After over a year of on-and-off tweaks and updates, I have finally released version 0.7 of SphinxSearch Extension for MediaWiki. There are several new options, support for latest version of sphinx, initial support for MW search API, and the extension now follows the usual MW conventions for localizations, autoload, etc.
deveblog
This blog is recursive. See tagline for details.Free Book by Robert Kiyosaki
Kiyosaki, the author of the famous "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" published his latest book "Conspiracy of the Rich: The 8 New Rules of Money" online, for free. You need to signup to get access, but I think it is worth it. I am not sure I agree with everything he says, but who needs to read stuff they already fully agree with?
Here is the table of contents: http://conspiracyoftherich.com/read/toc
It does not list all the chapters - it has intro, chapter one, and a dozen extras. The extras are neat too, but here is how to get to the whole book:
Introduction | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12
Even though it says "conspiracy," it is more about understanding how the system works and not getting duped along with everybody else. What you do with that knowledge depends on your level of heart and conscience...
Reading in the relatively small window within the web page is not very convenient. However, you can print (not via the browser but via the little printer icon right above the book pages) or open the book in a separate window by itself (there is a little rectangular icon for that next to the print icon.)
Avoid rollback when upgrading Sun Virtual Box
If you try to install or upgrade Sun's VBox on Windows XP, the installer will sometimes roll back due to unsigned drivers or other some such errors. It happened to me even though I had an option to ignore such warnings set in Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Driver Signing
The solution was to right-click the installer and select "Run As". This will give you a dialog where you can uncheck "Protect my computer and data from unauthorized program activity". Found it here.
Why I Like 7zip
It is not just because it is the best compression utility for Windows. I like it because after each command-line extraction it tells you:
Everything is Ok
I should add this at the end of all my scripts. Things may be terribly wrong, but still, everything is OK 
Download PECL Extensions for Windows
The last version of PHP that came with compiled PECL extensions for Windows was 5.2.6. Some time after that, the usual place to get those was taken offline, and php.net downloads page only says that for newer versions of PHP, 5.2.6 versions of PECL extensions still work. No link...
I felt I was lucky to keep a copy of those extensions around, until I moved to FastCGI and needed non-thread-safe versions. After some searching, I finally discovered that you can download both thread-safe and non-thread-safe versions of PECL dlls from http://museum.php.net/
UPDATE: Windows binaries are available again at: http://snaps.php.net/win32/
Who needs "search the web" on a regular website?
Why would London Stock Exchange have a "search the web" as an option on their search page? OK, I may want to search for news or information related to a stock, but there are better, specialized tools for that.
But why would they use GET request for that?
Hey! Maybe I can get a better ranking by linking to a search on third blessing domain. That page will not have any rank initially, but it is on a well established domain...
Google's scary captcha noises
Ever tried clicking one of those accessibility icons next to "captcha" fields? Here is what I heard when I tried the one on Google's password-recovery page today:
Mood-enhancing earphones
I just got these excellent Sennheiser headphones
Zen To Done
Zen Habits is an excellent productivity-and-lot-more blog by Leo Babauta. Well, maybe you should not use "lot more" when talking about something "zen", but sometimes less is more. Or more is less? Anyway, he collected his posts about a simplified version (is simple less or more?) of Get Things Done (and more) and you can get it now as an inexpensive e-book.
Click here to view more details
2007 DC PHP Conference Slides
I attended the 2007 DC PHP Conference few weeks ago. Still working on my notes to present what I learned to others at my company, but at least I can post links to all the presentations I found so far:
- Designing RESTful Web Services
- API Design in PHP
- APC @ Facebook
- Facebook Performance Caching
- Write Beautiful Code
- Rich Internet Applications
- High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques and Help, my website has been hacked! Now What?
- PHP and MySQL presentations by Damien Seguy
- Securing PHP with PHPSecInfo and Inspekt
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