Some friends and what they are doing - part I

This article resides in my sandbox for some time and this is the big day for him. I will write some ideas about some friends that are running IT business. Emil Marcoci - Software engineer Emil is first of all my friend but also a great software engineer. He enjoys a nice mountain city working w...

Human Computer Interaction - Episode IV - Javascript Keyboard Shortcuts

I hope you already used GMail. If you already did, I think you noticed the keyboard shortcuts at the bottom of the page....

Human Computer Interaction - Episode III

I want to share some ideas about using AJAX in web interface development. Working with Dojo, jQuery or any other JavaScript framework any web developer is able to offer a higher level of usability. In my projects I try to implement the following: Error checking in forms: Detecting duplicates of ...

Alternative PHP Cache

I had a small conversation with a junior PHP developer and I was disappointed about the lack of knowledge on PHP caching. In this article I will cover some ideas about APC. What is APC? Php.net offers a laconic presentation: " The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache fo...

PHP and MySQL Query Profiler

This is not really something new, but I had to use it few days ago and I decided to write my experience with the new Query Profiler from MySQL. Jeremy Cole from Proven Scaling did a great job and since MySQL Community Server 5.0.37 we have now a built-in tool for performance analysis. I wrote a v...

Culture Factor in Team Management and Leadership

Maybe you've heard the expression: "Managing computer programmers is like herding cats". I think that analogy is not chosen just happy. Traditional management, through some sort of command-control hierarchy, isn't what a manager should attempt. Programmers are complex people and have a spacial way...

Windows Live Writer

I found a very interesting tool to write articles on Ideaticus.com : Windows Live Writer. I have to admit that I'm rarely impressed by Microsoft software and in this case I really am. First of all it was extremely easy to connect this software to my WordPress and if someone has more then one site ...

Importing CSV files with PHP

Attention: this is a technical article. Sometimes site owners, with almost zero technical knowledge, want a way to save their database then to import them directly from their web application. For this I usualy save every table as CSV file and for import, I parse every csv file and import in the c...

Human Computer Interaction - Episode II

I managed to finish another article about Human Computer Interaction. In the previous episode we covered some rules about search results. Maybe some of you found them useful and I decided to write about Graphical User Interface (GUI). The most used paradigm in Graphical User Interfaces is "windo...

Firefox 3

It's been a while since my first download of Firefox and I'm proud of using the best web browser in the world. This has nothing to do with my sympathy for open source movement and definitely not a manifesto against Microsoft. In my opinion Firefox is the best. I found today the world record idea ...

Code reuse in web context

Hello everyone! I'll write today about a code reuse, maybe one of the most interesting controversy of the IT industry. I have three questions that I'll try to answer in this article: Why it is good to reuse code and why it is bad? How and when can we reuse the code? How to minimize the ...

BigSmall Holiday

I didn't had much time to work on this project lately but I have many pages with fragments that require some time to clean up and get some good articles on-line. I'm involved in interesting projects and many thoughts will be posted on Ideaticus. Also, I had some interesting meetings with web devel...

MDP - MySpace Developer Platform

This is a very short post! Congratulations MySpace! I found few days ago their Developers sections and I think is great. Since august 2006, when Facebook launched their API, I didn't found any other important development platform on big social networks. One more thing about APIs: everybody sho...

Human Computer Interaction - Episode I

As I promise, I'll write a series of articles about Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The prologue of this series had defined some terms from HCI theory. This article is focused on web interfaces, especially website search interfaces. First rule: do not return "No results" on any search. Try to f...

Flixster powered by MySQL

I like Flixster! It's a nice community where I can find quickly what movies should I rent for the weekend, I can read stories about actors, I can easily find some pictures with some cool actress or just waste my time with other people. But I'm a developer and now I love Flixster. Why? Because they...

Brands and domains market

Last night I made some research on domain names major domains auction sites and I didn't found many options. A lot of good domain names are parked and not for sale, but many domains are listed for thousands of dollars even the name is not a big deal apparently. The top bid on Sedo, for example is ...

Sun acquires MySQL

On January 16, 2008, Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer and President Sun Microsystems, Inc., made a big announcement: "we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP". The most popular open source database is used by millions of users for small home-made projects, blogs or small web...

Speed up ip2location queries

Many web applications use ip2location for ads targeting, restrict content to a specific location or just because they need to know where the traffic comes from. The initial setup of ip2location database is very slow. Important seconds are lost because ip2location and because the programmer will wr...

Human Computer Interaction - Prologue

I try to find different kind of approaches when I have to design web interfaces even I am a developer and not a designer. Reading about how to design an interface, I found the "Human Computer Interaction" (HCI) term. My first research on this subject was about 2 years ago and I found a lot of usef...

Simple URL rewriting

Any website needs a good url rewriting policy. Simple urls will be easily followed by spiders and many search engines will love your site if internal links are simple and offer some clue about the page. On many sites I use the rewriting only to offer friendly urls, but always keep in mind the opti...

MOSH - Nokia Social Network

I was very happy to discover MOSH, a great social network made by Nokia for their happy users. I believe the title says all: "MOSH - mobilize and share (by Nokia)". You can build a community, share applications and files with them, have fun, search for useful stuff or promote your applications. I ...

Web development quality assurance

One of the most important aspects when lunching a website is the customers satisfaction. If you want your site to be a success story, you must offer the best navigation experience to your clients. Every client is important and this is the reason you have to make your website compatible with every ...

Happy 2008

Hello everybody! Happy new year! I finally came back from a long vacation. Having a lot of free time, I made a list with subjects I'll wrote about pretty soon. I wish you all a great new year and keep making the web world better. Narcis Radu, Web Architect & Ideaticus.com columnist...

Developing the future

The title looks like a motto. Well, it isn't. IT development implies deep understanding of technology and comprehensive forecasts. Right now, every company try to align their business with the market trends and even to enhance it. Sometimes, someone has a great idea but he drops it because looks so ...

Video on Demand - Run your own television

Online televisions are small applications mostly made for websites. Some of them have a version for mobile phones, but the number of users is not very important for the market right now. No matter you are a student or some film professional, video on demand is a cheap solution to sell your productio...

Social network everyone?

MySpace, Facebook, AdultSpace, Orkut or Hi5 deliver thousands of pages every second. Many other applications were recently enhanced with social networking aspects (one of the biggest is Yahoo!). I wonder sometimes why every website tries to promote a social aspect, even the blogs through comments ...

Rumors about PHP and MySQL coming to mobile

I found some rumors about a not so far release of PAMP for S60. What PAMP stands for? The answer is very simple: Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP. The release and demonstration of PAMP capabilities will be made in January 2008 at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas. I also found PAMP was tested on Nok...

Working with development teams

I am a developer and I always want to maximize customer satisfaction. Any project manager should take care of customer satisfaction. Let me "sell" you few tips about how to maximize their effort. First of all you have to understand that working with programmers is very difficult because they tend...

Android Development

Do you have a good idea and you want to build a mobile application? Google helps you and much more then that: Google pays you! With the Google's million bounty put on application development for Android, development teams can penetrate the market. Intellectual property rights will be retained ...

Web application security

Dear reader, Are you, or your developers, familiar with the following terms: Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Injection Flaws, Malicious File Execution, Insecure Direct Object Reference, Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF), Information Leakage and Improper Error Handling, Broken Authentication and Sess...

What's special in you project?

When I talk with someone who wants to start a business online, my first questions is "What's special in you project?". Every new project needs something special. When end-users interact with your business, they need a good reason to come back. If they don't find a reason to come back, your busines...

It's all about ideas

A lot of websites are talking about Web 2.0, accessibility, usability, website optimization, security and many other topics and we will discuss about this topics too, but my concern is about quality and we want to offer a clear perspective about what end-user wants. It's about a very simple topic...