As a software developer or system admin have you ever encountered regular expressions that are just a bit too hard to understand? Kind of frustrating, right? As a rule, regular expressions are often relatively easy to write, but pretty hard to read even if you know what they are supposed…
For the past few months I have been doing a lot of work on the phpCAS library, mostly to improve the community trunk of phpCAS so that I wouldn’t have to maintain our own custom fork with support for the CAS attribute format we use at Middlebury College. The phpCAS…
Note: This is a cross-post of documentation I am writing about Lazy Sessions. Why use reverse-proxy caching? For most public-facing web applications, the significant majority of their traffic is anonymous, non-authenticated users. Even with a variety of internal data-cache mechanisms and other good optimizations, a large amount of code execution…
One of the requirements in the migration of our web sites to Drupal is that we create a robust and redundant platform that can stay running or degrade gracefully when hardware or software problems inevitably arise. While our sites get heavy use from our communities and the public, our traffic…
I have been using Twitter as a log of my daily doings and wished to export my time-line for reformatting into a calender format. Unfortunately TweetDumpr just retrieves the list of Tweets using a single fetch request which is limited by the Twitter API to a maximum of 200 Tweets….
This post describes an interoperability demonstration given at OpeniWorld Europe 2008 in Lyon, France. Abstract Segue and Concerto are two curricular applications built upon Harmoni, an Open Service Interface Definition-based (OSID) service-oriented application framework. This demonstration will show how website content created in Segue is stored as OSID Assets in…
Another week, another Segue 2 beta. This week’s installation brings visitor registration, a few new themes from Alex, theme migration from Segue 1, and a bunch of little bug fixes. Visitor registration brings with it a few interesting challenges. As in Segue 1, we want (and need) to be able…
We’ve recently announced our migration plans to the campus: We’ll be rolling out Segue 2 in mid-August for production use in the fall semester. I’ve now been working on Segue 2 directly or indirectly for 5 years, since June 2003. It has been a long road and it is wonderful…
I’ve recently developed a small PHP script, the WPEnclosureAdder (source | try) that goes through each item in an RSS feed, looks for links to YouTube videos or GoogleVideo videos, and then adds an enclosure tags for the videos. If multiple videos are found embedded in a post, then that…
As of a few days ago, I am now able to generate KML versions of Flickr photosets for viewing in Google Earth/Maps. With that taken care of, I also want to easily combine these KML documents of images together with other KML files that show additional information, such as paths…
