Kris Buytaert's blog

Nov 04 2007

Plaxo , what's the use ?

I just got an invite to connect to an old collegue on Plaxo Pulse

I`ve been ignoring Plaxo for a while now as the only thing it did for me was keeping an online addressbook.
I already have an online addressbook it's called LinkedIn.

Upon accepting the invite Plaxo proposed me to import my contacts from both Facebook (which I don't even actively use) and LinkedIn . Now this is the first time an app proposed me to import my contacts from LinkedIn.. an API was announced but I haven't found it yet.

I browsed around on the new Plaxo Beta but honestly I can't say I found anything interresting on it so it'ss yet another passive social network account for me.

However it made me wonder if there are already drupal frameworks out there that let you use FaceBook or LinkedIn data. And I promptly ran into the Facebook one still pretty young. I couln't find a LinkedIn one yet however .. altough that one would interrest me more

Any takers ? :)

Nov 03 2007

VMWare feels the heat

Lots of people are commenting on VMWare's vision on Open Source
With statements like
What we want to do is fund ourselves to be able to build new stuff. If you're purely open source, there is no way you can do new stuff.
you'll lose credibility pretty fast.
It's clear that proprietary software companies can't keep up with the speed of open source development so they need to spread more FUD on a daily base.

Half a decade ago Open Source indeed was catching up on proprietary software and trying to implement features that the other side already had. We have long passed that moment .. Xen and KVM are the technology leaders of the pack. The rest is trying to keep up. (And it's not only in the Virtualisation area that we see this evolution)

Yes VMWare does similar things under the hood with a more fancy GUI as Tarry notes but in a way indeed they are heading the way Microsoft showed them they way. Or aren't they..? Apple did nothing really new with the iPod, apart from its slick interface. But today Apple is feeling the heath from people not wanting their DRM, wanting to play OGG , and people wanting to use their device from non Apple platforms.
So people clearly want something more open, not one tool that locks them in with a vendor. If you really are looking for a GUI to manage your platforms you'd better choose for one that can manage them all

Nov 03 2007

Drupal Form API

Being a Drupal newbie with some web experience today I`m struggling with creating a form and using the input from that form to display items on the next page.

Unless I`m mistaken (which given my newbie status is perfectly possible) in a _form_submit you parse your data then return a link to the next page you are displaying.

When inserting and updating a page this works perfeclty because you point back to the page that displays the data you edited . But so far the only thing I found out that takes input from a form and displays it in the next page is by using a multipage form.

This article on Lullabot explains how to create such a page .. but I call that far from simple.
Anyone got a better way to do this .. Al I want to do is have a form where I can select some values, then based on those values get some data from my database and display that. There has to be an easier way than multipage forms. But this Drupal newbie can't find it :(

Next step is to get the above example working ..

Nov 01 2007

Why I stopped creating websites

about a decade ago:

Only the actual quote was.. I want the Green to be Greener

Oct 30 2007

Drupal Community Events in Gent

The folks from Krimson.be are organizing a couple of Drupal workshops in Gent
and even a full development tutorial day.

I already met half of the Krimson crew so I`m looking forward meeting the other half and learning from them ...

Oct 30 2007

GravityZoo

Over at O'Reilly GMT I blogged about GravityZoo but I'd figured it would be interesting here also.

There is a lot of hype going on about desktop virtualisation these days, most of the products are looking at traditional ways of transferring GUI of one machine to a desktop somewhere else. When not trying to publish desktops remotely, people try to use the web as an alternative. However the web has lots of limitations as do traditional methods.

Check out what GravityZoo has up its sleeve ;)

Oct 30 2007

The Day the Router Died

Warning: IPv6 promotional video ahead

Oct 29 2007

Puppet

John Willis has a good piece on Infrastructure 2.0 , talking a lot about Puppet and his meetups with Luke

Worth reading !

Oct 26 2007

Linux is too fast

Linux is to fast for todays hardware, I think today was the 3rd or 4th time in the past couple of weeks that I had to put a sleep 15 in an installatiion or rc.sysinit script because by the time I wanted to access my disk the controller or disk just wasn't awake yet.
Waiting a limited amount of time resulted in perfectly being able to access the disk. And no this has nothing to do with old and slow hardware, it happened with different SAS and SATA controllers also, not just with an external USB disk alone.

Oct 24 2007

Bug overview

MySQL is listing a good overview of the bugs they still have open in 5.1
This list comes very handy as I have on my todolist to figure out which bugs they still have open in 5.1 Cluster to see if we are impacted by one or more of them.
Now I don't have to manually go trough the lists anymore ..

thnx MySQL !