A good article on globalizing Oracle PHP applications, on the Oracle Technology Network:
"From the developers point of view, creating a globalized application introduces a new set of issues that need to be carefully planned from the early stages. Luckily, PHP offers all the necessary building blocks so that the developer can implement fully globalized applications. This document provides an introduction on how to effectively use these features when deploying in the Oracle Application Server. [...] The act of globalizing your application can be broken into four distinct stages:
- Data Integrity
- String Manipulation
- Text Translation
- Data Presentation"
Thu, 26 Feb 2004 11:59:58 +0000
Joao Prado Maia's introduction on using Gettext with PHP (ONLamp.com):
"The majority of open source projects, such as Xchat and others, use Gettext to translate the messages and strings shown in their user interface to several languages. The same concept can easily be applied to a Web site or Web application, and that is the objective of this article."
Thu, 26 Feb 2004 11:55:27 +0000
"The Dublin Core metadata element set set is a standard for cross-domain information resource description." It consists of the following elements:
- Title
- Creator
- Subject
- Description
- Publisher
- Contributor
- Date
- Type
- Format
- Identifier
- Source
- Language
- Relation
- Coverage
- Rights
Wed, 25 Feb 2004 09:20:43 +0000
Wed, 25 Feb 2004 07:29:52 +0000
Tue, 24 Feb 2004 10:52:28 +0000
Rich Skrenta explains why only RAM is fast:
"A disk head seek is about 9ms, and the human perceptual threshold for what seems "instant" is around 50ms. So if you have just one head seek per user request, you can support at most 5 hits/second on that server before users start to notice latency. If you have a typical filesystem with a little database on top, you may be up to 3 seeks per hit already."
Tue, 24 Feb 2004 10:34:24 +0000
Nick Usborne at A List Apart:
"If you want people to know how to find what they want on your site, be sure the language you use is relevant to their needs.
At its simplest, this means avoiding corporate-speak and industry jargon. It means taking the trouble to find out which words and terms your visitors use when thinking about your products and services."
Tue, 24 Feb 2004 07:48:24 +0000
Looks great: "WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability."
Thu, 19 Feb 2004 09:03:39 +0000

Java developer Russell Beattie is impressed by PHP projects:
"What is it about PHP that makes it so good for web projects? On the face of it, it looks like half-ass Perl or or scriptlet-based JSP pages. I mean all the bad things we're supposed to be getting away from with MVC and JSTL is included in PHP. Yet, the language is used quite efficiently and well. Yahoo uses it for a ton of projects, all the best web-based BBS systems are written in PHP and now WordPress impresses as well.
Once again I ask - why is Java web programming not keeping up? Why are Java web projects so bloated (I've got 5 MB of .jar files in my current web project and I think more are coming). Why are the pages so difficult to set up, maintain. Why do Java programmers insist on putting more logic in standard Java classes that make me have to touch ant, wait for compile and many times reboot my web server in order to test?
I think it's because PHP programmers want to get stuff done and Java programmers are geeks who want do stuff the "right" way. I'm getting sick of being in the latter camp."
Thu, 19 Feb 2004 08:16:54 +0000
Thu, 19 Feb 2004 08:13:26 +0000
Tim Berners-Lee on the world's first web browser:
"The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web. Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces).
I wrote the program using a NeXT computer. This had the advantage that there were some great tools available -it was a great computing environment in general. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already. There was an application builder to make all the menus as quickly as you could dream them up. there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object)"
Wed, 18 Feb 2004 10:57:27 +0000
revjim.net tells us how to write better code in PHP: "Writing good, clean PHP code isn't hard. One just needs a few simple guidelines."
He's explaining his approach to using Model/View/Controller architecture in a PHP application. (Not very well written, in my opinion - writing good, clean tutorials IS hard...)
Tue, 17 Feb 2004 09:15:47 +0000
Fri, 13 Feb 2004 09:58:36 +0000
Thu, 12 Feb 2004 12:40:35 +0000
ZDNet UK has a fun article on Schwäbisch Hall's migration from Windows to Linux:
"Once the migration was completed, though, there were concerns that the open-source software would be harder to use than Windows. Again, Schwäbisch Hall had a solution.
"We put the chairwoman of our workers' council on stage in front of all the municipal workers, and showed her using the new system. After that, we found that no man would say that he couldn't use his PC now that everyone knew a woman could do it," revealed Bräuner."
Thu, 12 Feb 2004 08:17:49 +0000
Timothy Appnel lets us know that Walt Disney Company is using RSS for internal communication:
"Internally, we are also leveraging RSS as a means of collaboration and communication for our software engineering teams. All engineers maintain blogs and use NewsAggregators to track tasks, projects, and new technology. In addition, we are tracking changes on our Wiki via RSS."
Thu, 12 Feb 2004 07:58:49 +0000
Tue, 10 Feb 2004 12:02:20 +0000
Gene Smith: "RSS and XML-based content syndication are really taking off. News organizations (like the NY Times) and business are increasingly using RSS to syndicate their content. RSS is also becoming the spam-free alternative to email newsletters.
Most RSS feeds are automagically generated from a content management system. As more feeds spring up, and more content is consumed through an RSS aggregator, content producers will need to think about how to create quality RSS feeds."
Mon, 09 Feb 2004 08:35:43 +0000
Fri, 06 Feb 2004 13:48:11 +0000
Andy Oram has written a nice article on Linux Documentation which is also a good read when thinking about how to document your own software...
Thu, 05 Feb 2004 07:51:41 +0000
Wed, 04 Feb 2004 13:19:15 +0000
Wed, 04 Feb 2004 12:59:45 +0000
Must check out Nagios. ONLamp.com has an article about Nagios: "Nagios is a feature-rich network monitoring package. Its displays provide current information about system or resource status across an entire network. In addition, it can also be configured to send alerts and perform other actions when problems are detected."
Tue, 03 Feb 2004 15:49:01 +0000