Blogs
Products, Services, Solutions, what could be the difference?
Things sold to customers for money are often listed as one of the above. It is relatively easy to distinguish products from services:
- Products are physical are physical entities that are manufactured from raw materials and exchanged on a unitary basis for a fixed cost
- Services are non-physical entities that are often a result of the application of know-how, skills and technology to transform a given situation
The distinguishing element in the above definition is the physical, and non-physical nature of each entity
A review of the Rackspace CloudSites elastic managed web hosting
Concurrently with my review of the Media Temple (mt) Grid Hosting Service, I took some time to review, and even install Drupal in the Rackspace CloudSites hosting environment. My main motivation for testing the Rackspace CloudSites offering was to find a hosting solution that was monitored, robust, flexible, and extensible.
Media Temple (mt) - A review of the Grid Hosting Service
I recently had the opportunity to read reviews on various hosting solutions and even test a few, some for quite some time. The least of which (in terms of the length of subscription) was Media Temple Grid Hosting. This solution is similar to Rackspace CloudSites in that each account is provided with a specific number of compute cycles per period. Unlike Amazon EC2, Neither Rackspace CloudSites nor Media Temple gives a clear translation or commitment on processor speed - Amazon actually tells you the frequency of the virtual processor that you are getting.
Site5 SSH Blockage: Safe but extremely inconvenient
I have been running some SVN repositories on a SIte5 server for some time and I can hardly complain about the service - it is generally stable and worth more than they charge for it. However, I am disappointed by the fact that they have disabled SSH access and plan to do so for at least a day because they are working on securing the setup.
Mosso Cloud Servers and Files, a match for Amazon EC2/S3 ?
I may be singing their praises too soon, but I like the fact that the process of provisioning, configuring and scaling servers is painless on Mosso compared to Amazon (I am always scared of loosing my nicely configured EC2 instance by accident or error if I do not quickly make it persistent in a block), the Mosso /hr prices make it financially painless to create small DEV servers from an existing backup and let it keep running for as long as the client wants without getting jittery about schedules and cost (I always wake up at night and wonder if I closed down my EC2 DEV server instances -
backup_migrate module seems to have a bug that causes a 'duplicate table'
New version of backup_migrate module seems to have a bug that causes a 'duplicate table' error in the Drupal update script [Backup and Migrate 6.x-2.x-dev (2009-Apr-06)]
* user warning: Duplicate column name 'filters' query: ALTER TABLE backup_migrate_profiles ADD `filters` TEXT DEFAULT NULL in /public_html/domain.com/includes/database.mysql-common.inc on line 298.
Aiming for an exact UI/UX and compatibility with all browsers is not practical
My very informed opinion casts doubt on striving to have the same exact User Experience in IE6 as the other more modern and relatively standards compliant browsers (Mozilla, Webkit etc). This can ofcourse be achieved if the expectations for the advanced browsers are lowered to a point where no graceful degradation will be required to meet IE6 capabilities.
Quick Example
Choose between CCK, Taxonomy of both for content structure and ontology
I just commented in an external blog discussion about whether to use CCK or Taxonomy for Drupal structured content. The theme of my argument is that these two approaches of structuring content within the Drupal framework are not in competition, but just two tools that complement each other and can be used together to avail power to strcuture, define and query CMS content in a granular and flexible fashion.
Filefield Image Drupal Module incompatible with fieldfield and imagefield in Drupal 6
I have been battling an elusive issue which caused image management module updated to cause a CCK image field not to display (not using imagecache on that field). After some troubleshooting, I have arrived att he conclusion that rolling back Filefield Image from the currently recommended version 6.x-1.0 (2008-Jul-17) back to FileField Image 6.x-1.0-beta2 gets things workign OK. The code problem could be with the other image field or filefiled and imageAPI versions, but the quick fiex that has worked for me is to rollback this particular module update.
Evaluating Apple Safari Web Browser for Windows
Testing and evaluating Apple Safari (Beta) as a viable web browser on Windows XP


