Programming for mind management

A wise king wanted advice about what to do when he faced a real crisis in his life. He met his master. The master gave him a locket and told him to open it only when he was in difficulty. After some years he was defeated in a battle and he lost his kingdom.

He was worried and was hiding in a cave. He suddenly remembered what his master had told him. He opened the locket and there he found a note, "even this will pass", and a second note which said, "if one door closes another door opens". He gained strength from this piece of advice and after a month won his kingdom back. He went to his master and thanked him and asked a question: "Why does the door close?" "The door is always open, your mind is closed," replied the master.

There are two types of worlds we live in. The visible world and the invisible world. The outer world and the inner world. Our body is in this outer space but our mind is in another space. Just as our body gets dirty if one is in a dirty space our inner self, our mind, gets dirty if we visit dirty areas in the inner world. If one broods over worry, dislike, anger, jealousy, then our mind is polluted. With such pollution you find the outer world a pain. The real pain is when our mind lives in negativity.

What type of world are we in? This is what one should really be aware of. Where are we placed psychologically is what we have to watch for. One believes that the outer world is the real world and not the inner world of mind.

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How to Move Your Joomla! Site to a New Server

Why not use a fresh install?

In my case, I probably could have. I only had about 4 or 5 articles on the test site, and I am using relatively few 3rd party CMT's (JomComment, TagBot, and JoomlaXplorer). But, I decided it would be easier just to move the installation I had to the new server, so I did.

You will want to move your Joomla! installation rather than re-install if you fit one or all of the following parameters:
Your site has accumulated a large amount of data in the database over time (sections, categories, content items, contacts, newsfeeds, etc.).
Your site uses multiple 3rd-part extensions already configured and/or customized for your site.

You just feel like trying it out to see if you can do it.

Step 1: Backup everything!
The first thing you want to do is backup all files within your Joomla! installation. Create a folder on your local system, and download all files to that folder using your ftp client application. I used FileZilla as my ftp client application to download all of my files to a folder on my desktop I named "howtojoomla".

Step 2: Export your database
Note: For this step, it really helps if you have phpMyAdmin installed on your server. Most hosting companies have phpMyAdmin already installed. If you are unsure, ask your hosting provider.

The second thing you need to do is export your Joomla! database. The best thing to do is to export it into an SQL file, which makes importing it easier in a later step. An SQL file will contain all of the necessary SQL commands for creating your database tables and filling them with your data. Be sure you export the entire database.

Step 3: Modify configuration.php
This step is very important. Go to the folder on your local system to which you downloaded all of your Joomla! files. In the first level folder, you will find the file named "configuration.php". Open this file with a text editor and make the necessary changes. At the very least, you will probably need to change the following parameters:
$mosConfig_absolute_path: This is the absolute server path to your new Joomla! installation. It will probably look something like "/path/to/joomla/installation".
$mosConfig_cachepath: This is the absolute server path to the cache for your Joomla! installation. It will probably look something like "/path/to/joomla/installation/cache".
$mosConfig_live_site: This is your website's url. It will be something like "http://www.yoursite.com".
$mosConfig_host: This is the location of the server that hosts your MySQL database. For most instances, this value will be "localhost". If you are unsure, ask your hosting provider.
$mosConfig_db: This is the name of your MySQL database.
$mosConfig_user: This is the database user name. Make sure this user has all privileges on your database.
$mosConfig_password: This is the password for your MySQL database user.

Step 4: Upload all of your files to your new server
Using an ftp client application (like FileZilla), upload all of your files to the location on your new server where you want to install Joomla!.

Step 5: Import your database to your new MySQL server
Using phpMyAdmin (or console commands if you are an advanced database administrator) and the SQL file you generated in step 2, import your old database into your new database.

Step 6: Test your new installation
Your move should now be complete, but please don't take my word for it. Test your site to make sure that everything is in it's proper place and working the way you expect it to. For example, if you did not use relative url's for your links on your old site, they will not work properly on your new site.

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What do you most dislike about PHP?

The title of this post is probably a little bit flamebait-ish, but I’m actually genuinely interested to get the Internet’s opinion on the following:

Pick any three aspects of PHP that makes you feel dirty as a developer, and post them as a comment here.

For me it’s:
- The standard library is a huge, monolithic mess. This has been covered before, so I won’t beat a dead horse. I’d love to see the standard library reorganized and some sanity introduced around the naming of certain aspects.

- Superglobals because they behave weirdly in certain scenarios and make unit testing a pain in the ass.

- omg\namespace\separator\is\Backslash, which has effectively killed this long-awaited feature for me.

Again, I don’t intend for this to be about hating on PHP or its developers (read: comments that don’t contribute anything meaningful to the discussion won’t see the light of day). Instead, I want to formalize what causes people pain when working with PHP today. Who knows — maybe somebody, somewhere will listen?

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Installing Drupal on Ubuntu (Gutsy) in a few easy steps

Drupal is a great solution if you’re looking for a CMS system. In order to sneakily install LAMP with the minimum of fuss, I usually just install mod php and mod mysql (the apache related modules for php and mysql respectively) and that triggers pretty much everything else to be pulled automatically! So, from the command line…

sudo aptitude install libapache2-mod-php5

sudo aptitude install php5-mysql

… should give you Apache, MySQL and PHP in one fell swoop. Just to be sure that all is well run the following install commands

sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

Then download and install Drupal (version 6.6 at time of writing) at http://drupal.org and follow their install guide.

One final tip, if there’s any problem with your apache installation’s configuration, you can install phpMyAdmin in order to plough through these problems as it will supply its own configuration. For example, I got the database configuration error when I was trying to connect to my database for the first time using Drupal

“Your web server does not appear to support any common database types. Check with your hosting provider to see if they offer any databases that Drupal supports.”

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20 Reasons Why I Choose WordPress

1. WordPress is Free
Whether you are using a hosted WordPress.com or opt to install the script on your own web server, WordPress is made available gratis. It costs you nothing to use. Who says “There is no free lunch in this world?

2. Easy to Setup
Installing WordPress is super fast and super easy. In fact, the process is much simpler if you’re using Fantastico autoinstaller that comes pre-installed with your hosting package. It doesn’t get any easier than that. If you need help with WordPress setup, ask and thou shall receive.

3. Themes Availability
You don’t like the look of your default theme? There are plenty of great design themes available for you to choose from. It doesn’t matter what your preference is, there is always one for you that suits your taste and personality.

If budget isn’t an issue, do yourself a favor and differentiate your blog with a premium theme.

4. Plug-ins Do Wonder
Without any doubt, the primary reason I choose WordPress over any other blogging platforms is the limitless possibility I could extend its functionality using a wide array of plug-ins which are continually built to make WordPress the best it can be for the blogging community at large. Best of all, all these plug-ins are free to use.

5. No-Fuss Maintenance
With WordPress Automatic Upgrade plug-in, I can always be sure of running the latest software in case of any upgrade. The process has been simplified and automated without the need to go through the individual upgrade steps.

6. No Programming Skill
WordPress can be used out-of-the-box without any programming skill that even the greenest of newbies couldn’t screw it up! Though a little knowledge in HTML or PHP might be an advantage, albeit not a necessity.

7. User-Friendly
WordPress Admin dashboard is one of the most user-friendly interface you can find. Whether you need to write a post or manage your settings, navigation hasn’t been that simpler, hasn’t it? As if that’s already good enough, the upcoming WordPress Version 2.7 gets even better and sleeker.

8. Open Source
Being an open source platform, in theory WordPress will have a better software development model which is good from users’ perspective. There will always be a continual improvement to its platform.

9. Customizable
Since WordPress platform function in a template-based structure, customization has never been easier. A typical blog structure consists of header, content, sidebar and footer. Any change to its template can be conveniently done right from the Admin Dashboard. I was pretty much impressed with it in the beginning.

10. Hassle-free Integration
If you do have an existing static website, now is the time you should consider WordPress to power your site. I can’t think of any other Content Management System (CMS) that is comparable to WordPress.

Do you know you can easily integrate WordPress pages seamlessly into your existing website? I’ve done it on numerous occasions for my clients.

11. Ease of Migration
The process of migration is as easy as telling WordPress which blogging platform to access and import from. All your posts and comments in another platform will be migrated in a relatively easy process. Go to ‘Import ‘ under ‘Manage’ on your Admin Dashboard.

12. SEO-Friendly
With the built-in auto-ping feature in WordPress and coupled with the use of Google XML Sitemaps plug-in, it takes minimal efforts to get indexed by search engines. In fact, Google loves blogs powered by WordPress. In case you aren’t aware, here’s 15 SEO Tips for Beginners.

13. Good Community Support
Due to its popularity, the solution to any WordPress problem is just by googling the question. Well, at least that’s what I usually do. There are just too many discussions on WordPress-related issues on various forums and discussion groups that a typical answer to any question can be readily available at the click of a mouse.

14. Monetize
For a long time, Google Adsense has been the preferred choice for blog monetization. With the availability of WordPress plug-ins, monetizing a blog is just as simple as pie.

Though I believe blogspot manages and integrates Google Adsense better than WordPress.

15. Statisticize
Checking my stats is easy with Google Analytic. All I need is to create an account and place the code conveniently at the footer.php. As a matter of practice, it is one of the first things I do on my post-install checklist.

16. Multi-Lingual
By default WordPress is in English, however the software has built-in capability that supports localization in any other languages. Learn how To Install WordPress in Your Language.

17. More Dofollow on WordPress
Probably it is much easier to remove the nofollow tag on WordPress than other blogging platforms. I could be wrong but more often than not, more and more blogs powered by WordPress are adopting the dofollow concept if you ask me.

18. Better Time Management
What I love about WordPress is the fact I could easily schedule my post to be published at a later date with post-time stamp. As such, I could manage my time better and more efficiently. Write today, post tomorrow.

19. Multi-User Environment
WordPress is not limited to just one user. It works in a multi-user environment where two or more people could collaborate on a single project using WordPress. How ’bout that?

20. If You Can Beat Them, You Join Them
If the majority of probloggers like Darren from Problogger, John Chow, Jeremy, to name a few, are using WordPress, it’s much safer to place your bet on WordPress than any other blogging platforms. If you can’t beat them, you’re better off joining them. Unless, you are as famous as Seth Godin.

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Google Sorts One Petabyte Of Data In 6 Hours

According to last Friday's Official Google Blog, the Google Systems Infrastructure Team has sorted a record 1 terabyte of data on 1,000 computers in only 68 seconds, which breaks the previous mark of 209 seconds established in July by Yahoo.

Team leader Grzegorz Czajkowski wrote that the team followed the rules of a standard terabyte sort benchmark and used Google's MapReduce software framework that supports parallel computations over large (multiple petabyte) data sets on clusters of computers. Yahoo's effort had featured a 910-node cluster, and used Hadoop, an open-source MapReduce implementation.

The sort benchmark, which was created in 1998 by computer scientist Jim Gray, specifies the input data (10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files), which must be completely sorted and written to disk. Not content with just rewriting the record book, the Google team then decided to up the ante in sorting massive volumes of data.

"Sometimes you need to sort more than a terabyte, so we were curious to find out what happens when you sort more and gave one petabyte (PB) a try," said Czajkowski. "It took six hours and two minutes to sort 1 PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers. We're not aware of any other sorting experiment at this scale and are obviously very excited to be able to process so much data so quickly."

One petabyte is a thousand terabytes, or roughly 12 times the amount of archived Web data in the U.S. Library of Congress as of May 2008. One way to put that amount in perspective, according to Czajkowski, is to consider that the aggregate size of data processed by all instances of MapReduce at Google was, on average, 20 PB per day in January 2008. A paper explaining MapReduce on the Google labs site says that the upwards of one thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day. So the infrastructure team's MapReduce job that extended the benchmark factors out to 50 typical MapReduce jobs, or one-twentieth the total of all daily MapReduce jobs run on Google's clusters.

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Google Analytic and Joomla

Google Analytics is a free website tracking tool which helps you understand your website’s visitor. We highly recommend it, and in this post will run you through how to add Google Analytics to either Joomla 1.5 or Joomla 1.0.1x.

We have broken down the answer of this question into two steps:

1. Create a Google Analytics account
2. Add the Analytics code to your Joomla template

Go to the Google Analytics website and sign up for account.
Once you’ve followed the registration process you will come to a page where you are given a tracking code to add to each page of your website. If you are given the choice to choose between the new tracking code (ga.js) or the old tracking code (urchin.js) choose the new tracking code.
Keep this webpage open with the tracking code on as we’re going to need it in a few minutes.

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15 Firefox Tricks

15 Coolest Firefox Tricks Ever

Everybody’s favorite open-source browser, Firefox, is great right out of the box. And by adding some of the awesome extensions available out there, the browser just gets better and better.

But look under the hood, and there are a bunch of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks available that will crank Firefox up and pimp your browser. Make it faster, cooler, more efficient. Get to be a Jedi master with the following cool Firefox tricks.

1) More screen space. Make your icons small. Go to View - Toolbars - Customize and check the “Use small icons” box.

2) Smart keywords. If there’s a search you use a lot (let’s say IMDB.com’s people search), this is an awesome tool that not many people use. Right-click on the search box, select “Add a Keyword for this search”, give the keyword a name and an easy-to-type and easy-to-remember shortcut name (let’s say “actor”) and save it. Now, when you want to do an actor search, go to Firefox’s address bar, type “actor” and the name of the actor and press return. Instant search! You can do this with any search box.

3) Keyboard shortcuts. This is where you become a real Jedi. It just takes a little while to learn these, but once you do, your browsing will be super fast. Here are some of the most common (and my personal favs):

* Spacebar (page down)
* Shift-Spacebar (page up)
* Ctrl+F (find)
* Alt-N (find next)
* Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
* Ctrl+T (new tab)
* Ctrl+K (go to search box)
* Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
* Ctrl+= (increase text size)
* Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
* Ctrl-W (close tab)
* F5 (reload)
* Alt-Home (go to home page)

4) Auto-complete. This is another keyboard shortcut, but it’s not commonly known and very useful. Go to the address bar (Control-L) and type the name of the site without the “www” or the “.com”. Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com” and take you there - like magic! For .net addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter.

5) Tab navigation. Instead of using the mouse to select different tabs that you have open, use the keyboard. Here are the shortcuts:

* Ctrl+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
* Ctrl+Shft+Tab (rotate to the previous tab)
* Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number to jump to a specific tab)

6) Mouse shortcuts. Sometimes you’re already using your mouse and it’s easier to use a mouse shortcut than to go back to the keyboard. Master these cool ones:

* Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
* Shift-scroll down (previous page)
* Shift-scroll up (next page)
* Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
* Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
* Middle click on a tab (closes tab)

7) Delete items from address bar history. Firefox’s ability to automatically show previous URLs you’ve visited, as you type, in the address bar’s drop-down history menu is very cool. But sometimes you just don’t want those URLs to show up (I won’t ask why). Go to the address bar (Ctrl-L), start typing an address, and the drop-down menu will appear with the URLs of pages you’ve visited with those letters in them. Use the down-arrow to go down to an address you want to delete, and press the Delete key to make it disappear.

8) User chrome. If you really want to trick out your Firefox, you’ll want to create a UserChrome.css file and customize your browser. It’s a bit complicated to get into here, but check out this tutorial.

9) Create a user.js file. Another way to customize Firefox, creating a user.js file can really speed up your browsing. You’ll need to create a text file named user.js in your profile folder (see this to find out where the profile folder is) and see this example user.js file that you can modify. Created by techlifeweb.com, this example explains some of the things you can do in its comments.

10) about:config. The true power user’s tool, about.config isn’t something to mess with if you don’t know what a setting does. You can get to the main configuration screen by putting about:config in the browser’s address bar. See Mozillazine’s about:config tips and screenshots.

11) Add a keyword for a bookmark. Go to your bookmarks much faster by giving them keywords. Right-click the bookmark and then select Properties. Put a short keyword in the keyword field, save it, and now you can type that keyword in the address bar and it will go to that bookmark.

12) Speed up Firefox. If you have a broadband connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup connections). Here’s how:

* Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
* Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
* Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
* Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
* Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

13) Limit RAM usage. If Firefox takes up too much memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed to us. Again, go to about:config, filter “browser.cache” and select “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it, depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between 512MB and 1GB ram.

14) Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized. This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go. Again, go to about:config, right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean. Name it “config.trim_on_minimize” and set it to TRUE. You have to restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.

15) Move or remove the close tab button. Do you accidentally click on the close button of Firefox’s tabs? You can move them or remove them, again through about:config. Edit the preference for “browser.tabs.closeButtons”. Here are the meanings of each value:

* 0: Display a close button on the active tab only
* 1:(Default) Display close buttons on all tabs
* 2:Don’t display any close buttons
* 3:Display a single close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)

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Programming for mind management

A wise king wanted advice about what to do when he faced a real crisis in his life. He met his master. The master gave him a locket and told him to open it only when he was in difficulty. After some years he was defeated in a battle and he lost his kingdom.

He was worried and was hiding in a cave. He suddenly remembered what his master had told him. He opened the locket and there he found a note, "even this will pass", and a second note which said, "if one door closes another door opens". He gained strength from this piece of advice and after a month won his kingdom back. He went to his master and thanked him and asked a question: "Why does the door close?" "The door is always open, your mind is closed," replied the master.

There are two types of worlds we live in. The visible world and the invisible world. The outer world and the inner world. Our body is in this outer space but our mind is in another space. Just as our body gets dirty if one is in a dirty space our inner self, our mind, gets dirty if we visit dirty areas in the inner world. If one broods over worry, dislike, anger, jealousy, then our mind is polluted. With such pollution you find the outer world a pain. The real pain is when our mind lives in negativity.

What type of world are we in? This is what one should really be aware of. Where are we placed psychologically is what we have to watch for. One believes that the outer world is the real world and not the inner world of mind.

Read More..

PHP Programming is Your Ticket to Web Success

Just like any programming language today, PHP has its share of commands which we now call as tags. These as the ones used to start and end a program or a website output in this case.

For some people, it may be too complicated but given a couple of sessions and trial on how to program using PHP, most of these tags such as and will become elementary for most.

You can build a lot of things with PHP and one important program you can compile are file uploaders which will be important when you need to place images or other files necessary for you site.

If you’re a PHP developer who has built a certain number of web applications, then it’s quite probable that you’ve already worked with HTTP file uploads. They play a relevant role in the business logic of any PHP program that permits users to transfer specific files from their client computers to a web server via a web-based front-end, which is generally represented by an online form.

Ranking behind Java, C, and Visual Basic, PHP is the fourth most popular computer programming language that is especially suited for web development
. It mainly runs on a web server with PHP code as its input and generating web pages as output. PHP can be installed on web servers, operating systems and platforms. It can be used for command-line scripting and client-side GUI application, as well as with several relational database management systems. The PHP group provides the complete source code for users to build, customize and expand for their own purposes and the best part is, it is free of charge.

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Zend Framework update focuses on AJAX integration

Zend has added integration with the Dojo JavaScript toolkit in the new version of its PHP programming platform.

Zend Framework 1.6, released yesterday, makes it easy to integrate AJAX and JavaScript with PHP applications, according to the company. There is a Dojo view helper for setting up the Dojo environment, along with form elements and decorators for integrating with Dojo’s Dijit library, which provides interface widgets. A new JSON-RPC server implementation and class can manipulate Dojo data envelopes in Zend.

Also new in Zend Framework 1.6 is interoperability with the SOAP Web services protocol, which Zend said makes connecting Web services to data across the Internet easier. New features around SOAP include client and server classes that can operate in both WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and non-WSDL modes, and auto-discovery. Unit testing features for controllers enable agile practices like unit testing and test-driven development, where a developer writes tests prior to writing code.

“Functional tests for your application will be much easier to write now that Zend Framework has built-in support for testing controllers,” said Wil Sinclair, Zend’s development manager.

Other new features and improvements are a component for displaying large data sets from multiple sources, a service providing text-based CAPTCHA images, and smaller XML documents that are easier to read, the company said.

Zend will tout version 1.6 at ZendCon 2008, taking place Sept. 15-18 in Santa Clara. The conference offers presentations and networking opportunities for PHP developers and business managers.

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Evaluating Open Source Options

The great thing about open source is that there are usually a ton of open source projects to help you solve a problem. The bad thing about open source is that there are usually a ton of open source projects to help you solve a problem. Part of a good open source developer is the mentality to test and evaluate different projects and then choose the best option for your current problem.

Documentation
This goes along with my research phase. Projects with good documentation are much easier to work with. If the project leaders have not written a lot of documentation, then they will most likely not be very forthcoming with support requests. Sometimes programmers put the documentation inside the code itself and solely rely on things like javadocs. This is nice that they wrote something, but digging through javadocs can be a pain because it is often hard to piece together how the classes interact.

Community Activity
The project community is another great place to get support. I look for projects that have active communities with participants outside the sponsoring company. If the community is just full of employees from the sponsoring company, I worry that the project has not been picked up by a lot of people. But a vibrant community is a great thing because people outside the company start to take ownership of the project.

Project Lifetime & Release Cycle
Look at how long the project has been around and how often it releases code. A project that has been around a few years with regular releases is probably solid. A project that hasn’t released in five years is probably dead. I don’t mind using really new projects, you just have to be careful with them. For new projects, I put a more emphasis on the project momentum.

Project Momentum
Project momentum is probably the most important factor for me. I want to use an open source project that will be active throughout the life cycle of my development project. Otherwise you start to have the situation of supporting legacy code that no-one is familiar with. Momentum is tricky and you have to take into account the overall open source atmosphere. What trends is the industry following? What types of technologies are now hot?

A good example of this is Struts. Struts became the standard for java MVC programming a long time ago. There are a ton of projects and programmers that use Struts. But Struts is now on the way out. People have figured out ways to design frameworks that extend the functionality of struts. Would I choose Struts for a new project? No. I feel that a safer bet would be to use a newer, more up and coming framework like Spring MVC.
So evaluting your open source options is not a fixed science and involves some fuzzy math. In the end, choose a library that you are comfortable with and you think will have a longevity in the industry.

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Open Source App Suites: Try the Individual Components

Even if you only favor some of the adjunct applications in them, they may complement your main applications very well.

We’ve written about the OpenOffice.org open source productivity suite before, which is out in a new version 3.0. It’s not perfect, and not perfectly compatible with Microsoft Office, but has its attractions. If you’ve avoided trying it because you already have core productivity applications such as a word processor and a database that you favor, you may still want to look into the other free applications that come with the suite.

Draw is a Microsoft Visio-like diagram drawing application in OpenOffice, Math is a tool for creating and working with mathematical formulas, and Impress is for building presentations. You can launch any or all of these applications on their own, and you may find they complement your core applications.

Today on the OStatic blog, we covered a fork of OpenOffice called Go-oo, which is for Windows and Linux. It’s a lighter, faster version of the suite, but has the same programs. There are also some attractions to the Go-oo versions that are not found in OpenOffice.

For example, the Calc spreadsheet in Go-oo supports VBA macros very smoothly, so you may find that an Excel spreadsheet macro that chokes in OpenOffice will run smoothly with Go-oo. Go-oo also has under-the-hood extras such as improved support for Microsoft binary files. The best way to get a feel for its compatibility with Microsoft Office files is to simply import a number of them. The biggest benefit to Go-oo over OpenOffice, though, is speed, especially at loading applications.

It’s a mistake to assume that the attraction of a software suite is necessarily the whole suite–the sum of all the parts. For diagrams, math, compatibility with Excel, and more reasons, some of the parts in these open source suites may benefit you.

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Microsoft 'not against' open source

The division between proprietary software vendors and open-source providers is not as clear as some industry players perceive it to be. As more enterprises consider adopting open source technologies, even traditional software vendors such as Microsoft have taken steps in responding to such customer needs.

"Open source is not a product but an approach to software development," said Matthew Hardman, platform strategy manager at Microsoft Singapore. "Microsoft does not compete with open source, just as Nike does not compete with running."

Hardman said the software giant seeks to provide the 'best possible platform' for open source applications to run. "We believe that enterprises and vendors should have a choice of software development methodology, and open source is one such choice."

The platform strategy manager noted however, that Microsoft will compete with open source-based providers, just as it also competes with other proprietary vendors.

Open-source contributions

According to Hardman, Microsoft has contributed to technologies that are deemed open source. "PHP, a technology used to build web pages, ran into multiple issues around performance and scalability on Windows Server 2003," he said. "With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 and host technology such as Fast CGI, we are now able to run PHP up to 200 per cent faster than Linux."

Hardman said the company has contributed code to PHP libraries for database support, making it easier for PHP developers to connect to Microsoft databases.

"Linux is open source, but open source is not Linux," Hardman noted. "PHP was designed to make it easy for people to build web pages, not specifically to run only on Linux."

As part of its open-source strategy, the company hosts a website called CodePlex, where Microsoft employees and the developer community work on some 6,000 open-source projects. "Examples of such projects include the AJAX Control Toolkit, SugarCRM, .Net, and code that can interact with the 'World of Warcraft'," Hardman said.

CodePlex includes more than just projects that Microsoft has released, according to Hardman. "It's a hosting platform where people can create and share projects, and we have also used it to share some of our technology to encourage further innovation."

Some five million developers worldwide have created various applications using Microsoft platform technologies such as Windows, .Net, Windows Server and Microsoft Xbox, according to the software giant.

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Yahoo's transforms data mining with open-source Hadoop

BEHIND Yahoo's push to open up web search and advertising is software powerful enough to sort through the entire US Library of Congress in less than half a minute.

The software, called Hadoop, is part of Yahoo's massive computing grid and is transforming the way Yahoo and corporate giants such as IBM extract meaning from enormous streams of data.
Universities are also using the code - an open-source version of software Google relies on for daily operation - to train a new generation of computer scientists and engineers.

"It makes it possible to actually take advantage of all the computers we have hooked together," Yahoo search and advertising sciences vice-president Larry Heck says.

Hadoop improves the relevance of ads Yahoo shows on the internet by analysing the company's endless flow of data - now more than 10TB daily - on the fly. As users click from Yahoo Mail to Yahoo Search to Yahoo Finance and back again, Hadoop helps figure out what ad, if any, is likely to catch someone's attention.

The key lies in mining insights from mind-boggling amounts of data. If a woman repeatedly reads reviews of sports utility vehicles, then clicks on automotive classifieds and then orders a book on helping a child adjust to kindergarten, she might be in the market for a family-size car, according to a Yahoo sales presentation.

As part of the push for more openness, Yahoo will be using the technology to boost ad sales not only on its own websites but on sites owned by the 796 members of a newspaper consortium working with the search giant to sell more ads at better prices.

In some ways, perhaps it is even more targeted than search advertising," says Leon Levitt, digital media vice-president for Cox Newspapers, a consortium member.

For Yahoo, an innovative approach to internet advertising is a major accomplishment. When Yahoo launched its Hadoop project in January 2006, it was selling search advertising for half of what Google charged and watched its share of internet searches dwindle.

Hadoop was first put to work building Yahoo's web index - the biggest computing problem inside Yahoo. Since then, a team of engineers has tuned the software, and researchers inside and outside of Yahoo have begun using it to experiment with giant data sets.

"All of a sudden, instead of waiting overnight, people could get the results of their experiments in a minute," says Doug Cutting, a work-at-home dad who hacked out the first version of Hadoop in his home in Sonoma County, California, as part of an open-source search project.

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PHP Shopping Cart

Purchasing a good shopping cart solution could be an overwhelming task. ASP, PHP, Cold Fusion or Flash? There are so many acronyms flying around that it is fairly impossible for those who are not in the thick of it to decide what shopping cart to choose. Of course, as far as business owners are concerned, options, features and ease of use are the main criteria for choosing the software platform. They are only bothered by concerns like inventory control, discount coupons, secure transactions and custom product options. It is true that most buyers are supremely unaware of the stuff that their cart is made of; yet, it is this that makes their cart work!

The backbone of any shopping cart solution is the scripting language in which it is written. The most common languages used are PHP and ASP. Using different scripting languages has definite implications on the power of your shopping cart software.

ASP or Active Server Pages is from Microsoft’s treasure trove of programming languages. It is used in conjunction with IIS (Internet Information Server) which runs only on Microsoft servers. ASP is popular because it fits in snugly with Windows based servers and other Microsoft programs. But, one of its greatest limitations is its exclusivity; it is supported only on Microsoft servers. Of course, there are 3rd party applications that can force compatibility with other servers; but these are workarounds. ASP is also rather hard for newcomers to pick up from scratch.

PHP or Personal Home Page was originally developed by three independent programmers who wanted to create a programming language that was easy to understand, flexible and highly versatile. Before long, PHP’s powerful scripting engine had hundreds of programmers working with it and developing it. Ultimately, PHP became one of the largest and most versatile open source scripting languages to be used on the web.

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What is PHP Hosting?

PHP hosting is a server-side scripting environment that is used to create dynamic web pages. PHP is an abbreviation for Hypertext Preprocessor, an open source language widely used by programmers and web developers. The fact that it is open source gives it a lot of advantages over proprietary programming languages. Due to this reason, PHP has been the most famous server-side scripting language and almost all hosting providers offer PHP hosting services nowadays.

PHP is an object oriented language. The way PHP hosting works is that the web server would filter a request document using PHP and generates the output from PHP to the web browser. These documents are usually in HTML format with PHP tags inside. The tags can be run on both Windows and UNIX servers. In terms of output text, PHP is capable to generate any format such as XHTML and XML.

With PHP, web developers would be able to perform any CGI tasks, such as generate dynamic contents or send and receive cookies. PHP is also capable of outputting PDF files, Flash videos and images on the fly at high speed. This is possible due to its ability to save the required files in its file system and forming a server-side cache.

There are a host of advantages of using a PHP hosting. For beginners, it is a relatively easy language to learn and work on. While for seasoned developers, there are a lot of advanced applications and features that comes with PHP hosting. In terms of cost, it is one of the cheapest hosting solutions as it is an open-source technology. There are also programming tools that come free with PHP hosting, contributed by programmers worldwide.

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Sun, IBM launch ODF tools initiative

Sun and IBM are expected Wednesday to announce the Open Document Format Toolkit Union, an open-source project aimed at making it easier for developers to use ODF.

Sun is contributing an initial set of code that API developers can use to work with ODF files without having to know the ins and outs of the technical specification, the companies said.

The joint announcement follows the launch last year of an initial ODF Toolkit project on the OpenOffice.org project site.

"We're going to have a call to action to other folks," said Sun spokeswoman Terri Molini. "We're welcoming everybody from Microsoft to whomever. That's our goal here, to get out and do some outreach."

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Java: Open Source RDF Framework

It has been designed with flexibility in mind. It can be deployed on top of a variety of storage systems (relational databases, in-memory, filesystems, keyword indexers, etc.), and offers a large scala of tools to developers to leverage the power of RDF and RDF Schema, such as a flexible access API, which supports both local and remote (through HTTP or RMI) access, and several query languages, of which SeRQL is the most powerful one.

Originally, it was developed by Aduna (then known as Aidministrator) as a research prototype for the EU research project On-To-Knowledge. Now, it is further developed and maintained by Aduna in cooperation with NLnet Foundation, developers from Ontotext, and a number of volunteer developers who contribute ideas, bug reports and fixes.

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Open Source State Machine Compiler

SMC uses the state pattern to its fullest extent. In the real world, events don’t always happen when they should. Dealing with unexpected events is a must for a robust application. By combining virtual methods with the state pattern, SMC allows you to define “Default” transitions - transitions which allow your objects to handle unexpected events, recover and continue providing service (rather than crashing, burning and getting you into trouble).

SMC is written in Java but it can generates code for the following object-oriented programming languages:

C
C++
C#
[incr Tcl]
Groovy
Java
Lua
Objective-C
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala
VB.net


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