply no truth to the idea that Java is better than scripting languages at writing scalable web applications. I won't go as far as to say that PHP is better than Java, because it is never that simple. However it just isn't true to say that PHP doesn't scale, and with the rise of Web 2.0, sites like Digg, Flickr, and even Jobby are proving that large scale applications can be rapidly built and maintained on-the-cheap, by one or two developers.

Reference Artical:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/digg_phps_scalability_and_perf.html
Monday April 10, 2006 9:28AM
by Brian Fioca

1 Vote(s)

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity

dharmavir — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:44:24 -0600

TED Talks Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

About this talk

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

About Elizabeth Gilbert

The author of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert has thought long and hard about some large topics. Her next fascination: genius, and how we ruin it.

1 Vote(s)

An Introduction to the Art of Unit Testing in PHP

dharmavir — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:39:12 -0600

Testing is an essential aspect of developing in any programming language. If you don't test your source code then how can you verify it works as expected? Manual testing can only be performed irregularly and usually only in limited ways. The answer to testing source code regularly, and in depth, is to write automated tests which can be frequently executed. In PHP such tests are usually written using a unit testing framework, a framework which allows the source code of any application or library to be tested as isolated units of functionality such as a single class or method. As unit testing has gained popularity, it has become a standard practice in PHP with libraries and frameworks such as Swiftmailer, the Zend Framework and Symfony all requiring unit test coverage of their source code.

Unit Testing is often seen as an arcane, time consuming task - which it sometimes can be! But the point of spending time writing tests is to improve the quality of your source code so it has fewer overall bugs, many of which are detected early, a continual testing process to prevent new changes from changing the behaviour of older code, and to provide confidence that your code can be depended on. There are other benefits too, and we'll detail these later.
The Testing Fallacies

Unit Testing, and actually all other forms of testing, fall afoul of four common excuses which hinder adoption by developers.

1. It's time consuming and takes too long.
2. Complex code cannot be tested.
3. So long as it works, I don't need to write tests.
4. Testing is boring.

These are testing fallacies, excuses which appear quite reasonable but are actually misinformed in subtle ways. So let's clear up a few things!

1 Vote(s)

Zipper - A Zipping Component In .NET 3.5 Using C# 3.0

dharmavir — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:35:22 -0600

Nice article with clean code and class diagram for Zipper - a Zipping component developed by Shams Mukhtar and article is posted on www.geekscafe.net

1 Vote(s)

RMSforms – A flexible CSS Forms Framework to Help Style Those Pesky Forms

dharmavir — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:28:36 -0600

If you are a Web designer or developer, you know that styling forms with CSS is a huge pain. Not only are browser inconsistencies rampant in form elements, but it is very difficult to get an advanced form to layout correctly, both visually & semantically. To alleviate these issues and to help designers / developers avoid unwanted stress, I took a crack at developing "RMSforms", a CSS forms framework. To apply it to your forms, simply download the RMSforms CSS Stylesheet, link to it from your HTML and apply the correct classes to the HTML structure described below and you will be on your way to creating complex CSS-based, tableless, flexible forms with ease.

1 Vote(s)